Natural flood management is part of the solution, not dredging. But if we seriously want to preserve and restore nature, argues Eddie Ford, then we need to challenge capitalism Parts of southern and central England have experienced the wettest January since Met Office statistics began in 1910 and, according to the Radcliffe Meteorological Station in Oxford University, ...
Robert Eagleton offers his comments on the floods that have hit south-west England Over the past few months floods have laid waste to parts of the south-west; the majority of the destruction has occurred in the counties of Devon, Cornwall and Somerset, where thousands of hectares of land have been covered in water. Since December last ...
The Durban conference on climate change is likely to be even more useless than its predecessors - James Turley argues it is time to serve notice on capital's stewardship of the environment The first casualty of war, they say, is the truth. The first casualties of an international conference of governments on climate change, on the ...
Technology is not socially neutral, declares James Turley (first published in the Weekly Worker) When they were not on Libya this week, the world’s eyes have been on Japan, following its most severe earthquake on record and the resultant tsunami. However, the focus soon shifted from the thousands who died to the effect ...
James Turley argues that there is more to the Eyjafjallajökull volcano than disruption to tourists The disruption caused by the gigantic ash column over Iceland is another monument to the idiocy of capitalism. With the skies of western Europe a no-fly zone for a week, a not so remarkable natural event has provoked a very human ...
Capitalism and sustainability do not mix, says James Turley And it was all looking so rosy for the official green movement. After the low point that followed America’s failure to ratify the Kyoto protocol, and the election in 2000 of president George W Bush, who openly flirted with global warming denial, the tide slowly seemed to ...
Ben Lewis reviews Martin Empson's Marxism and ecology: capitalism, socialism and the future of the planet Bookmarks, pp32, £1.50 In some ways, this Socialist Workers Party pamphlet is a useful read. Although it hardly presents a thoroughgoing critique of capitalism and its plundering of nature, it carries arguments, backed up by numerous figures and statistics, that ...
James Turley looks at the mixed messages from the media about the Copenhagen demonstrations As is the norm for any major gathering of world leaders, the COP-15 talks in Copenhagen over the global warming crisis have been accompanied by a whole series of protests. First, there were the protests outside Denmark, which saw thousands marching at events ...
On Saturday December 5, around 50,000 activists took part in the London ‘blue wave’ demonstration against climate change. Ben Lewis was there Organised by the Stop Climate Chaos campaign, the protest was conceived as a way of building up pressure on the great and the good assembled for the UN climate summit in Copenhagen. The event ...
Beyond the limits Huw Sheridan reviews Steve Jones’s Darwin’s island: The Galapagos in the garden of England Little, Brown, 2009, pp307, £20 The anniversarial hype surrounding Charles Darwin continues unabated. The BBC alone broadcast a seemingly endless flow of programmes as part of its Darwin season. Jones’s book is essentially a polemic against the parody of Darwin’s life ...
Nationalise drug companies under democratic control, says James Turley The British media has managed to get itself into yet another incredible panic over a viral contagion. Having stubbornly failed to be devastated by severe acute respiratory ...
This year is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th of the publication of his seminal 'On the origin of species by means of natural selection'. Huw Sheridan looks at its importance for communists Charles Robert Darwin died on April 19 1882. Plans for the funeral in his quiet village were ...
Despite an SP and SWP presence, no one proposed the necessary solution to global warming, writes Simon Wells The Campaign Against Climate Change held its annual demonstration on a bitterly cold afternoon last Saturday, coinciding with the latest United Nations negotiations being held in Poznan, Poland, to agree a post-Kyoto deal. Starting from Grosvenor Square, the demonstration ...