environment

The last 10 days or so have seen a massive shift in the NO TAV struggle, with the state now trying to repress the movement more openly than ever: evictions, police beatings, and the government’s terror propaganda. Here’s a look at recent events:

Update (27 february 2012, 11:00 am italian time):
While we write, police forces are expanding the off-limit area, trying to clear the baita in order to demolish it. Fifteen protesters are resisting in it. One notav protester, chased by police, climbed on an electric pylon, and then fell down (from 10 meters high) after taking a shock. He’s now under surgery in Turin, ambulance transportation has been delayed by police for almost an hour. Roadblocks and rails occupations by notav protesters have started in Valsusa and solidarity actions are being planned in all Italy. More updates later on.
(type #forzaluca on Twitter).

In this book first published in 2008, Jaime Semprun and René Riesel examine the attempt by predominantly First World governments and NGOs to utilize the specter of an environmental apocalypse as an alibi to save “industrial civilization” by imposing a rationed form of “survival”, justified by a terroristic propaganda campaign based on fear, enforced by an expansion of the state’s coercive powers, and facilitated by the mass conformism and resignation that “industrial society” has induced in the population by creating an “anxiogenic environment” of “insecurity and generalized instability”; “[f]or the fears proclaimed by the experts … are in reality nothing but orders”.

Murray Bookchin's collection of essays envisioning an anarchist society without scarce resources, if we rely on technology.