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24 September | New York

Carbon Tracker is taking part in a series of discussions at New York Climate Week, bringing an investor perspective to key questions shaping the energy transition

• AI, climate and corporate accountability
  Carbon Tracker is co-hosting a roundtable with As You Sow and Public Citizen exploring the economic, social and climate implications of AI and data centre development. The discussion will bring together investors, policy advocates and communities working to address the impacts of data centres, including questions around financing, corporate power and the potential risks of an AI bubble. 
• Climate and the energy transition
  Carbon Tracker will join the Laudato Si’ Movement for a discussion on climate and the energy transition, including the Santa Marta fossil fuel phase-out. The session will explore how finance, policy and investment can support a shift away from fossil fuels, as well as the barriers that remain to accelerating the transition. 
• Fossil Free Zones
  Together with Earth Insight, Carbon Tracker will convene philanthropic partners and civil society leaders from across the Amazon, Congo Basin and Coral Triangle to examine how Fossil Free Zones could support national energy transition and deforestation strategies ahead of COP31. The session will explore how the introduction of zones to protect key ecosystems from fossil fuel development can become a practical tool for national energy transition and deforestation strategies ahead of COP31. 

The post New York Climate Week 2026 appeared first on Carbon Tracker Initiative.

The recent backtracking by prominent Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) politicians, most notably Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani, on the call to defund the police...

The post Building mass movements: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and lessons from Black Lives Matter first appeared on Spring.

Penguin colonies are so large that their masses of excrement can be seen from space, offering scientists a useful means of studying the Antarctic birds. An analysis of 30 years of satellite images of penguin guano shows how the birds' diets are shifting in response to warming.

Read more on E360 →

It has been more than two months since President Donald Trump’s tentative ceasefire with Iran broke down, and gasoline prices are still high. With the midterm elections looming, the president seems to have turned his attention to the problem, rolling out a series of actions he says will secure more crude oil from Venezuela and exempt refineries from renewable fuel mandates. Most recently, he summoned refiners to the White House earlier this week to discuss ways to lower prices at the pump, although the refiners left without making any public statements and the White House didn’t publish a list of the attendees.

In the months since the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, the world has found ways to conserve oil and move Middle East crude around, but structural factors are still keeping prices high. The U.S. average gas price on Thursday was around $4.11 per gallon, up more than 90 percent from this time last year, and diesel was even higher.

The “crack spread,” which is the difference in price between crude oil and refined gasoline and diesel, soared to an historic high of more than $70 per barrel. This is a clear sign that the market for refined products is going haywire, and oil companies are raking in profits. The largest refineries in the United States have been operating at almost maximum capacity for several weeks now, longer than at any time in recent history, and they have deferred regular maintenance to take advantage of these soaring prices.

The president’s frustration with the high fuel cost has become clear over the course of the summer.

“Based on a shortage, they’re making too much money,” Trump said at an Oval Office briefing last month. “They ought to give some of that back to the public, and they better cut the retail price, the consumer price.”

The biggest reason prices have remained high is that there isn’t enough refining capacity to make gasoline from all the available oil. Many refineries in the Middle East have shut down during the conflict, and Russia’s diesel refineries are also offline thanks to Ukrainian drone attacks. The remaining refineries in North America and China are not large enough to fill that gap.

In its effort to lower prices at the pump, the Trump administration first turned to Venezuela, where it kidnapped leader Nicolas Maduro in January and announced a plan to revive the country’s moribund oil industry. Experts said after the Maduro raid that American companies would be hesitant to tap Venezuela’s oil reserves, but the Trump administration has tried to make the country more palatable by easing sanctions and pushing interim leader Delcy Rodriguez to rewrite the country’s oil laws. 

These efforts seem to be paying off. The Pentagon announced last week that it would take a stake in North American Blue Energy Partners, a private Venezuelan company that controls around 20 percent of the country’s reserves; the company plans to increase production in oil fields that had once been drilled by China and Russia. Alejandro Betancourt, the head of the company, has been described as Trump’s “viceroy” in Venezuela, and earlier this year, the Trump administration helped him avoid a Swiss arrest warrant. Chevron, the largest U.S. company that operates in Venezuela, also announced on Wednesday that it would double its production there, signing an agreement with the Rodriguez government at the Miraflores Palace in Caracas.

“In general, the read is positive,” said Ramón Andrade, a lawyer focused on the energy business and a partner at the law firm Ponte Andrade & Casanova in Caracas. He said that the business community in Venezuela is optimistic about a revival of the sector, but cautioned that on the Pentagon deal, “I think we need to look at what’s actually going to be signed.”

Even so, there is no chance that this will help reduce gasoline prices, even after the midterms. For one thing, only a small number of U.S. refineries can process the heavy crude from Venezuela, and they are already working overtime to take advantage of high fuel prices. 

“Everything that the Venezuelans could produce right now, I’m sure they’re squeezing out,” said Al Salazar, an analyst at the energy firm Enverus Intelligence who studies oil and gas markets. “You could get incremental production out of there in six to twelve months, but what really is causing the gasoline and diesel price spike is the lack of refining capacity.”

For another thing, scaling up production will take many years, if the legal agreement with the Pentagon even holds that long — the final details aren’t yet available, and some parties have alleged that conceding resource wealth to the United States would violate the Venezuelan constitution. The interim government has yet to face voters in an actual election.

“You need that long runway to be able to develop this resource,” said Salazar, who spent decades in the Canadian oil industry, which also produces heavy oil like Venezuela’s.

The administration’s other major move this week might do more to keep prices down at the margins, though likely not enough for most consumers to notice. The Environmental Protection Agency ended its summer ethanol blending requirements early. The rules mandate that refiners and fuel importers add ethanol to the nation’s fuel supply to reduce gasoline-caused smog. It also announced a series of waivers that would exempt a few dozen refineries around the country from having to integrate biofuel into their diesel and gasoline products. The purpose of this “renewable fuels standard” is to support farmers and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, since biofuels don’t warm the planet as oil does, but many oil industry parties argue that using ethanol drives up costs for refiners.

A number of major lobbies opposed these waivers. Midwestern politicians and biofuel associations argued that they will harm farmers by reducing demand for the corn that makes ethanol, and even the American Petroleum Institute warned that sudden exemptions would create an unpredictable business environment for refineries. The two sides of the biofuel debate argue that the exemptions either will or won’t reduce gasoline prices. Given that crude oil prices are still high, it’s possible ethanol is a cheaper ingredient than oil, and it’s unclear whether the exempt refiners like Marathon and Chevron will pass costs on to customers.

Even with the waivers, gasoline prices in many states are $1.50 above their pre-Iran highs. The early months of the conflict hinged on the question of the Strait of Hormuz, but even if the strait were to open tomorrow, the gasoline market will remain tight, and neither more oil from Venezuela nor cheaper inputs will free up refining capacity. 

“I think it’s going to have a tremendous impact; ultimately, prices are going to come down,” said Trump at the Oval Office on Monday. “Will it happen before the election? I can’t tell you that.” The stubborn high prices do not bode well for Republicans in the midterm elections. On average, the president’s party loses 25 more congressional seats in midterm elections after gas prices spike than in those after gas prices go down, according to a Politico analysis of elections since 1978.

Things could get even worse by then. Around half of U.S. refining capacity is located on the Gulf of Mexico, in the bullseye for Atlantic hurricanes. Forecasters are predicting a quiet season, but there’s still potential for a massive outage. Tropical Depression Edouard formed in the Gulf of Mexico and passed over a Texas refinery complex this week, but it fizzled out before it could become a major storm.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline With the midterms looming, Trump has no real way out of his gas price problem on Sep 4, 2026.

Long before ecology entered the political mainstream, Bernard Charbonneau was already diagnosing a central paradox of the modern age: that the more we master nature, the less we can experience freedom. Nothing illustrates this better than mass tourism: born from an authentic desire to escape the city, it ends up dragging the city’s crowds, concrete, and regulations wherever it goes.

“We cannot pursue infinite development in a finite world.”1 Bernard Charbonneau (1910–1996) undoubtedly had a way with words. Sadly, this did not secure him his rightful place in history as one of the most singular and appealing thinkers of the twentieth century. A few people do still mention him, often in the same breath as Jacques Ellul, but they often erroneously think the lives and ideas of these two Bordeaux thinkers are interchangeable.

Admittedly, from an early espousal of personalism to the fight to preserve the Aquitaine coast, they shared many dreams and fought for many of the same causes. There is more that unites them than divides them. But Charbonneau’s work was not only more literary, but also more philosophical, more applied, and most of all more directly engaged with ecological issues than Ellul’s. The latter said that his friend Charbonneau “taught me how to think and how to be a free spirit”.2

When, at the 2002 Johannesburg summit, Jacques Chirac spoke the now-famous words “our house is burning down and we’re blind to it”, readers of Charbonneau heard an echo of a remark made first in 1977 in the pages of Foi & Vie – “forced to think in a house that has caught on fire”, and again in 1980 in The Green Light: “Our paradox is that of having to hurry slowly, being commanded to reflect in a house that is on fire.”3

In terms of realising the urgency of ecological issues, Charbonneau was a pioneer. But to merely stress how early his warnings were, or the foresight of his analysis of how techno-industrial society destroys nature while also fuelling a need for it, is to overlook other important contributions. Even if we limit ourselves to the ecological aspects of his work, his singular approach meant he was not only a precursor to, but also an actor in and critical observer of a movement transformed by the pursuit of “changing politics”.

Bernard Charbonneau thought philosophically about his life and lived out his philosophy. Fully. Intensely. What made him such a major pioneer of degrowth and political ecology in twentieth-century France?

Bernard Charbonneau. Image by D.L.C. via Wikimedia Commons A pioneer

His awareness of these issues did not come from books. “I saw car culture arrive in my own street,” he explained in an interview.4 Growing up in Bordeaux, he was a rebel who was constantly trying to get out of the city by any means possible, on foot, at the height of the scouting movement, by train, or with small groups of friends as a sixth-former and student. He would pitch his tent in the middle of the countryside, in the forests and mountains on both sides of the Pyrenees, and fish with his bare hands in rivers and lakes.

From a young age, he was convinced that freedom could only be experienced in direct contact with nature. His understanding of freedom was an applied one, and his love of nature was physical. He felt he was watching what he called a “Great Metamorphosis”, a profound transformation in human beings caused by the acceleration of science and technology. He believed that the First World War, which he referred to as the first “total war” in history, played a significant role in this process.

At the start of the 1930s, he rejected both the liberal figure of the detached individual and the role of political soldier glorified by totalitarian countries. Instead, he sought an anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, anti-Stalinist movement. He travelled to Paris in 1933 to meet Emmanuel Mounier and to affiliate his small discussion group with the Esprit movement. It was in that personalist journal that his first feature article appeared, entitled “La publicité” (“Advertising”).5 He remarked that “advertising has swamped everything, our newspapers, our roads, no-one notices it anymore, but we need to deconstruct it.” It is “assisted by the invention of means of persuasion that can make lies more real than reality.” A creator of artificial needs, it goes unseen because it is ubiquitous: “Anyone who could clip the wings of advertising would make a hundred times as deep a change to our civilisation as any political initiative could achieve.”

In 1935, he and Jacques Ellul wrote the first Western proposal to voluntarily limit growth in the twentieth century: “Directives pour un manifeste personnaliste”.6 This text made the Bordeaux group the figurehead of the most libertarian, Girondist, regionalist, federalist strand of the personalist movement, and most significantly that which was most focused on ecology and degrowth (avant la lettre). “We are revolutionaries in spite of ourselves,” explained the authors. A searing indictment of the productivism of industrial civilisation and the power of money, the manifesto critiqued giantism, the way modern technology tends to concentrate capital, populations and the state. It railed against widespread proletarianisation: “Once man consents to no longer being the measure of his world, he relinquishes the very possibility of moderation.”

The manifesto advocated in favour of elective communities rather than large cities, small voluntary groupings that were rooted in a particular place, a city on a human scale, politics founded on direct, transparent communication between the governors and the governed, and countries divided into regions with a pared-back central state. It also argued for bottom-up federalism to coordinate these autonomous units, reorienting technology to fulfil the most arduous tasks, reducing working hours, providing a universal basic income, banning the charging of interest on loans, regulating advertising, and a property system focused on the effective enjoyment of goods. Both poverty and wealth needed to be tackled, as “people are dying of a desperate desire for the enjoyment of material things, and others of not having access to those things.” The themes of the dual society that blossomed forty years later with André Gorz and Serge Moscovici are already visible here, even if expressed in a different way.

In Le sentiment de la nature, force révolutionnaire (1937),7 Charbonneau expanded on the manifesto’s degrowth theme and systematised his thoughts on the relationship between humans and their environment. This text made him France’s foremost twentieth-century theoretician of political ecology. Following the anarchist geographer Élisée Reclus, with whose thought he was closely aligned, but whom he never quoted, he remarked that “we don’t need a Sunday in the countryside, we need a less artificial life.” His key message here was that modern technology makes us more comfortable, but removes the joy of simple pleasures, and that what we gain in safety and security we lose in liberty. “Feeling for nature” should be to personalism what class consciousness had been to socialism: reason made flesh.

Charbonneau made sacrifices in order to live ever further from urban centres. A teacher of history and geography in Bourges, Biarritz, Bordeaux and Pau, he successfully applied for a transfer to Lescar in 1945, and went to work in a small teacher training college. Living in almost complete mental and intellectual solitude, he threw himself into writing a manuscript of over a thousand closely written pages, entitled Par la force des choses, which contained the kernel of fifteen of his books.

The work analysed the contradictions of industrial civilisation, anticipating the risk of “social totalisation”, which would be worse than political totalitarianism, caused by the acceleration of technological progress. It showed how industrial society destroyed nature, while fuelling a feeling of desire for it. It criticised the “exponential development” of advertising and propaganda in daily life, and anticipated the liquidation of peasant agriculture, the destruction of the countryside and of landscapes, the increasing ugliness of cities and suburbs, and the bureaucratisation of existence, subject to an administrative apparatus that restricts the capacity to feel freedom.

In order to publish “the hulk”, as he nicknamed it, Charbonneau had to break it down into sections, which were then circulated among a very limited readership. In 1946, he resumed his nature discussion camps, where he used the ideas of Georges Bernanos and Aldous Huxley to think about the post-Hiroshima world. His ecologist, libertarian discourse still went unheard outside of his circle of admirers. He had to pay to publish his books, except for a few titles such as Dimanche et Lundi (1966) and L’Hommauto (1967).

His masterwork, Le Jardin de Babylone (Gallimard, 1969), was published at the moment that the environmental movement picked up pace, with the creation of France Nature Environnement in 1968 and Friends of the Earth in 1969. Ecology finally had the green light. Charbonneau was active on all its fronts, despite being in the early years of his retirement, which he would have preferred to spend indulging his passion for trout fishing. He was involved in the Soussouéou defence committee, which succeeded in preventing the construction of a high-altitude ski resort; he protested against the development of a tourist destination in a Basque Country forest; and he campaigned in Soule alongside the Association au service des agriculteurs montagnards (Mountain Farmers’ Association).

Image by Axlferrari via Wikimedia Commons

In 1971, he co-founded the Pyrénées-Atlantiques division of the Société pour l’étude, la protection et l’aménagement de la nature dans le Sud-Ouest (Society for the Study, Protection, and Planning of Nature in the South West), with one of its aims being to fight against the opening of new quarries and gravel pits, and plans for marinas on the Gave d’Ossau river. The same year, he began his “Chronique de l’an deux mille” column in Foi & Vie, which was largely devoted to ecology. In 1972, he was a close associate of Pierre Fournier (journalist at Hara-Kiri and later Charlie hebdo) when Fournier founded La Gueule ouverte – “the newspaper that heralds the end of the world” – a proudly “radical and global” publication. From the second edition onwards, Charbonneau wrote a “Chronique du terrain vague” column, in which he argued in favour of an alliance between ecologists and farmers against “industrial totalitarianism”.

In 1974, the editor of Combat nature, “the journal of ecology associations and environmental protection”, asked him to provide a philosophical foundation for the movement. He did so until his death. Simultaneously, he waged a battle against the government, which was attempting to hand over coastal land to developers looking to promote large-scale tourism in Gironde and Landes under the guise of town and country planning measures.

Charbonneau created the Comité de défense de la côte aquitaine (Aquitaine Coast Defence Committee, CDCA), which brought together citizens, Occitan activists, and “leftists” of various kinds to fight against the resortification of the coast, which would have involved the building of hotels, fast roads, ports, marinas, golf courses, etc. The CDCA organised media campaigns and demonstrations, and provided independent expertise to counter the government machine.

Charbonneau did not only take on local challenges. In 1976, he was among the founders of the federalist, anti-nuclear European Network for Ecological Reflection and Action (ECOROPA). He was seventy when he published The Green Light. In 1982, he and Jacques Ellul created the Groupe du Chêne, a small-scale working group that aimed to act as a kind of thinktank for the entire ecology movement. Because he always sought to place the question of humanity’s relationship to nature at the heart of politics, he disapproved of the creation of environmental parties, on the model of the German Greens.

His was an applied approach, in which his thought was the richer for his actions, and his actions the richer for his thought. Running the risk of oversimplification, we might summarise it in one sentence: Humans need nature as much as they need freedom, but techno-industrial society threatens the former as well as the latter.

An ecologist unlike any other

Charbonneau lambasted the standardisation of taste and the harmful effects of agroindustry, which eradicated not only the peasant way of life but landscapes and food with a genuine connection to the land from which it came. He highlighted the paradox of mass tourism, which came from an authentic desire to escape from city life, but which pillaged the spaces these fugitives discover and brought with it exactly what the city-dwelling tourist was trying to escape: overcrowding, concrete, and regulations.

“Nature is both the mother who has given birth to us, and the daughter we have conceived; should she disappear, humanity itself will regress into chaos.”8 Our bodies mean we belong to nature, but at the same time, we are called to go beyond it. Our duty, he argued, is to always keep these two considerations in mind. Humanity is part of nature, as nature is the origin of our aesthetic, physical, sensual and even spiritual joys. But when humanity comes out of nature, as a child comes out of its mother, it becomes something separate. Humanity must give life meaning, at each instant, through its quest for freedom; for nature, as a majestic entity, does not exist. Not only is a feeling for nature a modern invention, but it is also primarily found among civilised rather than “primitive” people, the bourgeois rather than peasants, city-dwellers rather than country folk.

Charbonneau thought that it was not so much nature that was threatened by the cult of progress as human freedom. The desire to seek infinite development in a finite world disrupts both nature and freedom, since humanity has a dialectic relationship with nature. Our freedom commands us to master nature, but if we destroy it, or even impose structure on it, we are simultaneously destroying our ability to experience our own freedom. What is the point of leaving behind the constraints of urban life at a set time each year, only to encounter them reproduced in miniature in another location?

To find nature again, we must first understand that we have lost it. For Charbonneau, nature was thus our own freedom by another name. Our feeling for nature is one and the same as our awareness of our own lives. Freedom is not one value among others, but the starting point from which all else follows. A common pitfall among intellectuals is to adopt an idealist, absolutist vision of freedom, rather than living it, in its prosaic, relative reality. When Charbonneau railed against “industrial totalitarianism”, he was unafraid of using a concept usually reserved for fascist and communist regimes to describe the trajectory of all modern societies.

To find nature again, we must first understand that we have lost it.

In his eyes, the process had entered its final stages: “You can get on a plane, but you can’t truly ever get off.”9 The last “natural” spaces were being slowly conquered by the tourism industry, and everyone and everywhere was becoming part of industrial society. Modern tourism is a social fact that presupposes a level of structure, which is the opposite of what we look for in our contact with nature: the feeling of freedom. The structure of tourism has become a keystone of techno-industrial society.

Charbonneau considered tourism to be the most destructive industry of all, because it is driven by the quest for and consumption of space. The less space there is, the higher the demand; the more nature disappears, the more city-dwellers feel a need for it. He summarised this phenomenon thus: “Because there are machines, people get into machines in order to flee from the machine … the crowd flees from the crowd, the civilised from civilisation. This is how nature is disappearing, destroyed by the very feeling that it arouses, as much as by the expansion of industry.”10 Under capitalism, tourism has become a form of heavy industry, mass-producing standardised products.

Charbonneau does not offer any neat solutions, but instead suggests a direction of travel: accepting limits, and recognising the finite nature of earthly space-time. In practice, this means ceilings on visitor numbers for islands, caves, historic sites, and monuments of various kinds. Tourism must be made to tread lighter and be more thinly spread. We should reject our current approach to building next to beaches and ski slopes, opting for campsites and wooden buildings rather than towers of glass and steel, existing small hotels rather than hotel complexes, and small roads rather than motorways.

This artisanal tourism would create jobs and most importantly be kinder to natural environments, as it would mean new motorways would not be built. Some spaces must be kept unstructured. This is why Charbonneau rejected the national park system, which results in an under-protected zone just outside the boundary, and an over-protected zone within it. Rather than letting land wither away all the better to hand it over to developers, he argued it was better to tend it in such a way that the inhabitants could welcome visitors.

Charbonneau believed that humans need to re-establish a normal relationship with space. As space is linked to time, speed crushes it, while a more leisurely pace allows it to unfold. This is why he was in favour of cycling and walking. Moving slowly reveals the richness of the land. When we visit somewhere in a way that “takes time”, we get knowledge and experience in return. Sedentary approaches must be prioritised over nomadic ones. Why is it supposed to be pleasurable to be shipped about like a parcel to “get an eyeful” of an increasingly superficial and stereotyped tourist attraction? It would be better to tend our own garden, if we have one, or decorate our flat, or to paint, sculpt, or play an instrument. We should focus on things that calm us, slow us down, and root us, anything that can turn us from a tourist into an “embedded inhabitant”.

Charbonneau wanted to combat speculation by banning property companies from buying farms and estates, but he thought that rather than lambasting second homes – a catch-all category – it would be better to help them to become primary residences. He suggested renovating small and medium-sized dwellings, which would either be physically and spiritually owned and dwelt in by their owners, or let out, which would have the advantage of restoring built rural heritage.

Against car culture

Above a certain level, progress does not make food any better or more nutritious, and likewise improvements in transport do not make journeys any better: “The spread of the battery farming of tourists, combined with the widespread use of agrochemicals, is in the process of destroying all dietary diversity.”11 We must avoid the market becoming split “between chemical chow and luxury natural food”. Organic produce should not become an island lost on an ocean of pollution. Especially as this pollution increases in tandem with urbanisation and the car traffic that comes along with it.

How can we live our lives in the middle of a perpetual building site? Growth has become a shared dogma, and so knows no borders.

People are born to be free (and to walk freely), but they live and die as slaves to their cars. “We think we are building cars, when in fact we are building a society,”12 Charbonneau wrote in L’Hommauto. “What good is a car if you never get out of it?” he asked, rhetorically. Drivers have made their cars into gods, to which they are ready to sacrifice everything. They may have started as a means, but now cars are seen as ends in themselves. Westerners invented motorised vehicles so that they could go wherever they wanted, but in the end, they only go where their cars take them, as these machines can only operate within a rigid structure. At a time when Taylorism and Fordism were king, Charbonneau thought it was entirely understandable that assembly line workers might want to step away from the grindstone. The car became a way of getting away from it all as much as a form of transport, allowing victims of the industrial system to satisfy a need to express themselves that their work could not satisfy. In the middle of the 1960s, he observed that a section of the population lived and died in their cars.

Allowing as many people as possible to buy a car, to move around more quickly and go wherever they want, is at first glance aligned with democratic ideals. But the inevitable consequence is that the globe is filled with traffic-clogged roads on the way in and out of cities, and further out, motorways that are often of little use. “Cars negate distance, but they negate the landscape at the same time,” noted the avid walker. “We get in the car to get out of the city, but city car life comes with us.” The herd of “nature-loving” drivers all head to the same places at the same time. Not only do city-dwellers sit in traffic jams on their way to and from holidays and weekends away, but they also spend time in gridlock on their way to work. “It is in machines that we go to serve the machines,” because we work to buy and feed the beast, towards which all our energies are directed. In the techno-industrial society, everyone has two jobs: their own, and that of chauffeur.

According to Charbonneau, the acceleration of scientific and technological progress means we never get far beyond the drawing board. When everything changes all the time, individuals tire themselves out in a perpetual effort to adapt. How can we live our lives in the middle of a perpetual building site? Growth has become a shared dogma, and so knows no borders. Nothing can stop it. Charbonneau does not argue with the necessity of change, but instead opposes the ways in which and the speed at which it occurs. His assessment in an unpublished 1990 text was that: “Change rules over our society more so than any other, both practically and morally, and so history now flows like an unchecked torrent.” The ideology of “progress” that drives industrial civilisation has made change both a reality and a value.

Re-establishing balance

Charbonneau always based his reasoning on personal experience, willing to bet it had universal resonance. He thus took Bordeaux as an example of the changes that occurred between 1950 and 1980. Among France’s largest urban centres, the Gironde city was no better preserved or more significantly altered than its counterparts. Before the Second World War, Charbonneau still used to see cats and dogs wandering freely in front of the central post office. Machines adapted to the rhythm of living creatures, not vice versa. You could cross the street without a second glance. If you had a hankering for the countryside, a quarter of an hour’s cycling would get you to a meadow or a wood.

“The major post-war change was the integration of the countryside into the industrial and urban system, with the effect of transforming it into an extension of the city.”13 Looking at the ravages of urban sprawl and land take, Charbonneau wondered whether the countryside might have changed faster than the cities. As he saw it, the trend towards architecturally bland detached homes was inexorably destroying local architecture and local landscapes. Everywhere, the countryside was being erased, not to turn it into the city, but to impose a feral form of urbanisation that led to “total suburbanisation”.

Looking at the ravages of urban sprawl and land take, Charbonneau wondered whether the countryside might have changed faster than the cities.

His 1980 “Internal critique of the ecologist movement” still feels current, as the following examples show. Moratoriums are needed to impose limits on development, as on the Côte d’Azur, where continued urban sprawl must be prevented. In terms of energy, we must not trade all-nuclear for all-solar, to avoid occupying finite, fragile land. The solution cannot be a miracle technology but must come from a combination of various sources of energy, and most importantly, a reduction in consumption. Since limiting economic growth also means limiting demographic growth, Charbonneau explicitly opposed natalist policies.

We must also resist the tyranny of the market, which drives the unbridled exploitation of the planet and its inhabitants. Having spread over the entire surface of the earth, productivist logic enforces itself just as strongly as does any totalitarian regime. Ecologists must “remove all goods previously considered free or “priceless” from the imperialism of the market and give them back to nature or to private life,” and so turn away from a world in which everything can be bought and sold.

Along the lines suggested by Ernst F. Schumacher in Small is Beautiful, which he cites, and the work of Leopold Kohr and Murray Bookchin, of which he seems to have been unaware, Charbonneau argues that ecologists must break up the capitalist economy into small, autarkic, self-managing units, which would mitigate one type of wound inflicted by the globalised economy: the accelerated destruction of nature caused by the transportation of merchandise from one end of the planet to the other.14

Conscious of the seriousness of the diagnosis, Charbonneau offered no miracle cure, but instead invited the patient to slow down, respect their limits, and get their bearings. We must learn to root ourselves in time and space. Shunted around by the job market, workers, employees, managers, teachers, and civil servants are all too weightless to put down roots. Nature moves slowly, and humans, too, need time to evolve gently. Happiness is found in savouring the present moment and not in an endless wait for the hope of a better world to come. Not only do we need to know how to take our time, in order to enjoy the moment, but we also need to work with what already exists and move forward from there, rather than trying to wipe the slate clean and start again from scratch.

This article was first published in French in Esprit, and in English by Eurozine, in collaboration with CAIRN International Edition. It is republished here with permission.

Translation by Cadenza Academic translations

1. Translator’s note: Unless otherwise stated, all translations of cited material are our own. ︎
2. Jacques Ellul and Patrick Chastenet, Jacques Ellul on Politics, Technology and Christianity: Conversations with Patrick Troude-Chastenet, trans. Joan Mendès France (Wipf & Stock, 2005), 56. ︎
3. Bernard Charbonneau, The Green Light: A Self-Critique of the Ecological Movement, trans. Christian Roy (Bloomsbury, 2018), 102. ︎
4. Patrick Troude-Chastenet, ‘Bernard Charbonneau: Génie méconnu ou faux prophète?’ Revue internationale de politique comparée 4, no. 1 (1997): 189–207. ︎
5. Bernard Charbonneau, ‘La révolution quotidienne: La publicité,’ Esprit, April 1935. ︎
6. Bernard Charbonneau and Jacques Ellul, ‘Directives pour un manifeste personnaliste,’ in ‘Nous sommes des révolutionnaires malgré nous’: Textes pionniers de l’écologie politique, ed. Bernard Charbonneau and Jacques Ellul (Seuil, 2014), 49–82. ︎
7. Bernard Charbonneau, ‘Le sentiment de la nature, force révolutionnaire,’ in ‘Nous sommes des révolutionnaires malgré nous’, ed. Charbonneau and Ellul, 121–192. ︎
8. Bernard Charbonneau, Le Jardin de Babylone (L’Encyclopédie des nuisances, 2002), 12. ︎
9. Bernard Charbonneau, Notre table rase: Essai (Denoël, 1974), 64. ︎
10.  Charbonneau, Le Jardin de Babylone,  10–11. ︎
11. Bernard Charbonneau, Un festin pour Tantale: Nourriture et société industrielle (Sang de la Terre, 1997), 156. ︎
12. Bernard Charbonneau, L’Hommauto (Denoël, 2003), 28. ︎
13. Bernard Charbonneau, Tristes campagnes (L’Échappée,  2023), 93. ︎
14. Ernst F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (Blond & Briggs, 1973). See also Leopold Kohr, Small is Beautiful: Ausgewählte Schriften aus dem Gesamtwerk (Deuticke, 1995); and Murray Bookchin, The Murray Bookchin Reader, ed. Janet Biehl (Black Rose Books, 1999). ︎

John Boyer grew up on his family’s 131 acres of rolling fields of corn, oats, and wheat in a rural area near the tiny city of East Jordan in northern Michigan. The farm had changed ownership outside the family several times over the decades before Boyer rebought it in 2018. He felt an obligation to repurchase and farm the land to prevent development from encroaching on the area’s community of family farms.

“For any farmer, everything’s personal,” Boyer said. “Every piece of property, every stone you pick up, you spend countless hours out there.”

As millions of farmland acres around the country are expected to change hands in the next few decades, farmers are facing decisions about whether — and if so, how — to preserve farmland amid pressures from rising land values, a shifting climate, and a younger generation that doesn’t want to farm. The number of acres devoted to farming in Michigan has declined in recent decades, as it has in the rest of the country. And ownership of that land is changing. 

In 2022, an estimated 9.5 million acres, or about a quarter of the state, were devoted to farming, a roughly 3 percent dip from 2017, according to the most recent federal farm census. Farmland in Michigan where the majority of operations were family-owned decreased nearly 470,000 acres in those same five years. Conversely, land leased or rented for farming operations increased by nearly 30,000 acres.  

Despite shifts in farm ownership and acreage dedicated to agriculture, the number of farmland acres in Michigan protected by conservation programs has increased in recent years, reflecting a national trend. The state saw an additional 22,000 acres protected in easements between 2017 and 2022, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“It’s a matter of trying to figure out what exactly is going to be the best fit for everybody’s situation. And there’s a lot of pressure. There’s a lot of money,” said Jon LaPorte, a farm business management educator for Michigan State University Extension.

According to the USDA, Michigan farmland was valued at about $6,800 per acre last year, up 7.8 percent from 2024 and outpacing the national average of 4.3 percent.

The pressure to preserve farmland could be especially strong in northern Michigan. Farmers there are already confronting the effects of climate change, including more extreme precipitation, crop disease, and temperature swings, but some local farmers said those impacts are relatively easier to deal with than elsewhere in the country.

“As the world climate changes, this area could become more and more important for food production and food security,” said Dave Skornia, a farmer in Boyne City, Michigan. “So, you got to have land.”

John Boyer on his farm outside East Jordan, Michigan.
Vivian La / Grist

For Boyer, the best way to protect his farmland was to restrict future development on it by entering into what’s called a conservation easement. He still owns the property, but he sold the future development rights of his 131 acres to the Little Traverse Conservancy, a nonprofit that acquires and protects land. The organization holds those rights even if Boyer transfers land to his kids or decides to sell to another owner down the line.

An easement can be a hard decision for farmers because land is typically their greatest asset, something that can pay for retirement or a college fund, said Joe Graham, chief financial and operating officer for the Little Traverse Conservancy.

“We’re offering them another alternative,” Graham said. “We’re offering a way to capture some of the equity and the value they have in that land without having to sell it and see it leave their ownership.”

Of the conservancy’s 30,000 acres protected in easements across five counties in northern Michigan and its Upper Peninsula, about 6,000 acres are farmland. Graham has seen interest in conservation easements growing among small farming communities.

Read Next Georgia is losing farmland fast. Is a state conservation fund enough to save it? Emily Jones

But easements still have their challenges, he said. Conservancies pay landowners for a portion of the overall land value, and selling the development rights earns the landowner less revenue than outright selling the land. As land values rise in rural northern Michigan, the conservancy doesn’t see many farmers purely motivated by financial return entering into such agreements. 

“There can be a question of timing: ‘Is this the right thing to do? What might we be foregoing later?’” Graham said.

Boyer wants to prevent his land from being divided up down the line and sold in smaller parcels “to make a quick buck.” Once an acre is converted for built developments like houses or commercial buildings, it typically doesn’t return to farmland.

“Then suddenly a productive farm field or ground is gone, and it’s gone for generations,” Boyer said. “It’s gone forever.”

Rebecca Carlson, a cherry and apple grower who runs Overlook Orchards in Northport, a village at the tip of Michigan’s Leelanau Peninsula on Lake Michigan, also sees land division as a future threat to the farmland in her county. Aging farmers might split up land among multiple kids, leaving a patchwork of ownership that “breaks up multigenerational farms,” Carlson said, especially as younger people in the area choose not to go into the business.

She’s a fourth-generation farmer who married into another multigenerational farming family. She and her husband have grown the original farm from about 200 acres to 1,300 acres over eight years. To expand, the couple bought nearby land, but they also lease some parcels, mostly from family farmers who don’t have a younger generation to take over. 

“In order to be successful in farming, in some cases, it’s one of those, ‘Go big or go home,’ with the climate of farming today,” Carlson said. 

In Michigan, about 39 percent of agricultural land is leased, according to the 2022 USDA census, a number that mirrors the national average.

Leases keep farmland in production for the duration of the contract — most of Carlson’s leases are for 30 years. She pays annual fees that vary based on factors like location or crop productivity. Those fees can be significantly cheaper than owning farmland outright, because Carlson isn’t responsible for property taxes or other costs like insurance for infrastructure.

“It’s a great way to maintain your … farm and grow your farm,” she said. “They don’t make land anymore.”

Leasing does have some limitations. A 2026 MSU survey of Michigan farmers found high lease rates and locating land that matches their needs were the top concerns for those looking to lease. Farmers either have a “crop in mind but no ground, or they had the ground, but in some cases they weren’t sure what they could raise on it,” LaPorte with MSU Extension said.

It’s not just about land, either. LaPorte said the relationship between landowner and farmer is just as important. 

“You might have a great relationship where you never worry a single day about whether or not you’re going to have the property a year from now,” LaPorte said. “Other cases, there’s some differences in terms of what each party’s goals are that kind of create that sense of anxiety about, ‘Is this going to last long-term?’”

Sheep graze among solar panels on the Turkey Creek Solar Ranch in Lancaster, Kentucky. The solar operator pays a local farmer to graze his sheep to keep grass and weeds at manageable levels, and to improve the soil while also producing pasture-raised meat.
Universal Images Group / Getty Images

In the Midwest, farmland values are holding steady or even increasing, even as farm incomes are down nationally. That’s because demand from industrial and residential development in the region is high, said Howard Halderman, president and CEO of Halderman Companies, a farm real estate and management agency working primarily in Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio.

Halderman said high farmland values come from tax-deferred exchanges, which allow landowners to defer capital gains taxes when they sell highly appreciated land and use those proceeds to buy other property.

“That’s where a lot of your farmland value gets support. Are there other buyers out there that keep a floor under it?” he said. “If you’re looking to buy farmland, that might be frustrating. However, if you’re a farmer that owns a lot of farmland and you like to keep your asset values on your balance sheet higher, it’s a good thing.”

As the state pushes for a cleaner grid to combat the effects of climate change, favorable policies are also attracting renewable energy developers to farming communities, where they’re eyeing land for wind turbines, battery storage facilities, and solar panels.

“From a landowner’s perspective, they’ve got bills to pay the same as a farmer, and they’re looking at situations of, ‘Where can I get the most value?’” LaPorte said. “And if they struggle to find an interested farm, they might be willing to go into some of these long-term agreements that you see into wind turbines, solar.”

In Michigan, solar takes up a small share — 0.09 percent — of USDA prime farmland. Like in the rest of the U.S., it’s less than the acreage that’s been converted to suburban development or recreational uses like golf courses, according to the trade group Solar Energy Industries Association. 

Still, local opposition remains fierce. Earlier this year in Wexford County, on the northern end of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, early plans from a renewable energy developer to build solar panels on nearly 1,500 acres of farmland sparked concerns about encroaching development on productive fields and the long-term impact on the ground.

Michigan researchers are hoping to address those concerns by looking at ways that solar panels and farming can coexist, a practice known as agrivoltaics. Solar panels can shade livestock or crops, and leases with renewable energy developers can be a way for farmers to offset declining farm incomes, said Charles Gould, a bioenergy educator with MSU Extension.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a choice between producing power or food, he said.

“If we can do both on the same acre of land, why wouldn’t we?” Gould said. “We want to preserve the family farm. This is a very powerful tool.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As family farms decline and the climate heats up, farmers weigh what to do with their land on Sep 4, 2026.

In Eswatini, Warren, a gardener and conservationist, is nurturing an indigenous garden that shows how local knowledge and care can help communities adapt to a changing climate.

Wendell supported the writers, scholars, farmers, and activists who shared his interest in the fate of good farms, strong communities, and healthy ecosystems, helping us become more than we ever could have without his wisdom and support.

Where’s the urgency in climate discussions? Scholars Theresa Leisgang and Gerriet Schwen examined why climate warnings fail to spur change and how they might better motivate us to act in the face of collapse.

Exploring past examples of ‘revolutionary forgiveness’, D K Renton considers the socialist value of striving to repair harm

The post Why forgiveness is a part of socialism appeared first on Red Pepper.

Kecepatan akses kini menjadi salah satu faktor yang diperhatikan pengguna saat memilih platform permainan digital. Fenomena tersebut juga terlihat pada Royalgacor Slot Maxwin, terutama ketika pemain menginginkan proses navigasi yang tidak berbelit, respons halaman cepat, serta pilihan permainan yang mudah ditemukan. Perhatian terhadap proses cepat Royalgacor tidak semata berkaitan dengan durasi membuka halaman. Pengalaman pengguna dibentuk oleh rangkaian kecil, mulai dari struktur menu, perpindahan antarlaman, penempatan kategori, sampai kemampuan sistem menampilkan informasi tanpa jeda panjang. Di tengah banyaknya pilihan platform, aspek semacam ini mulai menjadi pembeda. Pemain tidak hanya melihat jumlah permainan, tetapi juga seberapa praktis sebuah sistem digunakan dari awal.

Kecepatan Jadi Sorotan di Royalgacor

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Akses Dibuat Lebih Ringkas

Salah satu elemen yang menarik perhatian adalah sistem akses. Navigasi yang ringkas membantu pengguna berpindah dari halaman utama menuju kategori permainan dengan proses lebih sederhana. Dalam konteks Royalgacor Slot Maxwin, struktur tersebut menjadi relevan karena jumlah permainan dapat terdiri dari berbagai tema dan provider. Jika seluruh pilihan ditampilkan tanpa pengelompokan jelas, pengguna justru harus bekerja lebih keras untuk menemukan game yang dicari. Sistem akses yang efektif biasanya mengandalkan kategori, fitur pencarian, menu provider, serta penyusunan halaman yang mudah dipahami. Faktor ini ikut membentuk pengalaman pemain Royalgacor secara keseluruhan.

Respons Sistem Ikut Menentukan

Selain struktur menu, waktu respons halaman juga berpengaruh. Pengguna cenderung menginginkan interaksi langsung ketika memilih menu, membuka informasi permainan, atau berpindah kategori. Respons lambat dapat mengganggu kenyamanan meskipun desain halaman terlihat menarik. Karena itu, layanan Royalgacor dari sisi teknis tidak dapat dipisahkan dari performa antarmuka. Kecepatan akses, stabilitas halaman, dan perpindahan menu menjadi bagian dari pengalaman pengguna, bukan sekadar persoalan teknis di balik layar.

Slot Maxwin Hadir dengan Banyak Pilihan

Selain kecepatan proses, pilihan permainan tetap menjadi faktor penting. Istilah Slot Maxwin Royalgacor mencakup banyak game dengan gaya yang berbeda. Setiap permainan dapat menggunakan tema, fitur, pola reel, serta mekanisme bonus tersendiri. Perbedaan tersebut memberi variasi bagi pengguna ketika menjelajahi kategori permainan.

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Provider permainan memiliki pendekatan masing-masing. Ada pengembang yang menonjolkan visual penuh animasi, sementara lainnya memilih desain sederhana dengan fokus pada struktur permainan. Perbedaan juga terlihat pada penggunaan fitur game seperti free spin, multiplier, cascading symbol, respin, atau mekanisme bonus tertentu. Karena itu, Royalgacor Slot Maxwin tidak dapat dilihat sebagai kumpulan permainan dengan format seragam. Setiap provider membawa karakter, ritme, serta identitas visual berbeda. Hal tersebut menjadi salah satu alasan variasi game tetap penting dalam pengalaman pengguna.

Pemain Mencari Pengalaman Praktis

Preferensi pengguna digital terus berubah. Banyak pemain kini lebih terbiasa dengan antarmuka sederhana, informasi cepat, serta akses yang tidak membutuhkan banyak langkah. Kebiasaan tersebut ikut memengaruhi cara platform permainan dirancang. Bagi pemain Slot Maxwin, pengalaman praktis dapat berarti banyak hal, mulai dari menemukan provider favorit, membuka kategori tertentu, hingga membaca informasi game tanpa harus berpindah terlalu jauh. Dengan demikian, kenyamanan pengguna muncul dari kombinasi antara sistem akses dan desain halaman.

Proses Cepat Bukan Satu-satunya Faktor

Meski kecepatan mendapat perhatian, hal tersebut bukan satu-satunya penyebab sebuah platform terasa nyaman digunakan. Pengalaman pengguna juga dipengaruhi desain, variasi konten, struktur kategori, serta konsistensi antarmuka. Pada titik ini, proses cepat Royalgacor lebih tepat diposisikan sebagai salah satu bagian dari ekosistem pengalaman digital.

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Tampilan visual membantu pengguna memahami struktur platform. Penggunaan ikon, kategori, menu, serta penempatan informasi dapat menentukan apakah sebuah halaman terasa sederhana atau justru membingungkan. Navigasi platform yang baik tidak selalu berarti memakai desain kompleks. Justru struktur yang konsisten sering lebih efektif karena pengguna dapat memahami pola menu sejak awal. Faktor ini ikut menentukan bagaimana pengalaman pemain Royalgacor terbentuk.

Variasi Game Slot Menambah Pilihan

Pilihan permainan juga menjadi unsur penting. Tema permainan kini dapat bergerak dari konsep klasik, fantasi, petualangan, budaya Asia, hingga desain futuristik. Mekanisme permainan pun semakin beragam di mulai dari kombinasi di mana kombinasi tersebut membuat Royalgacor Slot Maxwin memiliki ruang eksplorasi lebih luas bagi pengguna yang ingin membandingkan gaya permainan dari beberapa provider.

Pada akhirnya, daya tarik sebuah platform tidak hanya bergantung pada satu fitur. Kecepatan akses, respons sistem, navigasi, tampilan, variasi game, serta karakter provider saling membentuk pengalaman pengguna. Fenomena tersebut menunjukkan bahwa perhatian pemain terhadap Royalgacor Slot Maxwin lebih banyak muncul dari gabungan aspek teknis dan desain. Proses cepat memang menjadi nilai penting, tetapi kenyamanan tetap ditentukan oleh bagaimana seluruh bagian platform bekerja sebagai satu sistem.

A very fishy business Channel News brendan 4th September 2026 Teaser Media

The Community Development Advocacy Foundation (CODAF) is a Nigerian NGO bridging the gap between policymakers and grassroots communities on environmental issues.

CODAF tackles climate change through innovative zero-waste initiatives, converting organic waste to compost using Black Soldier Fly technology while training Zero Waste Ambassadors and the Zero Waste Farmers Network in zero-waste and agroecological practices.

    

CODAF holds extractive industries accountable by exposing environmental violations by mining and oil companies in the Niger Delta and the Northern and South Eastern parts of Nigeria.

Through our projects, capacity building, and policy advocacy rooted in the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, CODAF empowers communities to defend environmental rights and manage resources sustainably without marginalization.

In this article, part of a series, we spoke with Richard Bini, the Executive Director of CODAF, about their work as a partner in Epe, Lagos State, for the MAMRN project.

Thank you for joining us, Richard. Several organizations carry out the project through different activities, but with the same goal. Can you share some insights on best practices for collaborating with other organizations on a project in Nigeria?

CODAF’s collaboration approach centers on strategic partnerships that amplify impact while respecting local leadership.

As a member of GAIA, CODAF leverages local organisations, including GAIA members and non-members, to strengthen local methane reduction initiatives and bring diverse, aligned expertise to community-level implementation in Epe.

Our collaborative model emphasizes:

• Integrating GAIA’s technical knowledge with CODAF’s grassroots engagement expertise to reach local institutions and non-GAIA members.
• Ensuring local organizations support rather than direct local initiatives
• Complementary strengths where other organisations/institutions are blended into our idea and belief, including universities providing aligned research, government agencies getting involved in creating policy pathways via our zero-waste parliament structure, while GAIA members contribute zero-waste technical capacity.
• Regular stakeholder meetings align diverse actors, including other organizations around our common goals.

This approach transforms partnerships into genuine collaboration where communities remain primary decision-makers while benefiting from expanded resources and knowledge.

Could you share some perspective on the current waste crisis in Nigeria and how this project aims to address this?

Nigeria is currently facing a severe waste management crisis that is as much about the climate as it is about public health, with most communities lacking proper disposal infrastructure, leading to massive dumpsites that generate methane.

In Lagos State alone, Lagosians generate thousands of tonnes of waste weekly, with organic waste decomposing in open dumps that act as “methane bombs”, polluting air and water while contributing significantly to climate change.

CODAF staff speaks to grassroots and community representatives Do you have a personal milestone or favourite moment in this project so far?

A standout milestone for us was our final groundbreaking on the construction of the Epe Material Recovery Facility.

Watching a site once abandoned and dilapidated transform into a structured hub for resource recovery was incredibly powerful. It made our vision for methane reduction tangible; we weren’t just talking about abatement; we were building the solution.

But the real magic happened when we launched the Zero Waste Parliament. Seeing the room filled with the entire waste value chain, government officials, zero waste ambassadors, and our Zero Waste Farmers Network was a “pinch me” moment. These groups are now a unified movement. Our favorite part is seeing our farmers and ZeWA championing the message, showing how organic waste from the MRF is literally reviving their soil.

What is the path forward for your organisation and possible next steps from this project?

Our goal is to scale the “Epe model” into a national blueprint. We want to see a decentralized Material Recovery Facility in every local government, moving Nigeria away from the era of toxic mega-dumpsites.

We also hope to see the Zero Waste Parliament become a permanent advisory body that can influence national policy directly. We also want to expand the Zero Waste Farmers Network so organic compost becomes the default choice for Nigerian agriculture. We’re moving from a single project to a nationwide movement for justice.

We have seen these key themes emerge in this project (Organic Waste Management, Infrastructure Development, Waste Picker Integration, Capacity Building and Awareness Raising, Local Government Engagement, National Policy Advocacy and Emissions Monitoring. Could you share experiences (as applicable) on any of these topics within this project so far?

Our journey in Epe has shown us that you can’t fix the waste crisis without first addressing the human crisis. That is why Waste Picker Integration is at the heart of everything we do. We are currently developing a Waste Picker Integration Manual. It’s designed to guide both communities and the government on how to transform informal work into dignified, green jobs. 

On the Infrastructure and Organic Waste front, building the MRF was our “proof of concept.” It turned the abstract idea of methane reduction into something people could touch. We’ve watched organic waste, which used to rot and smell in the sun, become high-quality compost. 

This vision comes alive during our capacity-building sessions. We’ve brought together Zero Waste Ambassadors, Zero Waste Farmers Network, and waste pickers in Epe for training.

It’s been incredible to watch these groups lead awareness campaigns together, teaching their own neighbors about segregating waste at the source and why diverting organics from the dumpsite is a win for the climate and the soil. Also, seeing a farmer hold our compost and realize they don’t need to buy expensive, soil-stripping chemicals is when “zero waste” actually clicks for people.

Of course, none of this works in a vacuum, so we’ve been deeply engaged with policymakers. We are working closely with the Epe LGA to ensure local ownership, while also collaborating with the Lagos State Ministry of Environment and LASEPA.

Our goal is to show them that the Epe MRF isn’t just a one-off project; it’s a scalable model for the entire state. We are advocating for a shift where the government sees waste as a resource to be managed locally, rather than a problem to be buried.

The post CODAF: Bridging the gap between policymakers and grassroots communities through MAMRN Project first appeared on GAIA.

"This man lived fully and happily. He strongly believed he could transform the world—and he did.”

The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) and our entire community are shocked and deeply saddened by the sudden passing of Sena Alouka, Executive Director of Jeunes Volontaires pour l’Environnement (JVE-Togo) and founding Chair of AFSA’s Climate and Agroecology Working Group.

AFSA Chair Reverend Thomas Tolbert Jallah said: “Sena was a mentor, an inspiration and a guide—one of the pillars upon which AFSA was built. On behalf of the young people he called his children, the farmers whose soil he fought to protect, the fisherfolk whose rivers he defended and the pastoralists whose lands he held sacred, we mourn him with broken hearts.”

Sena often told us that his name meant “Gift from God.” His mother, Davé, had prayed for a daughter and received instead a son who would go on to mother a continent. He was indeed a gift. For more than two decades, he devoted himself to Africa’s environment, climate, biodiversity, food and culture—and, above all, to its young people, calling generation after generation to rise, learn and lead.

His life’s work began with a fire on a mountain above his childhood village of Kpélé Tsiko in 1999. The whole community went out to fight it, returning with burned cassava and yams in their hands—and something new burning within Sena. From those ashes, with neither money nor a map, he founded Young Volunteers for the Environment. What began with children raising tree seedlings in a small Togolese village grew into one of Africa’s largest youth-led environmental movements, now rooted in more than thirty countries.

“Sena Alouka was a rare kind of leader. He breathed life back into youth volunteerism and activism for Africa’s environment, biodiversity, culture and indigenous knowledge at a time when few believed young people could lead this fight. He was instrumental in starting AFSA’s Agroecology and Climate Working Group, and he was the one who insisted, again and again, that we create a Youth Working Group of our own. He was a driving force for change, always seeking new opportunities, expanding the frontiers of possibility for Africa’s youth and shifting mindsets towards a proactive, impactful life. His loss leaves a huge gap in youth activism across this continent—a grief we feel deeply today. But his legacy will not be buried with him. We will carry it forward and ensure that it is celebrated for as long as this movement lives.”  — Dr Million Belay, General Coordinator, AFSA

An unrelenting Pan-Africanist, Sena drew strength from Africa’s liberation leaders and carried the continent’s history with extraordinary passion. He understood that a movement without memory is a movement without direction, and he constantly reminded young people that Africa’s unfinished struggle for dignity was now theirs to carry forward.

His influence reached far beyond Togo. He chaired the Climate and Agroecology Working Group of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa; served as facilitator of CAN International’s Energy Working Group; and was a strategic advisor to the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, a trustee of the African Biodiversity Network and Global Coordinator of Ashoka Africa’s ICON nutrition programme—all while serving as patron of the Young Environmental Negotiators Academy and mentoring the very generation he now leaves to carry the torch. In 2014, Ashoka named him a Fellow among the world’s changemakers, twelve years after the IUCN–Reuters Award first recognised his voice as a young environmental journalist. But he had already been a changemaker as a teenager, when he built a community radio station from a car battery and scrap metal on a tin roof and called it Radio Hakuna Matata.

Sena also stood at the birth of YOUNGO, the official youth constituency of the United Nations climate negotiations. After finding himself the only Francophone African at a meeting in Montreal in 2005, he resolved that it would never happen again. The following year, he helped establish the African Youth Initiative on Climate Change and went on to guide generations of young Africans into international policy spaces from which they had long been excluded. There is hardly a young African climate leader today who does not owe some part of their path to his hand at their back.

Sena was that rare breed of leader whose actions were as forceful as his words—an electrifying advocate who spoke boldly yet acted with equal resolve, turning conviction into reality. His organising helped Togo reject a national energy law that would have entrenched coal and nuclear power and become the first country in the world to ban glyphosate. Long before agroecology became widely known, he championed it as an inherently African wisdom inherited from our ancestors. He persisted until it became part of Togo’s national strategy—not because he claimed to have invented it, but because he refused to let the world forget that it was already ours.

Those who knew Sena will remember a character larger than life—a man who wore his passion on his sleeve and whose commanding presence could fill a room. His speeches were positive and lively, sometimes loud and bold, but never, ever dull. He was known for his distinctive humour, his gift for storytelling and his truly captivating personality. Yet behind that smiling, luminous face lived a quieter seriousness: a fiercely pragmatic activist who could galvanise, mobilise, organise and lead with a fire that made every single moment matter.

Sena wanted one line carved on his tombstone: “This man lived fully and happily. He strongly believed he could transform the world—and he did.”

A forest does not fall silent when one great tree comes down. It grows around the space left behind—and it remembers. We are that forest.

Rest now, Papa Sena, in the soil you spent a lifetime restoring. We will keep alive the fire you lit. We will keep planting, even the trees whose fruit we may never live to eat, exactly as you taught us.

Sena—Gift from God—thank you for being ours.

With broken hearts and unbroken resolve,

Rest in peace, Papa Sena.

Few organisations have so consistently campaigned to stymie climate action – possibly anywhere on the planet. So why is News Corp so worked up about the recent CCA report?

The post Climate Authority’s “misinformation” report hit a nerve at News Corp for a reason appeared first on Renew Economy.

CALGARY — CHRIS SEVERSON-BAKER, Executive Director of the Pembina Institute, made the following statement in response to Canada’s Changing Climate Report 2026:“This report again confirms that the human activity of burning fossil fuels is driving...

Shireen and Anderson: On June 24, two back-to-back earthquakes hit Venezuela. As of now, the death toll has surpassed 6,300 people, and tens of thousands are missing. The earthquakes devastated the northern coastal areas of the country. Can you talk about the days and weeks since the earthquakes hit? What have working-class Venezuelans been experiencing since the earthquakes?

Gonzalo: The earthquakes struck a country already devastated by a prolonged social crisis. The death toll continues to rise, and thousands of people affected by the earthquakes remain in camps, without a clear prospect for their future. The destruction of homes, basic services and workplaces—across parts of the capital, Caracas, and other urban areas, but especially in La Guaira—added a massive natural disaster to the pre-existing social crisis, vastly compounding the scale of the resulting humanitarian catastrophe.

The coastal strip of La Guaira, which was most affected by the earthquakes, is an entire state in Venezuela that covers about 170 km of coast on the Caribbean, and is about 30 km north of the capital, Caracas. There are still no definitive estimates of the scale of the destruction, but apart from the dead and missing, there are about 50,000 people who lost everything or who cannot return to their homes. The death toll that has been confirmed is not definitive yet either—many are still under the rubble and their removal has barely begun, even over a month since the earthquakes. In La Guaira and Caracas, along with some other areas in the central-northern-coastal region, there are about 30,000 uninhabitable homes, hundreds of buildings and houses converted into mountains of rubble. Tens of thousands of people remain in dozens of emergency camps and in improvised street shelters, too, in town squares or in the ruins of collapsed buildings. There are people who, given the insufficiency of official aid, have had to use picks and shovels to remove debris, or have had to pay to carry out debris removal or repairs. Many are recovering from wounds and injuries.

Working-class people have had to face the consequences of the earthquakes without wages, savings, or social protection, living in extreme precarity and appalling poverty.

There are numerous testimonies and news stories from people reporting delays or even bureaucratic obstruction of aid from the immediate response to the earthquake through today. The military and police blockaded access to La Guaira, ostensibly for the direction of government aid. This does not seem justified. Hundreds of people had decided to drive to the region on their own accord to provide aid that was not arriving from the state level up to that point.

The slow and insufficient response of the state has made things much worse. For working class survivors, the impact of the earthquakes has also been twofold: They were already struggling with loss of income and near total absence of conditions necessary for a normal life, and now they must also endure the destruction of their homes, the death of family members, and serious injuries, all in a situation of profound abandonment by the state.

In the face of state abandonment, we must highlight how solidarity emerged from below, from the neighborhood and from citizens: spontaneous groups carrying out rescue work, initiatives collecting aid for food, medicine, and supply distribution. This self-organization helped compensate for the absence of the state during the critical early stages of the disaster, especially since the government responded to these grassroots efforts with bureaucratic obstacles and police and military interference. Although these initiatives cannot substitute for the state’s responsibilities, for days they were the only source of assistance available to many people. The grassroots efforts continue to form the basis for demanding democratically monitored aid, and for aiming toward a reconstruction process subject to social oversight in the context of a state that is inefficient and corrupt.

The U.S. has taken advantage of the situation to advance the military occupation … and to bring Zionist Israeli army members to Venezuela under the pretext of “aid.”

One of the most striking manifestations of the social tragedy that everyday people have endured for years is that the minimum wage has effectively been reduced to zero, amounting today to just a few U.S. cents per month. This violates Article 91 of the Constitution which mandates that the minimum wage cover the cost of basic needs including basic food, goods, and services. Working-class people have had to face the consequences of the earthquakes without wages, savings, or social protection, living in extreme precarity and appalling poverty. Raising the minimum wage to meet constitutional standards is a matter of pressing urgency—one that the tutelary1Tutelage is “protective control,” originally signifying the relation between a lord and a serf. government, the business sector, and their political parties refuse to address. This issue stands alongside other fundamental concerns; the tragedy must also be measured by the collapse of living conditions for workers, retirees, and working-class communities who have lacked, and still lack, access to essentials like public health care and social services needed to address their needs.

The international aid of rescuers and the logistical assistance of some NGOs has been very important in this context. More than fifteen countries sent rescuers and aid to Venezuela after the earthquakes. Among them were the Mexican rescue team known as the Topos, who gave their expertise and dedication to the rescue effort.

But the U.S. government, which already had a presence in Venezuela, rushed to send military personnel rather than quality aid. The U.S. has taken advantage of the situation to advance the military occupation of Venezuela and to bring Zionist Israeli army members to Venezuela under the pretext of “aid.” This is with the forced consent of the tutelary government.

S & A: Natural disasters cannot be disconnected from politics. This is particularly clear in Venezuela, where the Trump administration kidnapped president Nicolás Maduro in January, and then backed Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president. The U.S. then took control of Venezuela’s oil—worth approximately $8 billion. In July, a New York Times report stated that U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has taken control of Venezuela’s finances and is working closely with Delcy Rodríguez. And yet, while the earthquakes have caused an estimated $37 billion in damages to Venezuela, the U.S. response to the earthquakes has been to send only $300 million in aid, and to maneuver to put more U.S. troops on the ground. Could you talk about how the Trump administration’s imperialist interventions have affected the aftermath of the earthquake?

G: As I have already alluded to, the emergency situation after the earthquakes cannot be separated from the tutelage imposed by the Trump administration and the “viceroy” of Marco Rubio since January 2026. Washington’s capture of the Venezuelan government and oil revenues created a dependency that today brutally limits the capacity for reconstruction, while many of the economic sanctions continue to be applied to Venezuela. It is evident that its priority is to take billions of dollars of Venezuelan oil, not to help the Venezuelan people. The other thing the U.S. is doing is taking advantage of the tragedy to expand its military presence under the guise of “aid.”

The U.S. now controls the sale of Venezuelan oil, and the resulting revenues are deposited into U.S. Treasury accounts. Whatever funds are transferred back to Venezuela are allocated in an opaque and discretionary manner, to a government that is itself composed of many of the same corrupt officials who participated in the long-running plunder of the country. The scale of that plunder alone would be enough to rebuild the country more than fifteen times over after the earthquake.

Furthermore, Trump claims that what he has taken—or, we should say, stolen—from Venezuela’s oil has allowed him to cover the costs of the military intervention that kidnapped Maduro and has, in his words, made him a lot of money, and given him more fuel and resources for his war on Iran.

The U.S. has taken advantage of the situation to advance the military occupation … and to bring Zionist Israeli army members to Venezuela under the pretext of “aid.”

On top of all that, the restructuring of the foreign debt—which should be considered corrupt and illegitimate—which Delcy Rodríguez took on, multiplying it from $172 billion to around $240 billion, demonstrates clearly the advantage Trump is gaining and the pettiness of his “aid.”

Marea Socialista’s position has been to firmly reject this intervention from day one, without defending Maduro and his government, whose authoritarian, bureaucratic and anti-worker drift had already destroyed salaries and trampled on rights. The “international aid” that the U.S. offered to “restore democracy” to the country and combat “narco-terrorism” has been fully exposed as a pretext and mechanism to undermine the country’s sovereignty and deepen its occupation, utilizing an “interim” government that is hostage to Trump and lacks constitutional legitimacy—much like the Maduro government from which it originated.

Even the right-wing opposition led by Maria Corina Machado, which called for imperialist intervention, has been sidelined by Trump’s antidemocratic schemes, which show no respect for the Venezuelan constitution.

The material and social recovery of Venezuela, together with the restoration of democratic rights, requires simultaneously reclaiming national sovereignty over the country’s resources, ending the U.S.’s imperial tutelage, and ensuring that all humanitarian assistance is administered transparently under the democratic oversight of the affected communities and the working class as a whole. The working class must recover democratic control over what happens in the country—it is the victim of the social and political catastrophe of the counterrevolutionary monstrosity to which Madurismo, and all that emerged from it, became.

Marea Socialista has put forward a series of proposals for an emergency and recovery program, many of which are shared with other political groups from the left-wing opposition and with activist movements fighting for working-class rights.

Marea Socialista supports the proposal—made by Venezuela’s May Day Union Current, which we are a part of—for an Independent Truth and Justice Commission to look into the government’s response to the earthquakes.

We have also been calling for a Public and Citizen Audit to carry out an independent and reliable audit of the expansion of Venezuela’s debt, and of state expenditures more broadly.

S & A: In the days and weeks after the earthquakes, anger in Venezuela has been directed against Delcy Rodríguez for her government’s inept response. What has the state’s response to the earthquake shown about Delcy Rodríguez and her government?

G: The ineptitude and capitulation of Delcy Rodríguez’s government is no accident. Her government represents the PSUV bureaucracy, allied with the military and the lumpen-bourgeoisie2I define the lumpen-bourgeoisie as a type of bourgeoisie whose mode of capital accumulation is based on the corrupt appropriation of income, on speculative financial operations and criminal economies. It emerged from the state bureaucracy due to the degeneration of the Bolivarian revolution that has accelerated under Maduro and further in the current period. spawned by the degeneration of the Bolivarian process—and it reflects the continuity of the bureaucratic and authoritarian model of Madurismo, now combined with open subordination to Washington and to interests such as those of Israel. Israel, as mentioned above, was invited by the Delcy-Trump government to “rebuild” Venezuela following its genocide and destruction of Gaza.

The Venezuelan government has shown and continues to show its inability to coordinate unions, communities, universities and social organizations at the service of those affected by the earthquakes. Its hyper-centralized and opaque structure has prevented popular participation and prioritized the preservation of power over care for victims. And the fact is that all the apparatuses of the bureaucratic state are at the service of its predatory leadership, which is now subordinated to Trump’s blackmail in a bid to save its own skin.

Widespread indignation and complaints against Delcy’s government reflects that the tutelage government cannot live up to the needs of this emergency. Reconstruction cannot be left in the hands of a bureaucracy accustomed to plunder, nor should it be in the hands of private contractors, or at the expense of imperialist piracy. Reconstruction should be under citizen control and public audit, which would require the development of consciousness, organization, struggle, and the creation of alternatives for workers and the people more broadly.

S & A: With the Venezuelan government’s response inadequate, how have regular Venezuelans participated in the recovery process? Has Marea Socialista taken part in these efforts?

G: The most powerful response came from the people. Communities organized rescue efforts, shelters, food provision and searches for missing people. This solidarity could be the seed of a popular organization capable of influencing reconstruction and exercising social control over resources, which would then give way to another level of consciousness and create capacity to fight for something better.

Marea Socialista has welcomed these efforts and participates in them to the best of our ability. We propose the creation of autonomous, community-based committees for aid and reconstruction. Together with solidarity movements, these committees should demand inspections and repairs for damaged buildings, and insist on compensation and sufficient state resources for other needed tasks. The committees should also serve to monitor aid and funding, expose corruption, and coordinate with public services while demanding efficiency, as water, electricity, telephone, and internet services in Venezuela are failing, and the healthcare system is in a dire state. It is worth noting that a worker’s wage, or even an average salary, is insufficient to cover the cost of daily transportation.

The most powerful response came from the people. Communities organized rescue efforts, shelters, food provision and searches for missing people.

Marea Socialista is also collaborating with other organizations belonging to the National Gathering for the Defense of the People’s Rights (a coalition of united left-opposition groups), in spearheading campaigns demanding that the state dedicate all necessary resources to addressing the emergency and to manage reconstruction transparently. This includes the demand that the Trump administration stop stripping Venezuela of its economic resources as part of the spoils of an imperialist war following its intervention. We maintain that not a single cent of the foreign debt be paid: not only are these resources needed to address the social and humanitarian catastrophe, but the debt itself is corrupt and illegitimate.

Grassroots self-organization is necessary to compel the state to act, and to guarantee that the state will serve the public’s interest rather than bureaucratic or private interests. Still, this cannot be fully achieved under an antidemocratic, capitalist government, or under domination with the imperialist boot on Venezuela’s neck.

S & A: The current government in Venezuela is markedly different from the left-wing government of Hugo Chavez in the 1990s and early 2000s. In addition to its entanglement with the U.S., how has Venezuela’s government shifted since Chavez in ways that are affecting the recovery process?

G: The government’s deterioration did not begin in 2026. During the Maduro era, a bureaucracy consolidated; it was enriched through corruption, the looting of oil revenues, and the destruction of workers’ rights. The “lumpen-bourgeoisie” of the state replaced any emancipatory project with management that was patrimonial, authoritarian, and corrupt. Calling itself “left-wing,” “anti-imperialist” and “socialist” became mere rhetoric. Chavez’s government was something quite different, as it had many advanced and progressive elements. At the same time, however, it already carried within it the seeds of the degeneration that would later fully crystallize under Maduro. After the death of Chavez, a regressive stage began, paving the way for an imperialist onslaught, accompanied by the moral rot and betrayal of the Rodríguez siblings [Vice President Delcy Rodríguez and National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez], and [Interior Minister] Diosdado Cabello. If any remnants of the best phase of the Bolivarian Revolution remained, it should be preserved and redirected. But what followed was nothing less than a counterrevolution.

The U.S. intervention in January only crowned this process: the old discourse of anti-imperialism ended in direct subordination to Washington. On this point, the Venezuelan government now aligns with the traditional right wing, which shares the same neoliberal program and commitment to opening the country to transnational capital that is now being implemented by the post-Maduro tutelary government.

In this context, reconstruction is hampered by destroyed wages, stolen sovereignty, and the absence of the slightest democratic control over the national wealth stripped by the bureaucracy and the imperialist colonial “protectorate.” The way out of this quagmire is not choosing between elites or leaders who are expressions of capital, but to build a real alternative that is genuinely socialist, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist, anti-bureaucratic and democratic, and emerging from the working class and popular sectors in Venezuela. It must also be in synchrony with the struggles of peoples across Latin America, and with working-class Americans who are resisting Trump’s abuses and their imperialist state.

S & A: There are more aspects to the U.S.’s detrimental involvement in Venezuela that are impacting the recovery process. For example, extensive sanctions that Trump imposed on Venezuela beginning in 2017 have only been partially lifted. How are U.S. sanctions affecting the recovery process? Also, it should be noted that the U.S. deported over one hundred people to Venezuela just hours before the earthquake, and the majority of them were killed in the earthquake.

G: The U.S. sanctions have aggravated the crisis, making it difficult to access supplies, technology, and financial resources to address it. Marea Socialista rejected the sanctions from the start because they punish the Venezuelan population and strengthen authoritarian tendencies of the state. And it is not a matter of slightly “easing” or “relaxing” the sanctions today. The U.S. government is playing with the hunger and suffering of the Venezuelan people, and the sanctions have served as a pretext for the Maduro and Delcy administrations to justify authoritarianism and cutbacks—and for their failure to meet working-class people’s demands.

But it would be wrong to attribute the crisis fully to the sanctions: before 2017, when Trump’s sanctions began, there was already massive corruption, the destruction of the PDVSA (the state-owned oil company), capital flight and a pattern of looting oil revenues. The sanctions added to and aggravated the situation of a country already devastated by lumpen-capitalist bureaucratic management.

We demand the suspension of all economic sanctions, which fall on the people and hinder reconstruction, but we also call for a struggle to recover sovereignty over oil revenues, to carry out public audits and confront the gigantic national embezzlement. Furthermore, Trump must return all the resources stolen from Venezuela.

Trump has tried to justify all of this in the name of “democracy” and as help to “liberate” Venezuela, but very early on we saw how he treated Venezuelan migration to the U.S. with ICE arrests and deportations. We see that while he extracts oil and minerals and tries to promote his businesses, Trump is keeping an illegitimate government in power while maintaining authoritarian structures and worsening the conditions of the Venezuelan people.

Although the final blow came with the earthquakes, the situation in Venezuela worsened significantly after January 3 under a government that has remained repressive and undemocratic, has made no concessions to the working class, and threatens further hostile maneuvers—such as undermining labor laws and eliminating social benefits. In the months following the military intervention, the government has enacted unconstitutional laws that dismantled oil sovereignty, among other regressive measures.

S & A: From the perspective of Marea Socialista, is the anger against Delcy Rodríguez in Venezuela coalescing into significant opposition, or mobilizations? Is there a sense of exhaustion, or of renewed activity? Will the discontent with her government continue to grow?

G: Today, social exhaustion coexists with some signs of renewed social and political organization. The community response shows that there is a reserve of forces that can be organized and potentially transformed into a political force, if it is articulated democratically and independently on the part of the working class. However, the traditional Right is trying to capitalize on this potential (what is left of Chavismo today has become another right-wing force, though not the traditional right wing). On the other hand, before the earthquakes, workers’ struggles had been revived. While they have lessened since the earthquakes, we believe that momentum will be progressively recovered and that there is potential for a class reorganization at the socio-political level. Sectors that still retain a degree of loyalty to Madurismo have begun to mobilize alongside others who are in opposition or critical of the government from the Left. On July 24, the birthday of Simon Bolivar, some of these forces gathered in Bolivar Squares in certain Venezuelan cities to shout anti-imperialist slogans and to denounce the presence of Zionists in Venezuela.

The way out of the authoritarian tutelage imposed by imperialism is not a return to the Madurismo that helped bring about this situation. Nor is it the right-wing neoliberal option that promoted U.S. intervention, the consequences of which we are now witnessing. And the way out is certainly not to resign ourselves to the “transition” plans that rely on the current government remaining under foreign tutelage. The Venezuelan people see this reality and are reformulating their understanding of the situation. The polarization between elites in leadership is preventing any solution that would benefit the majority of the population, as both factions are equally beholden to the dictates of imperialism.

Sectors that still retain a degree of loyalty to Madurismo have begun to mobilize alongside others who are in opposition or critical of the government from the Left.

Resistance and recovery are not merely a matter of willpower—they must be forged through organization built by struggle, guided by a class-based program, and driven by a political alternative and alliances independent of those capitalist elites.

We must become as organized and deeply rooted as possible with the working class and people. The formation of class-based alliances or united fronts of action between anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist and anti-bureaucratic organizations and movements is very important.

Marea Socialista, who at an international level are linked to the International Socialist League (ISL), in Venezuela currently participates in a union current called Corriente Primero de Mayo. We also mobilize with other left-wing opposition organizations. We are part of what is known as the National Meeting for the Rights of the People, which fights for wages, against repression, for democratic freedoms, against corruption, and in international efforts of solidarity with Palestine and now the fight against imperialist intervention and the puppet government in Venezuela. Within this political space, we have joined forces with the Communist Party of Venezuela, the PPT-APR (Patria Para Todos-Alternative Popular Revolucionaria), the PSL (Partido Socialismo y Libertad), and other organizations—an alliance formed nearly four years ago to oppose both Madurismo and the traditional right. The alliance as a whole now radically opposes the tutelary government of Trump and Marco Rubio, that of Delcy and Jorge Rodriguez alongside Diosdado Cabello, a government used as a tool by the imperialist invader that must be driven out of Venezuela.

Discontent will continue to grow as long as hunger persists, the lack of sovereignty and reconstruction guided by external interests continues, and the dearth of democracy and repression continue. The challenge is to convert this discomfort into a conscious organization and a socialist, democratic and anti-imperialist alternative built from below.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Allison White; modified by Tempest.

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