How Movements Sustain Us Amid Rising Authoritarianism

Cloee Cooper speaks with three movement leaders—Alex Tom, Meena Jagannath, and Vince Warren—about rising authoritarianism, successful resistance strategies, and the future of Left organizing.

The political stakes are high for the oil and gas industry, which is desperate to preserve its dominance amid cascading environmental policy shifts, broadening support for the renewable energy revolution, and ever more visible, sensed, social, and…

In this episode, Koki interviews Laura Pulido, Collins Chair and Professor of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies and Geography at the University of Oregon, who studies race, environmental justice, and cultural memory. They discuss the intersection…

This excerpt from Ajay Singh Chaudhary’s book, The Exhausted of the Earth, discusses the Right’s “climate realism” and who benefits from the extractive economic system that fuels climate change.

Host Koki Mendis and guest Alex Amend discuss the rise of far-right environmentalism. It is more than just a reactionary response to the climate crisis. It is an ideological framework weaponizing environmental concerns to propagate nativist and…

Author Q&A with Dr. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

There has been a recent resurgence of interest in reparations, with cities including Detroit, MI; St. Paul, MN; and Berkeley, CA either considering or endorsing institutional compensation and redress for the country’s legacy of slavery and racism.…

Author Q&A with Reece Jones

Over the past 30 years, the U.S. Southern border has become an increasingly volatile political force. Trump built his political identity on demonizing immigrants and promoting spectacles of border fortification: the promise of a wall, expansive…

Author Q&A with Andreas Malm

From “heat domes” to super-hurricanes, the signs of an accelerating climate crisis are all around us. Yet at the same time there’s been a parallel, global surge in far-right forces, many of which flatly deny the very existence of climate change, and…

Watch Now: A PRA Roundtable Discussion

From ecofascism to science denialism and the lobbying power of extractive industries, the Right does not present a unified opposition to climate action. Social justice organizers have a four-fold task: build buy-in on the urgency of addressing…

American Ecofascism Past, Present, and in the Coming Climate Crisis

“We’re the virus.” So read a popular tweet from mid-March praising reports of diminished air and water pollution in countries under lockdown due to the novel coronavirus COVID-19. By mid-April, the tweet, which also suggested that “Coronavirus is…

Calls to treat environmental defenders like terrorists enable more surveillance and violence, putting activists at risk while protecting those profiting from ecological destruction.

In 2015, the United States and China – the two biggest emitters of greenhouses gases in the world – were among 195 countries to ratify the Paris climate accord with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Less than two years later…

Activist Shana Griffin on Post-Katrina New Orleans Housing

Rep. Richard H. Baker, a Republican congressman from Baton Rouge, was quoted as telling lobbyists in September 2005, “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.”

It’s been ten years since the Category 3 hurricane named Katrina came ashore in Louisiana, causing over 1,800 deaths and billions of dollars in property damage. Five years after the storm, Political Research Associates published the below piece in…

Radical journalist Andrew Kopkind once quipped that Arizona and its capital, Phoenix, were “at the mercy of [their] own myths.” That was as true in 1965 as it is today. Local promoters have long credited central air conditioning with making the…

It looks like the Lone Star State’s reputation as a hotbed of anti-science fanaticism is about to be reinforced. At least six creationists/”intelligent design” proponents succeeded in getting invited to review high school biology textbooks that…

What’s the scorecard on the Michigan Operational Integration Center’s ability to combine information from different sources when the threat is not terrorism but environmental disaster?

The New Orleans Catastrophe Predates Katrina

Five years after Hurricane Katrina and the “federal flood,” as locals call the disaster, the new New Orleans is as much the product of decades of antiwelfare ideology in local and national governments as it is of the unique circumstances of the…

Everyone wants to be green. Fossil fuel companies tout their commitments to the environment, with BP sporting its green and yellow flower logo and Chevron scooping up a Green Apple award for promoting public-school energy efficiency. In 2009 Exxon-…

Immigrants and the Environment The anti-immigrant Right has appealed to those who value the environment, blaming immigrants for problems of pollution, overcrowding, energy shortages and the very quality of life in the United States. Sometimes…

Right-Wing Anti-Environmentalism

In the last days of the 1992 presidential campaign, George Bush Sr. denounced “environmental extremists” who sought to lock up natural resources and destroy the American way of life. At the heart of this imagined green conspiracy was the “Ozone…

Grassroots Constituencies Criticize the Movement

For many years, the large, mainstream environmental organizations such as The Audubon Society, the Wilderness Society, and the Sierra Club exercised hegemony over the environmental debate in legislation, the media, and publishing. In the 1980s and…

Environmental activists over the past few years have reported a series of incidents involving surveillance, police overreaction, and harassment that lead them to believe they are being targeted by a campaign to discredit them and hamstring…