For Z Magazine, September 2009
The summer and fall of 2009 will surely be noted in the annals of environmental history. This period could be remembered as the time when the world’s elites slowly began to crawl toward a meaningful solution to the threat of accelerating global climate disruptions. But if events continue along the path of recent months, it could mark the beginning of an inexorable slide toward an increasingly unstable planetary climate regime, an unstable and chaotic world that our ancestors would barely recognize.
Relying on the mainstream media for …

- From C. Armiger, P. Palmiotto, J. Estes, eds., Banking on Biodiversity: The ecological and socio-economic dimensions of sustainable agriculture, Keene, NH: Antioch University Center for Tropical Ecology and Conservation (in press)
The previous panelists have offered thoughtful perspectives on how US agricultural policies profoundly alter the lives of people around the world and how people in tropical Central America are beginning to reclaim sovereignty over their food supply. I’d like to bring the discussion home by addressing the problem of increasing corporate control over our own food, and exploring some …

(This interview was originally posted at http://www.ecoclub.com/news/101/interview.html)
ECOCLUB.com: What is Social Ecology and in what key ways does it differ from the mainstream environmentalism of the big US & International NGOS?
Brian Tokar: Social ecology offers a coherent radical critique of current social, political, and environmental problems, as well as a reconstructive, ecological, communitarian, and ethical approach to society. We view environmental problems as fundamentally social and political, and seek systemic, long-term solutions, in contrast to the incremental policy adjustments generally advocated …

First published at Toward Freedom, Sept. 2008
Note: This article is from a presentation for Changer le Monde, Un Quartier à la Fois! (Changing the World, One Neighborhood at a Time) conference, Montreal, 5/1/08
Over the past year, we’ve seen an unprecedented rise in awareness of the consequences of potentially catastrophic global climate changes, and the need for a more ecologically sound way of life. We know that profound changes in our energy systems, our modes of transportation, and our entire way of life, are absolutely essential if we are to avoid …

- For In the Middle of a Whirlwind/Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, Summer 2008
(inthemiddleofawhirlwind.info)
Complaining about the weather is about as American as apple pie, sitcoms and rock and roll. But while the rest of the world has been noticing for years that our increasingly unstable weather is an initial sign of potentially devastating global climate changes, our nation’s collective heads have mostly remained in the sand. Finally, over the past year or so, things have begun to shift a little.
It helps, of course, that weather changes over the past year …

- For Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, March 2008
Murray Bookchin was a leading theoretical progenitor of the many currents of left ecological thought and action that emerged from the 1960s, and his voluminous and many-faceted work has continued to influence theorists and activists to this day. Marcel van der Linden of the International Institute of Social History, based in the Netherlands, has described Bookchin’s collection of sixties-era essays, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, as “definitely… one of the most influential works on the international generation of 1968.”1 His magnum opus, The Ecology of Freedom, was …

For Synthesis/Regeneration Spring 2008
With all the fanfare that usually accompanies such gatherings, delegates to last December’s UN climate talks on the Indonesian island of Bali returned to their home countries declaring victory. Despite the continued obstructionism of the US delegation, the negotiators reached a mild consensus for continued negotiations on reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, and at the very last moment were able to cajole and pressure the US to sign on.
But in the end, the so-called “Bali roadmap” added little beside a vague timetable to the plans for renewed …

- For Z Magazine, January 2008
If 2006 was the year that the “inconvenient truth” of global climate disruption made its way into the popular consciousness—and sparked a huge new wave of green products and corporate greenwashing—then hopefully the results of 2007’s revelations about the earth’s rapidly changing climate will prove more substantive and long-lasting. Not only did the UN’s Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issue a massively comprehensive report on climate science and its consequences, but the disturbing, and sometimes catastrophic, reality of worldwide climate collapse began to affect …

- For GeneWatch, Spring ‘07
Since 1999, activists across North America have created comprehensive educational events, colorful parades, and determined oppositional media campaigns in response to the annual conventions of the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO). BIO is the world’s largest biotech lobbying organization. Their annual conventions have grown in recent years to bring nearly 20,000 biotech executives to major cities across the continent, and have featured high profile speakers from Presidents Clinton and Bush, to Hollywood celebrities, such as the late Christopher Reeve and Parkinson’s sufferer Michael J. Fox. These conventions …

- For Z Magazine, January 2007
One of the most pressing issues facing us all, including the new Democratic-controlled Congress, is what to do about energy policy and climate change. With sweeping changes in the leadership of key congressional committees, and heightened public concerns about the consequences of disruptive climate shifts, the time appears ripe for significant changes in US policy. Environmental lobbyists in Washington, however, are bracing themselves for only minimal steps. California Senator Barbara Boxer, the new chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, is planning comprehensive hearings …