Challenging the corporate co-option of the UN should be a major priority in the run-up to the UN Rio+20 Earth Summit in June 2012. In less than six months, the UN summit in Rio de Janeiro will take place ( 20-22 June 2012), twenty years after the historic Earth...
sustainable
The Future We Want
Preamble/Stage Setting 1. We, the heads of State and Government, having met at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from 20-22 June 2012, resolve to work together for a prosperous, secure and sustainable future for our people and our planet. 2. We reaffirm our determination to...
The need for a paradigm shift: challenges for achieving social justice in a resource-limited world | by Anabella Rosemberg
At the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, it appeared that a global consensus had been reached that there was an inevitable connection between social justice, environmental protection and economic security. Sustainability was the watchword and there seemed...
The Green Economy: the Wolf in Sheep’s clothing | by Edgardo Lander
I. The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro 1992: sustainable development In 1983, when the Earth’s ecological crisis was becoming ever more apparent, the United Nations General Assembly decided to create an international commission (the World Commission on Environment...
Disempowering Women through the Green Economy | by Clarissa Militante
“The Future We Want,” the text being discussed by governments for Rio+20, promotes rhetoric of empowering women but in reality, it not only disempowers them further, it also gives more rights and access to corporations. The basic step towards achieving women...
Another shale gas scandal – Fracking in the Quebec | by Kim Cornelissen
Virtually unknown only a couple of years ago, shale gas has become a very controversial issue. Considered the new oil, thousands of wells have to be drilled and fracked, contaminating millions of litres of water, to extract what is called ‘unconventional gas’. This...
Indigenous people: a key to environmental rescue
A 60 000-year track record on ecologyInterview with Clayton Thomas-Muller, founder of Defenders of the Land in Canada. Michael Welch (MW): Clayton Thomas-Muller, you’re on staff with the Indigenous Environment Network and a founder of Defenders of the Land. What...
What We Are For | by Richard Heinberg
Every activist engaged in combating human-caused climate change or specific elements of the current energy economy knows that the work is primarily oppositional. It could hardly be otherwise; for citizens who care about ecological integrity, a sustainable economy, and...
Economic crisis and post-capitalism | Interview by Mat Little
Mat Little interviews the economist Harry Shutt about economic crisis and the left alternative. What marks Harry Shutt out as an economist is not that he predicted the financial crisis that struck in 2007 (two years before he warned of ‘an unavoidable financial...

