Bangladesh and the government’s reaction to the rains is a good one, also Kenya and the encroachment of drought, migration of disease-carriers etc and again, government response. Generally, as basically every government saves the wealthy first and tells the poor to go fuck themselves, pick an environmental disaster, find a radical group to ask about the government’s response, and voila, article.
Good class struggle environmentalist issues
Chipko movement in India, Narmada Dam movement in India, - you would find much more stuff in India, like that recent or ongoing instance in Kerala that Chomsky and various other left wing luminaries embarrased themselves over, various protests and riots against pollution/new developments in China, Mountain Top Removal (and before that strip mining) in Appalachia, environmental justice in the U.S., anti-nuclear movement in Europe - the stuff in Gorleben in Germany is still ongoing after 25 years, I think I remember a pylons protest in Spain that anarchists were particularly involved in, likewise stuff around the TAV (or maybe TAZ?) high speed trains in Italy and along the French-Italian border. I think you would find a lot in the Med. countries, but I don't know the languages so I can't help (wasn't some struggles around development mented in the context of the Greek forest fires). Tons of small scale and little noticed campaigns in Britain and Ireland - for the later 'Guests of the Nation' is a good book to look at (later reissued as 'No Global') it is by Robert Allen and Tara Jones. For Britain, at least south of the border, I don't know the good sources - other than trawling the local press, if anyone does I'd like to hear it. Scotland the books 'Soil and Soul' and 'Troublemakers'. Guess none of that is perhaps spectacular enough for a magazine in Mexico though.
The dam movement in India's a good one, but since it's been picked up on by plenty of NGOs they may have already covered it. I'll check out some of the others and sex them up if necessary, thanks Terry.
The natural disasters template sounds interesting but I may have to negotiate its focus a little to satisfy the remit of the publication. The editor's cool though, I was gingerly trying to argue environmental issues being tied into a larger social structure and he interrupted saying "oh definitely, you need to abolish capitalism".
Other thing to look at would be Rainbow Keepers, who hold a protest camp every summer somewhere in Russia. It was at such that a person was killed by fascists last year. There is coverage of this group in back issues of Abolishing the Borders from Below.
Also if you go to the Friends of the Earth International site and follow the links to member sections in the global South you ought find things of interest.
Aye and Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta is probably worth looking at is well, though probably difficult to get a handle on if you are not living in the Niger Delta. That is the lot whose attacks on infrastructure and kidnapping of ex-pat oil workers has cut Nigerian oil production by a quarter.
Probably India is your best bet though, for accessible information, plenty of stuff going on other than just Narmada.
Also if you have access to a university library (or they might have it in their electronic journals) maybe worth looking at the journal Capitalism Nature Socialism havn't read much of it, but have read books by some of the people behind it, and those are quite good. They tend more towards the political economy of ecological crises from a Marxist perspective than towards information about specific environmental struggles though.
catch wrote:
US reaction to Hurricane Katrina - Chris Wright's analysis not long afterwards was really good.
we never ended up posting that did we...
Judi Bari and the IWW/EF! thing with logging might be good, although well covered already.
Could any of this shit be posted in our library too?
some big dam project in spain was a big deal as well...
The UK roads movement - aufheben shit
anti-nuclear struggles in germany
That is probably the Itoiz dam you are thinking of John....I suspect the pylons I'm thinking of were part of the same development.
There is also a relevant article in the latest issue of Organise!:
http://www.af-north.org/afed/org/issue69/grassroots_environmentalism_ecopopulism.html
Yeah they were, the activists cut down the pylons to stop the dam getting built.
There’s been a big multinational activist thing going on in Iceland for a while now as well, also against a dam, and the huge dam in China which has just been finished had big protest, on the grounds it was drowning both villages and major conservation areas. The oil pipeline Baku-Ceyhan is a huge deal environmentally, as is uranium dumping in Russia (we sell it to them in the UK, they dump it just outside rural towns and poison people), the ex nuke sites in the former USSR countries, pollution fallout from oil exploitation in Azerbaijan, water depletion in India from companies like Coca Cola, Unilever. In Africa there’s also the famines being caused/exacerbated by diversion of crop production to international sale during droughts (which are of course getting much more common as the equatorial area is more volatile and susceptible to climate change).
Alan wrote:
Yeah gonna cover Naples...is the China one linked to the Libcom article about the guy with the video camera getting killed?
yes. With the olympics shitloads of polluting industry is getting pushed out of its home so I'd expect to see a lot mor of this. Probably is, just unreported.
Hey I've recently landed a gig writing for a handwringing environmental revista which'll be good for my Spanish and my options upon graduating. Anyway, in a media scene that practically never manages to shift its focus outside of Latin America and the US, I've already managed to stun my editor with my excellent grasp of international stories. I just churned out a sexy article on the Australian Green Bans for example, and he's gonna publish a tale about Rossport. What other good yarns out there that fit the preordained narrative of environmentalist concerns overlapping with class struggle?