Alexander Reid Ross

By Alexander Reid Ross - Anti-Fascist News, April 5, 2017

By Alexander Reid Ross - Anti-Fascist News, March 29, 2017

By Alexander Reid Ross - The Ecologist, April 7, 2015

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

The Wilderness Society is celebrating with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance over striking a deal with the conservative elements in the state.

Trading away half a million acres of land to the energy industry for 1.5 million acres of wilderness seems good on paper, after all.

And after the Bundy Ranch fiasco in Nevada, rapprochement between the greens and the far right seems like exactly what the country needs. But not everybody is happy.

Local groups Utah Tar Sands Resistance and Peaceful Uprising are crying foul. "This is very much a sell out", organizer Raphael Cordry told me over the phone. "It's very disappointing.

"They're trading the lives of the people of Utah and their health and wellbeing for some wilderness area, and the area that they're trading is the place we've actually been protecting. They've been calling it a sacrifice zone, and we knew this, so it's not a surprise."

The Wilderness Society is shy about discussing the impacts of what the Wall Street Journal is calling 'the Grand Bargain'. To Wilderness Society spokesperson Paul Spitler, "It's pretty refreshing to see a new approach."

"We have seen for the past twenty years that the Bureau of Land Management and School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration have been strategically swapping parcels of land that was originally checker boarded, so they trade off and make that a contiguous stretch of land."

By Alexander Reid Ross - Earth First!, December 13, 2015

Image, right: Police confront Indigenous protest at COP21, Indigenous Environment Network.

World leaders congratulated one another with the help of some professional conservationists who have agreed that the climate accords are, as President Obama put it, “the enduring framework… the mechanism, the architecture, for us to continually tackle this problem in an effective way.”

During a protest march, indigenous activists presented to the world leaders a traditional cradleboard used to carry children by the Ponca Nation (Oklahoma, USA). Ponca elder Casey Camp-Horinek declared: “We come here with a present for Paris, we know what happened on November 13. We Indigenous people know how that feels to have someone kill the innocent ones. We offer this symbol in memory of lives lost, and we thank you for hosting us on this sacred day.”

The “mechanism” of the COP21 agreement calls for an “accelerated reduction” of carbon emissions to keep global temperature rise at 1.5 degrees. To get there, it summons a list of “shoulds” rather than “musts” with no actual “mechanism” of enforcement.

In one incredible line likely difficult to swallow for many of the US’s allies and multinational corporations, the agreement states, “Parties should, when taking action to address climate change, respect, promote and consider their respective obligations on human rights, the right to health, the rights of indigenous peoples local communities, migrants, children, persons with disabilities and people in vulnerable situations and the right to development, as well as gender equality, empowerment of women and intergenerational equity.”

The agreement surges forward with a series of “recognitions” and “acknowledgements” meant perhaps as an eye to imperialist conditions in the Global South. For example, “acknowledging the specific needs and concerns of developing country Parties arising from the impact of the implementation of response measures[.]” Acknowledgement, unfortunately, has never been lacking. Assessing the immediate needs and demands is another thing entirely, and the climate agreement takes at best a glancing notice of this mechanism failure, relegating those discussions to ad hoc subgroups and committees.

In terms of actual execution, the agreement declares: “In accounting for anthropogenic emissions and removals corresponding to their nationally determined contributions, Parties shall promote environmental integrity, transparency, accuracy, completeness, comparability and consistency, and ensure the avoidance of double counting, in accordance with guidance adopted by the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement.” Relying on the good faith of some of the most heinous violators of human and ecological rights in the world sounds great when read off of an official document signed by those perpetrators, but when one steps outside into an abject police state at permanent war with its own population and countless other groups, sects, and parties, the clarity begins to fade into an overwhelming, terrifying, and stark sense of grey.

By Alexander Reid Ross - Earth First! Newswire, November 19, 2015

Although Syrian refugees are still being blamed for the Paris attacks, the news that the attackers were all European nationals seems only to have created a growing sense of disquiet. It’s as if some sense of purpose has been lost with cavalier bravado that always obscures the chauvinism staring plainly back at the West through the mirror of “the Orient.”

Lost on many is the fact that NATO powers helped to fuel the conflict in Syria and ensuing growth of ISIS. Lost on many more is the accelerant that climate change has become, creating systems of drought and despair in Syria and throughout the world that feed the conditions of civil war. Solving climate change would provide an important key to liberate those struggling for global justice, because it would come from them.

At this point, domestic questions begin to arise, and answers do not come easily for the bomb-dropping President of the French Fifth Republic whose imperial policies are so clearly part of the problem. He has agreed to allow Syrian refugees into France regardless of the notorious ressentiment of the radical right. However, his government has also used the attacks as convenient leverage to attempt to preemptively disperse protests for the upcoming Paris Conference of Parties (COP21), slated to take place November 30 to December 11.

By Alexander Reid Ross - The Ecologist, March 6, 2015

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

In January, I went to the Oregon coast to get away from the city, clear my mind, and have some fun. While walking down the beach, though, we noticed a horrible sight.

Thousands of dead young birds, called cassin's auklets, littered the sands, strewn amongst the bottles and random plastic like so many discarded dreams.

Scientists are baffled as to the reason for the die-off. National Geographic called it "unprecedented... one of the largest mass die-offs of seabirds ever recorded." Between 50-100,000 birds as of the end of January.

The most direct explanation is simply starvation. The natural food of the birds has gone away this season, and it fits in with a larger trend of mass die-offs on the Northwest coast. It could be that ocean acidification is creating an ecological collapse, a lack of oxygen in the water, perhaps, but the main theory places the blame on the warming oceans.

It is climate change that is causing this death, just as climate change induced drought have led to the wars in Syria and Mali. It is killing our young; the entire planet is in grave peril.

Something must be done. But what?

The political party in power in Greece is called Syriza, an acronym meaning Synaspismós Rizospastikís Aristerás (Συνασπισμός Ριζοσπαστικής Αριστεράς) or 'coalition of the radical left'. Their organization is not what one could possibly call a conventional political party: it is more of a work of rethinking politics and its relationship to the state.

They formed in 2004 as an anti-establishment party, and surfed into power on the waves of riotous discontent incumbent on austerity programs and police repression. Although they have found turbulent times amidst negotiations with global financial institutions, Syriza has shown the North Atlantic the possibility of taking hegemony from the core economic and political powers of neoliberalism.