There is plenty of evidence that the livelihoods of farmers and communities can be improved, and that agroecology can deliver a huge range of other benefits.

At the beginning of March, the Guardian ran a chilling editorial warning of a looming global food crisis, saying that an “enduring lesson of history is that drought and famine feed conflict, and conflict breeds more privation, and despair.”

The good news is that there’s a whole host of ways going forward to address the challenge of sustainable food production. The bad news is that donors, development agencies and multilateral financial initiatives seem to want to move in the opposite direction.

There is now extremely good evidence that small-scale sustainable farming, or agroecology, can deliver as much if not more food than large-scale corporate-controlled agriculture.

For example, research by the UN showed that switching to agroecological farming methods has increased yields across Africa by 116% and by 128% in East Africa compared to conventional farming.

There is also plenty of evidence that the livelihoods of farmers and communities can be improved, and that agroecology can deliver a huge range of other benefits, including reducing the gender gap, creating jobs, improving people’s health, increasing biodiversity, and increasing the resilience of food systems to cope with climate change.

The malign influence of agri-corporations

So why are governments, development agencies, policy makers and funders so focused on large-scale, high-input solutions which marginalise poor and small-scale farmers, have a negative impact on our environment, and do little to increase the resilience of our food system as a whole?

The short answer is corporate power. A longer answer is that there is a significant economic and political bias in favour of large-scale industrial agriculture. This bias is created through an economic system which privileges industrial farming, large-scale land owners and monopolistic corporations, leading to political support for these vested interests.

A change in the ideological support for industrial agriculture towards agroecology and sustainable small-scale agriculture will require the political establishment and development agencies to design policies based on scientific evidence and the long-term viability of our global food system.

As the eminent agroecologist Professor Miguel Altieri has put it,

“The issue seems to be political or ideological rather than evidence or science based. No matter what data is presented, governments and donors influenced by big interests marginalize agroecological approaches focusing on quick-fix, external input intensive ‘solutions’ and proprietary technologies such as transgenic crops and chemical fertilisers.

“It is time for the international community to recognize that there is no other more viable path to food production in the twenty-first century than agroecology.“

There are many other barriers in place which prevent agroecology from being scaled up and helping to create a more robust and equitable food system.

Unfair trade rules and skewed research

For starters, there is the question of unfair trade rules and policies which force governments to sacrifice democratic decisions and priorities such as the ‘right to food’ in the name of free trade.

Many southern countries have had their agricultural sectors decimated as they have been forced to remove agricultural protections like quotas and tariffs, food stockpiles and price controls, and subsidised seeds and other inputs.

These are all seen as barriers to trade. This problem is compounded by the fact that many western countries are still allowed to subsidise agriculture, meaning small African farmers are being forced to compete with highly subsidised North American and European agribusiness.

But there’s no reason why trade has to work in this way. Trade could easily prioritise and promote the ability of small farmers to sell goods, just as certain fair trade schemes currently do.

What’s more, trade should primarily encourage local, national and regional trading relationships, ensuring countries feed themselves before throwing them into competitive relationships with established companies in the west where customers are able to spend more on food than in domestic markets.

Then there’s the question of research and investment. At the moment, most of the money for both is spent on high-tech conventional farming which relies on expensive inputs, such as chemical pesticides and fertilisers, and proprietary high-yielding seeds.

Instead, investments and research should be realigned towards sustainable farming and agroecology – particularly given the increasingly strong evidence of the benefits of these low-input practices on a wide range of environmental, social and economic indicators. Investments should not be tied to policy reforms which promote corporate-controlled economic growth at the expense of small-scale and poor farmers.

Land ownership

Finally there is the complex question of land ownership. An estimated 90% of rural land in Africa is unregistered, making it particularly susceptible to land grabs and unfair expropriation by governments on behalf of multinational corporations.

Behind the problem of insecure land tenure is a deeper rooted problem of land ownership inequality, which goes back to the colonial era and before and looms large to this day. Across the continent, households in the highest income per capita quartile control up to fifteen times more land than people in the lowest quartile.

Land tenure is a complex issue and improving tenure rights and the growth of private property rights can, in some cases, facilitate corporate land grabbing and strengthen private land ownership by already rich investors and farmers.

Corporations and other powerful actors can increase their control of land either directly, with medium and long-term leases, or through direct land purchases, but they can also control land and labour through contract farming arrangements.

Improving land tenure arrangements should go hand in hand with land reform and land redistribution which prioritises the needs of small-scale farmers and farming communities and reduces land ownership inequality.

All of these barriers can be overcome through policies which take power away from corporations currently pushing for a one-size-fits-all industrial model of agriculture, and give it back to the small-scale farmers who currently grow 70% of Africa’s food.

Democratic alternatives

At Global Justice Now, we campaign for a world where resources are in the hands of the many, not the few. We champion social movements and propose democratic alternatives to corporate power.

We need a complete shift in who controls our food system. Power must be taken away from corporations and put back into the hands of the people and communities that produce and consume food. Only a movement of people calling for food sovereignty and agroecology will create this sort of change.

Ian Fitzpatrick is a researcher with Global Justice Now.

• Check www.globaljustice.org.uk/food for the latest actions calling on the UK government to support agroecology instead of corporate-controlled farming in Africa.
• Join the UK food sovereignty movement, www.foodsovereigntynow.org.uk

This article is an excerpt of ‘From the roots up‘, a report about how agroecology can feed Africa. It was originally published by openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence.

“I am arrested and ready to be deported now – Alex.” The text message came from Mother Nature Cambodia founder Alex Gonzalez-Davidson.

An hour later his last message on Cambodian soil encapsulated the mission for which he has become known: “Message to youth and Cambodian nature lovers, stay strong, the battle is yours to be won. For Nature. Our Life.”

As his flight took off at 9.30pm protests by his supporters continued outside the airport under a frenzied media glare. He texted again: “The reason they are trying to deport me is that they regard me as a fish bone in their throat, due to the activism in the Areng valley.”

The Areng valley in the Cardamom Mountain forests is at the heart of one of Cambodia’s last great forests, home to 30 endangered species and a 2,000-strong Chong indigenous community. Over the last 20 years 84% of the country’s primary forest has been lost to logging, plantations and other developments.

But a massive 10,000 hectares of the valley are slated to be flooded by a hydro-electric dam – one that makes no commercial sense, and appears to be a triumph of corruption over wise governance, as it opens up timber and minerals for exploitation, and parcels out lucrative construction contracts.

Police officers had detained Alex and San Mala, a Khmer Mother Nature activist, at a cafe in central Phnom Penh around 1pm. His arrest came days after his visa had expired on 20 February. The Ministry of the Interior had asked him to leave voluntarily and re-apply, but sensing that it would not be renewed, Alex decided to overstay his visa.

Deportation of foreign NGO activists is highly unusual in Cambodia. The last similar case was in 2005 International NGO Global Witness provoked the government with a critical report and staff were denied visas.

If words could kill …

For over a week the issue dominated the headlines, dragging senior political figures into the discussion. The opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party sided with Alex demanding of the Government and even the King that he stay, but it was not to be. Nalry Pilorge, director of prominent rights group LICADHO said:

“The government’s decision to deny Mr Gonzalez-Davidson a visa renewal is a perfect example of the government’s sustained attempt to quash grassroots advocacy, silence dissent and ensure an environment where the government can operate with immunity from independent criticism.”

Prime Minister Hun Sen responded in aggressive tone following the deportation. “If you want to make an autonomous zone” in the Areng Valley, he threatened, “please come, and we will put BM21 [multiple rocket launcher vehicles] in that area.”

However under pressure his threatening remarks were followed by what appeared to be a significant climb down delaying the project: “Stop talking about Areng. Let’s study it thoroughly. And I have come up with an idea that no matter whether the study is clear or not, there will be no construction from now on until 2018.”

Within the week 180 activists had travelled to the Areng Valley in solidarity with the local people and in defiance of Alex’s deportation.

The Government was also at work in the area sending a heavily armed parliamentary delegation to intimidate the residents. A Mother Nature observer had his camera phone snatched by guards for attempting to record the meeting.

Mr Vaen Vorn, a prominent local activist from the Areng valley, was also summoned to court charged with supplying timber without a permit to Mother Nature for an eco-centre. The charge was viewed by observers as another attempt to silence opposition to the project.

Protest camp in Cambodia’s last great jungle hits a raw nerve

How did Alex, who had been living and working in Cambodia for 12 years, reach such notoriety?

In March 2014 Alex and a band of Khmer followers set up a protest camp in the middle of the thickest jungle in Cambodia. Their mission – to block Chinese dam builders from entering the remote Areng Valley – one of the last refuges for endangered wildlife and settled by Indigenous Chong People.

Despite a regime ban on protest, the camp became a clarion call to a growing youth movement. Students made the journey from the capital Phnom Penh to support a motley mixture of monks, indigenous locals, and ex-loggers who had joined Alex at the jungle camp.

I visited in the rainy season to find this committed bunch sleeping in hammocks as the incessant rains flooded tents turning the place into a quagmire.

Five times Chinese surveyors and dam builders were surrounded in their vehicles and sent packing. Then last September the police arrived with military support, broke up the camp and arrested Alex and eleven others when they again blocked the road. They were released only after agreeing to sign onerous commitments to cease their activities.

Though not naming Alex explicitly the threat of deportation came soon after. An article in the Phnom Penh Post of 12th December 2014 quoted Government minister Chheang Vun, who threatened the leader of Alex’s group Mother Nature with deportation:

“If I find that he did anything against what he pledged to the Ministry of Interior, I will request that the Immigration Department at the ministry arrest him and send him back to his home country.”

After years beneath the radar, Alex steps into the open

Of mixed Anglo-Spanish parentage, Alex speaks English with a Geordie accent alluding to earlier years living with his Mother near Newcastle. Originally from Catalonia, he made Cambodia his home and worked with the International Red Cross and a number of private companies as a translator.

Alex’s fluent mastery of the Khmer language enabled him to engage intimately with Khmer communities struggling against ongoing exploitation under the regime of Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has brutally suppressed all opposition in the country during his 30-year rule.

Mother Nature activist Somnang Sim said of him: “Alex is a foreigner but he can speak Khmer, so many people respect him.”

I got to know Gonzalez-Davidson in 2012 while making a documentary ‘Defenders of the Spirit Forest’. In the early days, though usually busy organising activities, he was careful not to stand in front of the camera, preferring to take a low-profile approach, mindful of the consequences of being seen to be speaking out against the regime he calls a “criminal cartel”.

That all changed as he became increasingly immersed in a campaign to save The Areng Valley, growing increasingly frustrated with the ineffective approach of conservation NGOs in the Areng Valley such as Flora and Fauna International and Conservation International.

Working in formal partnerships with the regime, they have said little in public against destructive projects like the dam, for fear of losing their permission to operate in the country.

Social media successes rankle corrupt politicians

Styling his own brand of activism based on non-violent direct action and creative use of social-media, Alex founded the group Mother Nature in October 2013.

His short quirky videos which poke fun at the “monkeys in power” have become a hit with Khmers – each one quickly going viral on Facebook. In a country where television is tightly controlled by the state, it is the internet where much social debate happens.

He especially appeals to a youth population yearning for the political freedoms they read about on their smart phones daily. By fronting up to the regime Alex has become a symbol of their hopes and aspirations. Now he has a following of activists increasingly prepared to challenge decisions made by corrupt politicians, and stand up to laws enforced by crooked judges.

Hun Sen narrowly retained power in the July 2013 elections but opposition claims that the results were rigged were accompanied by protests. Hun Sen responded in characteristic fashion with bloody crackdowns, and people were killed. This was followed up with a ban on all protest in January 2014.

Throughout this period Alex and his allies continued to mount protests in the capital, most of which were swamped with police from the start. One featuring students wearing animal costumes on bicycles attracted more police than protesters and didn’t even manage to begin cycling. Still the symbolism that it presented set social-media alight.

Cambodia’s conservatoin jewel in peril

A report by the Japanese International Cooperation Agency for the Cambodian government concludes that the £200 million price tag will result in a high cost of electricity per unit compared with other dams, for the modest 108 megawatt output it would provide.

But while the Government maintains that feasibility studies have yet to be done, Mother Nature has gathered substantial evidence indicating that the dam has been approved behind closed doors and therefore views these feasibility studies as just an excuse to commence construction.

“We have been really effective at exposing this white elephant project”, said Alex. “It is just an excuse for further corruption from logging and mining.”

The proposed hydroelectric-dam project is led by Chinese dam building giant Sinohydro with help from its powerful local partner Pheapimex, led by ruling party Senator Lao Meng King. Pheapimex is infamous for its high profile land-conflicts.

In a public letter, Prime Minister Hun Sen said the dam has not been approved and a decision is pending based on the results of an Environmental Impact Assessment yet to be conducted.

Alex disputes the letter’s claims that the dam will provide positive benefits such as creating energy, jobs and the development of ecotourism: “The letter in itself is so biased towards construction that it is further indication of our belief that the dam has been approved.”

A further indication that the project has approval is that Sinohydro Resources recently registered a wholly owned Cambodian subsidiary specifically for this hydro project: Cambodia Cheay Areng electricity company Ltd.

Now blacklisted from entering Cambodia, Alex said prior to his explusion: “I am really proud of what we have achieved so far, and I truly believe that the movement we have created, will only serve to accelerate the unstoppable growth of the movement in future.”

Rod Harbinson is an environmental journalist, filmmaker and campaigner.

Watch ‘Defenders of the Spirit Forest’, a 25 minute documentary on the Cardamom Mountain forests by Rod Harbinson at: www.spiritforest.org

Sign the petition by Rainforest Rescue to Save the Areng Valley.

Support the campaign to save the Areng valley with Cambodian Campaign group Mother Nature.

This has been a momentous year! A year in which the Green Party has taken its place at the forefront of UK politics. A year in which young people in particular have embraced our message of hope and real change.

A year in which nearly 300,000 people joined together to help ensure we took our place in the national leadership debates. A year in which we are matching, and often exceeding, the Lib Dems, a party of government, in national polls.

And a year in which we have become the third largest political party in England and Wales! In the space of 12 months we have grown from 13,000 members to 55,000. Our membership has quadrupled!   

And one thing that the green surge means is that more than 90% of you will have the chance to vote Green on the 7th of May. For some that means the first ever chance to vote Green. 

Your vote can change the face of Britain!

In just nine weeks’ time, you will have in your hands something miraculous … the possibility of a peaceful political revolution. Your vote can change the face of Britain. It can end the failed austerity experiment, end the spiteful blaming of the poor, the sick, the vulnerable for the mistakes of the wealthy.

This election can be a turning point in history. The moment where we can deliver a better Britain, a Britain which works for all its people … A Britain which cares. 

Vote for what you believe in, vote for the policies of hope not fear, vote for policies that work for the common good not just the few, and Britain could be a very different country on the 8th of May. It is time for Green Politics – the politics of the future – that delivers:

• a living wage: jobs that workers can build a life on, with support for those who need it;
• public services run for the good of all – our railways run not for shareholders but for passengers, our NHS not handed over to profiteers but kept in public hands;
• social housing, council housing, to meet our housing needs;
• the means for everyone to live within the limits of our one planet – because it’s the only one we’ve got.

A society fit for people and our communities

No one should be living in fear of being unable to put food on the table. No one should be forced into debt just for trying to get an education.

No one should be worrying about a fracking drill burrowing into the heart of their community.  No one should fear being left destitute by Iain Duncan Smith’s punitive benefit sanctions. 

The politics of the future is not a politics of transaction, that discredited politics which offers selected individuals and groups a bribe of short-term, unsustainable personal advantage.

History tells us that is now the old politics, the tired politics, the failed politics. The Green Party is offering instead a society working for all of us; for the many, not just the few; a society in which those who can contribute do so, and no one in need goes without.

It asks voters to make a choice that will deliver a society fit for themselves, their communities, and their children.

#GreenSurge

That’s why the Green surge is much more than just a hash tag – although a highly successful hash tag it has been – the green surge is much more than just membership numbers. That’s why people are becoming engaged with the Green Party. 

I have seen the Green surge on the ground, around the country, from a village hall in Ilkley, Yorkshire, to an enormous, snaking queue of hundreds at Exeter University, to a Valentine’s Eve Friday night crowd at the London School of Economics. 

And of course we saw it last May with the election of Molly Scott Cato as the first Green member of the European Parliament in the South West – and boy, hasn’t she delivered for her voters! 

The Green surge is the result of your hard work as Greens. It’s thanks to you in this hall, and to all of the Green Party members and supporters up and down the country – to your commitment, your belief, your dedication and your hard work – that we approach the General Election as a central player in UK politics. 

And of course, it isn’t just Green Party. Up and down the country, campaigns demanding a new politics are getting stronger, bigger, more effective. There’s People’s Assemblies, Occupy Democracy, the anti-fracking movement and the fossil fuel divestment campaigns: the tide is growing, the demand for change is louder and clearer.

We’re fighting back

At last, the people are fighting back! Five years ago we made a huge breakthrough with the election of Caroline Lucas as the first Green MP, and she’s given Brighton a spectacularly good local voice and a national impact far beyond any other MP. Caroline has led the debate on issues from railway ownership to statutory Personal and Social Education.

She’s led the debate on parliamentary transparency and she has put her freedom on the line to oppose fracking. Because Caroline shows what voting Green delivers: passion, sensitivity and courage. 

On May 8, just imagine, a strong green group of MPs at Westminster – able to build on and expand Caroline’s work. A group which would never, ever support a Conservative Government. A strong group of Green MPs – in a parliament where they could have a huge say, a huge impact – that is a real opportunity to start to deliver a new kind of politics.

We know that the way things are in Britain is not sustainable. Continuing as we are is not an option. Since 2007, food prices have risen 22% but wages have fallen 7%. Almost seven hundred thousand people are listed as ‘in work’, despite having no guaranteed hours week-to-week.

It’s time to end the scourge of zero hours contracts. Almost half the new jobs created since 2010 are for the self-employed, yet nearly 80% of self-employed workers are living in poverty. I applaud the growing number of individuals who contribute to, who volunteer in, who run, food banks.

But individual charity is no substitute for collective justice. This the outcome of the years of Blair, of Brown, of the Cameron / Clegg Coalition and austerity Britain – this is the record of George Osborne’s ‘long term economic plan’.

The Green Party are calling time on the politics of low wages, job insecurity and fearing the food bank. We are calling time on privatisation – the sell-off and the handing over – of public assets into private hands.

We must treasure the natural world – not trash it!

We are calling time on the trashing of our natural world – the world on which everything, depends. Our economy, our lives, our future depend on society, which in turn depends on the Earth and its resources.

That puts a huge weight, a huge responsibility on our shoulders – a responsibility we have to meet in the next few years. We know now the damage we are doing to the Earth, as we didn’t know in the past. We have to be up to the task.

The whole ideology of Thatcher and her successors, be it Blair, Brown or Cameron, has failed. Change has to come. The market is short-sighted and short-term. It is blind. It is senseless. It works for the 1%, it fails the rest of us. All in it together? I don’t think so.

The current model of economics and society has served only those with power and wealth. In austerity Britain, the super rich grabs more than anywhere else in Europe. We must be first and foremost citizens, paying fairly to common funds to look after the poor, the weak, the old and the sick. 

Everybody contributes what they can and everybody benefits from that. This is what the politics of the future will look like, what the Green Party will deliver. The old politics, the failed politics of letting the market rule has to end.

Save our NHS! Save our social care!

There’s nowhere that’s more obvious than in our NHS. The insidious but rapid infiltration of the profit motive into our health service, the dreadful, senseless PFI schemes that have deliver despair and threaten bankruptcy, must be reversed.

The market costs us big time. In 2010 the Health Select Committee reckoned it consumed 9% of total NHS costs – well over £10bn a year. As Caroline has already said – we will repeal the Health and Social Care Act, which is damaging and threatening the health service.

And we will go further – we will replace it with an NHS Reinstatement Bill that removes the market mechanism from our NHS. But of course there is another side to care. Free healthcare is the very cornerstone of our NHS. Whether you are rich or poor you have the right to the best that is available.

That’s something the Green Party will restore – and extend. For that same principle should apply to social care – the support and services that you need to lead a fulfilling life should be available when you need it, free at the point of use. 

We believe that to be a decent, humane, caring society, social care must be free. We believe those who have the most should contribute to help pay for social care. We need a range of new taxes aimed at making Britain a more equal society.

We would introduce a new wealth tax, rigorously clamp down on tax avoidance and evasion and introduce a financial transaction tax – a Robin Hood Tax, and we are not ashamed to say that those on incomes above £100,000 should pay more income tax.

Providing Free Social Care for the Over 65’s means security and freedom from fear, suffering and loneliness for many, and it means 200,000 new jobs and training places. 

We will consult experts, users, and care workers on its exact design – but our manifesto will include this as a core pledge: social care is not a privilege, it is a right! 

Register to vote – now!

We know that the younger generation – many of whom are supporting the Green Party – have it tough. But we acknowledge, we stress, that isn’t the fault of their elders. 

In a Britain of solidarity, in a Britain of community, in a Britain of care, we all need to look out for each other. Of course – and I cannot stress this enough – we can only do this if you, the people of the UK have your say on May the 7th.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of each and every person who can vote registering to do so and making their voice heard. The deadline is April 20th, but please don’t wait – register today. Only then can you deliver the politics of the future, help us deliver for the Common Good.

There are people who want to see business-as-usual politics continue. People who are happy with politicians who learnt nothing from the global economic crash. People who’ve quietly forgotten the scandal of MPs expenses. Who are resigned to the failed austerity experiment, to low wages and to the swift demise of public services.

Those people will probably vote for the parties of yesterday. To counteract them, you need to use your vote. At this election, if we all vote Green, we can change Britain. Together we can create the society we all deserve a society that cares, a society that works for all of us. 

Vote for the party that cares. Vote for the common good. Vote for the politics of the future. Vote Green.   

Natalie Bennett is the leader of the Green Party of England & Wales.

This speech was delivered to the Green Party’s spring conference on Friday 6th March 2015. See original here.

In a dire chain of cause and effect, the drought that devastated parts of Syria from 2006 to 2010 was probably the result of climate change driven by human activities, a new study says.

And the study’s authors think that the drought may also have contributed to the outbreak of Syria’s uprising in 2011. The ensuing civil war has left at least 200,000 people dead, and has displaced millions of others.

The drought, which was the worst ever recorded in the region, ravaged agriculture in the breadbasket region of northern Syria, driving dispossessed farmers to the cities where poverty, government mismanagement and other factors created the unrest that exploded four years ago.

The study, by scientists from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, US, is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The authors are clear that the climatic changes were human-driven (anthropogenic) and cannot be attributed simply to natural variability – but are careful to stress that their findings are tentative.

“We’re not saying the drought caused the war”, says Richard Seager, one of the co-authors. “We’re saying that, added to all the other stressors, it helped kick things over the threshold into open conflict. And a drought of that severity was made much more likely by the ongoing human-driven drying of that region.”

Climate link to violence

Their study, although it contains new material, is not the first to suggest a possible link between extreme weather and the likelihood of violence.

Some researchers have investigated whether there may be a link between El Niño and La Niña – the periodic Pacific weather disruptions – and outbreaks of unrest. Suggestions of a global connection between climate change and political instability is being taken seriously by two influential groups – insurers and military planners.

Syria was not the only country affected by the drought. It struck the Fertile Crescent, linking Turkey, Syria and Iraq, where agriculture and animal herding are believed to have started around 12,000 years ago.

The Levant has always seen natural weather swings. Other research has suggested that the Akkadian empire, spanning much of the Fertile Crescent about 4,000 years ago, probably collapsed during a long drought.

But the authors of the Lamont-Doherty study, using existing studies and their own research, showed that the area has warmed by between 1°C and 1.2°C since 1900, and has undergone a 10% reduction in wet season precipitation. They say this trend is a neat match for models of human-influenced global warming, and so cannot be attributed to natural variability.

Global warming has had two effects, they say. First, it appears to have indirectly weakened wind patterns that bring rain-laden air from the Mediterranean, reducing precipitation during the usual November-April wet season. And higher temperatures have increased the evaporation of moisture from soils during the hot summers.

Other researchers have observed the long-term drying trend across the Mediterranean region, and have attributed at least part of it to anthropogenic warming.

Government stuck with water-intensive cash crops

The government has also encouraged water-intensive export crops such as cotton, while illegal drilling of irrigation wells depleted groundwater, says co-author Shahrzad Mohtadi, an international affairs consultant at the US Department of State.

The drought’s effects were immediate and overwhelming. Agricultural production – typically, a quarter of Syria’s gross domestic product – fell by a third. In the northeast, livestock was practically wiped out, cereal prices doubled, and nutrition-related diseases among children increased steeply.

And Syria was especially vulnerable because of other factors – including a huge increase in population from four million in the 1950s to 22 million in recent years. As many as 1.5 million people fled from the countryside to cities already strained by waves of refugees from the war in neighbouring Iraq.

“Rapid demographic change encourages instability”, the authors say. “Whether it was a primary or substantial factor is impossible to know, but drought can lead to devastating consequences when coupled with pre-existing acute vulnerability.”

Solomon Hsiang, professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, says the study is “the first scientific paper to make the case that human-caused climate change is already altering the risk of large-scale social unrest and violence.”

Alex Kirby writes for Climate News Network.

The numbers of trapped songbirds illegally killed on a British military base in Cyprus last autumn reached an estimated 900,000 birds.

That’s the highest level recorded in 12 years, according to the latest RSPB-funded research of trapping activity on the Dhekelia Sovereign Base Area, close to the tourist hotspot of Ayia Napa.

Following the dramatic increase in bird deaths, the RSPB and BirdLife Cyprus – the RSPB’s BirdLife International partner on the island – are urging the Base Area authorities to continue the positive start made late last year to clamp down on the illegal trappers.

Small-scale trapping of songbirds for human consumption on Cyprus was practiced for many centuries, but it has been illegal on the island for 40 years, when it was outlawed in 1974.

Comparative figures for the Republic of Cyprus reveal that illegal bird trapping is still a considerable issue, but the figures have reduced since 2002.

An huge organised criminal enterprise

BirdLife Cyprus and the RSPB have been monitoring illegal songbird trapping activity on the British military base at Dhekelia since 2002. The figures for last autumn reveal that 2014 was the worst year on record, by far, with an estimated 900,000 birds being killed.

This is equivalent to almost 15,000 songbirds a day during the September-October period. The latest figures are now three times higher than when the monitoring started in 2002.

Step one is to clear planted acacia scrub, which the trappers use as cover for their illegal activities while on the military base. The scrub also attracts vast numbers of migrating songbirds, moving between Europe and Africa each autumn.

Extensive areas of illegally-planted avenues of acacia scrub have been allowed to be grown by criminals on MoD land. This illegal bird-killing infrastructure is used by the trappers as cover to attract the birds and to set their nets.

Unfortunately, organised crime now seems to be driving this illegal activity which is thought to be worth millions of Euros every autumn from the songbirds the trappers kill on British Ministry of Defence (MoD) land and then sell to consume illegally in the Republic.

UK must act before another massacre this autumn

RSPB’s International Director Dr Tim Stowe said: “The report highlights the illegal trapping of songbirds on the British military base has escalated and we are urging the Ministry of Defence and the Base Area authorities to resolve it before this autumn’s migration.

“Such extensive illegal activity requires all the Cyprus authorities to work together to combat it, and the Base Areas’ contribution should be zero-tolerance towards illegal bird trapping.

“We were pleased that the Base Area authorities have started to remove acacia scrub last December.  We believe the scale of illegal trapping requires continuing and sustained action, and we’ll continue to offer our support.”

The RSPB welcomes the signing by the Base Area authorities of a Cyprus Strategic Action Plan on illegal bird trapping.

BirdLife Cyprus and the RSPB believe that the Sovereign Base Area authorities should now develop a plan to remove all the illegally-planted and non-native avenues of acacia on MoD land as rapidly as possible.

Dr Clairie Papazoglou is the Executive Director of BirdLife Cyprus. She said: “Acacia isn’t a native plant in Cyprus, so the planting of extensive stands of this shrub by the trappers is a highly visible symbol of their flagrant disregard for anti-trapping laws.

“In fact, you can see these plantations from space. By removing the acacia, the Sovereign Base Area authorities would send a clear signal that they will not tolerate the slaughter of birds on British bases.”

A dainty dish to set before a king?

The songbirds are trapped to provide the main ingredient for the local and expensive delicacy of ‘ambelopoulia’, where a plate of songbirds, such as blackcaps or robins, is served to restaurant diners. The illegality of the practice and the high profits are attracting the attention of organised crime gangs.

Today, most trappers will use long lines of nearly invisible netting, known as mist nets. They attract birds into them on an industrial-scale by playing birdsong to lure them in. Traditionally, trappers had relied solely on lime-sticks, where stems of pomegranate are coated in a locally-manufactured ‘lime’ and are then placed in trees and bushes.

Passing birds become stuck on the lime-coated sticks where they fall easy prey to trappers. Whilst lime-sticks are still used in many areas, mist-netting between planted avenues of acacia has now taken the slaughter to a whole new level.

Since 2002, the monitoring program has recorded over 150 different bird species which have become trapped in nets or on lime-sticks. Cyprus has two songbirds found nowhere else in the world: the Cyprus warbler and the Cyprus wheatear. Both of these songbirds are impacted by illegal trapping.

In January, I went to the Oregon coast to get away from the city, clear my mind, and have some fun. While walking down the beach, though, we noticed a horrible sight.

Thousands of dead young birds, called cassin’s auklets, littered the sands, strewn amongst the bottles and random plastic like so many discarded dreams.

Scientists are baffled as to the reason for the die-off. National Geographic called it “unprecedented… one of the largest mass die-offs of seabirds ever recorded.” Between 50-100,000 birds as of the end of January.

The most direct explanation is simply starvation. The natural food of the birds has gone away this season, and it fits in with a larger trend of mass die-offs on the Northwest coast. It could be that ocean acidification is creating an ecological collapse, a lack of oxygen in the water, perhaps, but the main theory places the blame on the warming oceans.

It is climate change that is causing this death, just as climate change induced drought have led to the wars in Syria and Mali. It is killing our young; the entire planet is in grave peril.

Something must be done. But what?

The political party in power in Greece is called Syriza, an acronym meaning Synaspismós Rizospastikís Aristerás (Συνασπισμός Ριζοσπαστικής Αριστεράς) or ‘coalition of the radical left’. Their organization is not what one could possibly call a conventional political party: it is more of a work of rethinking politics and its relationship to the state.

They formed in 2004 as an anti-establishment party, and surfed into power on the waves of riotous discontent incumbent on austerity programs and police repression. Although they have found turbulent times amidst negotiations with global financial institutions, Syriza has shown the North Atlantic the possibility of taking hegemony from the core economic and political powers of neoliberalism.

In the US, we are way behind the times. Would it have been possible to formulate an organized political response to neoliberalism during the antiwar movement that surged into existence during 2003? Instead, the tangled ball of anti-war sentiment unraveled in sectarian provocations.

A friend of mine who joined some anarchist black bloc protests during that era recently recalled an example that illustrates this reality.

We talked about a panel where an audience member asked, “Why did the anarchists continually co-opt the anti-war protests?” The audience member went on to site a specific protest, to which my friend replied, “We were one of the groups that organized that protest.”

Over a century on the front lines of radical change

Anarchists are often attacked as the destabilizing force of left politics par excellence, yet when we approach politics from an anarchist perspective, we see these to be misconceptions. Anarchists bled and died for the eight-hour workday in the 1880s. The Magónista Liberal Party raised the banner of ‘Tierra y Libertad’ (Land and Liberty) in the fight for the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s.

The anarchist-syndicalist party, the National Confederation of Labor (CNT), joined the Spanish Popular Front during the 1930s. Anarchists played a driving role in the 1960s antiwar movement, the alter-globalization movement, and organized the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Today, the Kurdish PYD in Rojava (Syria) is motivated by the formulation of ideas condensed through the meeting of minds between Abdullah Öcalan and libertarian municipalists Murray Bookchin and Janet Biehl.

The goals remain the same: mutual aid, solidarity, justice. There is no reason why, today, the left cannot or should not band together to form political institutions around these tenets to confront the current global threats of climate change and the police state. In fact, there is every reason to perform and encourage such an act through radical new organizations.

Power bases are being built already. In Seattle, City Councilor Kshama Sawant has taken her seat under the party Socialist Alternative (SA). SA is not a conventional political party, nor is Sawant a typical candidate. An immigrant woman of color, she is the first socialist elected to City Council in Seattle since 1877.

Her forward momentum helped carry the $15 minimum wage into effect and inspire a like-minded organization called Right to the City in Portland, Oregon.

Nature in the blast zone (and us too)

Convening around issues of climate change and economic justice, Right to the City is one of several groups developing out of the Occupy movement that gets a sense of purpose from articulating a transformation of the relationships between private property and urban spaces.

The group will be supporting independent candidates in the coming city council elections with the platform of increasing the minimum wage, shutting down industrial polluters, and promoting free access to safer and more diverse public institutions.

The creative application of alternative networks and spaces is emerging with a new way of thinking labor policy in the US. In the Pacific Northwest, the climate movement and labor movement have joined together to shut down the Port of Vancouver and the Port of Longview in light of proposed fossil fuels terminals. Climate and labor activists are currently joining on the picket lines against refineries in the Pacific Northwest, as well.

The oil train derailments are rising at breakneck speed. On Thursday, an oil train derailed near the Mississippi River in Illinois, adding to the several other derailments already this year.

Because we are all in the blast zone, nature is in the blast zone, the environmental group Rising Tide posted an average of a blockade per month of fossil fuel infrastructure in the Pacific Northwest for the last half of 2014, and there is more to come.

Today in Pacheco, California, the IWW is joining with union workers at the Golden Eagle refinery to protest fossil fuel expansion. This confluence marks one of many ways that people are moving forward in defiance of conventional politics, bringing remarkable energy toward rethinking education, food distribution and production, energy and power.

Race, poverty, injustice

While productivity has increased, there has been a decline in median income since 2000, and rents are rising across the country. The poverty rate for African-Americans is nearly triple that of whites, and the environmental injustices related to real estate and inadequate health care mean that people of color are more likely to die of cancer than white people.

The fact that more than two-thirds of African Americans live closer than thirty miles to a coal-fired power plant translates to heart diseases, birth defects, and asthma.

To enforce de facto segregation, overwhelmingly white police departments are commissioned to disproportionately incarcerate and kill people of color. Although data is often sketchy, USA Today disclosed that between 2006 and 2012 a white police officer shot and killed an African-American every three and a half days.

That is saying nothing of the black sites maintained by the Chicago Police Department, for example, under the watch of the Democratic Party machine.

This is nothing new, and it only scratches the surface of the economic hardships experienced in the US. Being denied the meeting of basic needs, Native peoples continue to be dispossessed by land grabs from Peabody Coal in Black Mesa to Resolution Copper in Oak Flats.

Latino/a farm workers are exposed to the terrible crisis of industrial farming, from chemical fertilizers and poisonous pesticides to disproportionately low wages. With climate change-induced droughts, many will be forced to flee the Central Valley and Central Coast area of California, perhaps heading north to the Pacific Northwest.

A grand coalition of the local and grassroots

Something will have to compensate if a collapse in agriculture continues apace in California’s once fertile valley. According to the UN, sustainable compensation of food production can only come from local family and community farming. We will need to reformat the coding system and transform relations between urban and rural, farm and market in order to produce enough food for everyone – but it can be done.

The enormity of the problem is, perhaps, dispiriting, and manifests one reason left movements spin out into sectarian and fracture – after all, one lesson of left politics is that much can be done on a grassroots, local basis. But what if the groups organizing on a local basis joined together to form a Coalition of the Radical Left to confront these major dilemmas on a horizontal basis?

A primary place for such an entity to enter into existence would be the Pacific Northwest, as Portland and Seattle are both among the fastest growing and fastest gentrifying cities with climate refugees to come in the future.

This is how we rise up. It is how we return to our reason for being on this planet in order to overcome the despair, take and share power, and stop the die-offs.

Because when you look the cyclone of famine and drought in the eye, it looks like our own young will be the next to wash up starving on the shores of politics if we don’t seize the moments, the opportunities to stand for our right to live on this earth – a right that we won’t have if we don’t live up to the hard demands of liberation and dignity.

In direct opposition to the neoliberal agenda of the corporate political parties that brought about the financial collapse, a horizon of creative, local activism can be cultivated. This coalition, bringing together ideas of groups like Right to the City and Socialist Alternative, would have an eye to global relations, stopping free trade agreements that have proven to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

But it would also maintain accountability to grassroots activity for social and ecological justice on a local level – from switching agricultural production to a local level, as insisted upon by the UN, to transforming the daily relations of patriarchal and racist power associated with the police state and its capitalist agenda.

Is this the ‘coming together’ that Naomi Klein is asking for?

The Coalition of the Radical Left, or what might be called CORAL, would be able to dispose of the cancerous institutions of climate change and their power mongers on a regional level, replacing the dialectics of the city with ecologically sustainable and resilient regional networks.

Through this horizontal organization emerging out of the union of Occupy and Black Lives Matter, among other movements, the left could break down the sinister land and water politics that are exterminating native species and exhausting aquifers, acidifying oceans and choking the skies. We could galvanize opposition to capitalism, and generate power to be shared by all people.

Warming oceans, rising sea levels (four inches in two years, according to recent studies on the Atlantic seaboard), catastrophic droughts. They are destroying the complex diversity that the web of life requires to maintain an integral balance.

The coral reefs are an excellent metaphor for what is happening. Based on a diverse amalgam of life and calcium carbonate ecosystems built by groups of animals, the coral reefs have for a long time symbolized the dreamland of Aboriginal life.

Australia’s Indigenous peoples for centuries have mapped out their knowledge of the reefs’ systems through the composition of intricate artworks and musics that translate the vitality of those systems into a lived reality.

As climate change bleaches and destroys those ecosystems, the dreamscapes of the world’s peoples are obliterated. Scientists have begun working with Aboriginal peoples to restore the coral, because that collaboration is the only way to re-establish a sense of the place.

CORAL would have to work as a solidarity movement with Indigenous partnerships along with communities of color. Coming together, we can rediscover how to understand and appreciate both biodiversity and human diversity, how to live together amongst both Indigenous and migrant populations, and how to embrace both the new and the ancient forms of reconciliation and resilience.

It is not an easy path, but integrity and respect never is. It requires self-discipline and practicing our ideas in good faith, passing along the wisdom of life. That is how we spin the fabric of dreams into our realities and celebrate what makes us human.

Alexander Reid Ross is a contributing moderator of the Earth First! Newswire and works for Bark. He is the editor of ‘Grabbing Back: Essays Against the Global Land Grab’ (AK Press 2014) and a contributor to Life During Wartime (AK Press 2013). 

In a dire chain of cause and effect, the drought that devastated parts of Syria from 2006 to 2010 was probably the result of climate change driven by human activities, a new study says.

And the study’s authors think that the drought may also have contributed to the outbreak of Syria’s uprising in 2011. The ensuing civil war has left at least 200,000 people dead, and has displaced millions of others.

The drought, which was the worst ever recorded in the region, ravaged agriculture in the breadbasket region of northern Syria, driving dispossessed farmers to the cities where poverty, government mismanagement and other factors created the unrest that exploded four years ago.

The study, by scientists from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, US, is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The authors are clear that the climatic changes were human-driven (anthropogenic) and cannot be attributed simply to natural variability – but are careful to stress that their findings are tentative.

“We’re not saying the drought caused the war”, says Richard Seager, one of the co-authors. “We’re saying that, added to all the other stressors, it helped kick things over the threshold into open conflict. And a drought of that severity was made much more likely by the ongoing human-driven drying of that region.”

Climate link to violence

Their study, although it contains new material, is not the first to suggest a possible link between extreme weather and the likelihood of violence.

Some researchers have investigated whether there may be a link between El Niño and La Niña – the periodic Pacific weather disruptions – and outbreaks of unrest. Suggestions of a global connection between climate change and political instability is being taken seriously by two influential groups – insurers and military planners.

Syria was not the only country affected by the drought. It struck the Fertile Crescent, linking Turkey, Syria and Iraq, where agriculture and animal herding are believed to have started around 12,000 years ago.

The Levant has always seen natural weather swings. Other research has suggested that the Akkadian empire, spanning much of the Fertile Crescent about 4,000 years ago, probably collapsed during a long drought.

But the authors of the Lamont-Doherty study, using existing studies and their own research, showed that the area has warmed by between 1°C and 1.2°C since 1900, and has undergone a 10% reduction in wet season precipitation. They say this trend is a neat match for models of human-influenced global warming, and so cannot be attributed to natural variability.

Global warming has had two effects, they say. First, it appears to have indirectly weakened wind patterns that bring rain-laden air from the Mediterranean, reducing precipitation during the usual November-April wet season. And higher temperatures have increased the evaporation of moisture from soils during the hot summers.

Other researchers have observed the long-term drying trend across the Mediterranean region, and have attributed at least part of it to anthropogenic warming.

Government stuck with water-intensive cash crops

The government has also encouraged water-intensive export crops such as cotton, while illegal drilling of irrigation wells depleted groundwater, says co-author Shahrzad Mohtadi, an international affairs consultant at the US Department of State.

The drought’s effects were immediate and overwhelming. Agricultural production – typically, a quarter of Syria’s gross domestic product – fell by a third. In the northeast, livestock was practically wiped out, cereal prices doubled, and nutrition-related diseases among children increased steeply.

And Syria was especially vulnerable because of other factors – including a huge increase in population from four million in the 1950s to 22 million in recent years. As many as 1.5 million people fled from the countryside to cities already strained by waves of refugees from the war in neighbouring Iraq.

“Rapid demographic change encourages instability”, the authors say. “Whether it was a primary or substantial factor is impossible to know, but drought can lead to devastating consequences when coupled with pre-existing acute vulnerability.”

Solomon Hsiang, professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, says the study is “the first scientific paper to make the case that human-caused climate change is already altering the risk of large-scale social unrest and violence.”

Alex Kirby writes for Climate News Network.

In January, I went to the Oregon coast to get away from the city, clear my mind, and have some fun. While walking down the beach, though, we noticed a horrible sight.

Thousands of dead young birds, called cassin’s auklets, littered the sands, strewn amongst the bottles and random plastic like so many discarded dreams.

Scientists are baffled as to the reason for the die-off. National Geographic called it “unprecedented… one of the largest mass die-offs of seabirds ever recorded.” Between 50-100,000 birds as of the end of January.

The most direct explanation is simply starvation. The natural food of the birds has gone away this season, and it fits in with a larger trend of mass die-offs on the Northwest coast. It could be that ocean acidification is creating an ecological collapse, a lack of oxygen in the water, perhaps, but the main theory places the blame on the warming oceans.

It is climate change that is causing this death, just as climate change induced drought have led to the wars in Syria and Mali. It is killing our young; the entire planet is in grave peril.

Something must be done. But what?

The political party in power in Greece is called Syriza, an acronym meaning Synaspismós Rizospastikís Aristerás (Συνασπισμός Ριζοσπαστικής Αριστεράς) or ‘coalition of the radical left’. Their organization is not what one could possibly call a conventional political party: it is more of a work of rethinking politics and its relationship to the state.

They formed in 2004 as an anti-establishment party, and surfed into power on the waves of riotous discontent incumbent on austerity programs and police repression. Although they have found turbulent times amidst negotiations with global financial institutions, Syriza has shown the North Atlantic the possibility of taking hegemony from the core economic and political powers of neoliberalism.

In the US, we are way behind the times. Would it have been possible to formulate an organized political response to neoliberalism during the antiwar movement that surged into existence during 2003? Instead, the tangled ball of anti-war sentiment unraveled in sectarian provocations.

A friend of mine who joined some anarchist black bloc protests during that era recently recalled an example that illustrates this reality.

We talked about a panel where an audience member asked, “Why did the anarchists continually co-opt the anti-war protests?” The audience member went on to site a specific protest, to which my friend replied, “We were one of the groups that organized that protest.”

Over a century on the front lines of radical change

Anarchists are often attacked as the destabilizing force of left politics par excellence, yet when we approach politics from an anarchist perspective, we see these to be misconceptions. Anarchists bled and died for the eight-hour workday in the 1880s. The Magónista Liberal Party raised the banner of ‘Tierra y Libertad’ (Land and Liberty) in the fight for the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s.

The anarchist-syndicalist party, the National Confederation of Labor (CNT), joined the Spanish Popular Front during the 1930s. Anarchists played a driving role in the 1960s antiwar movement, the alter-globalization movement, and organized the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Today, the Kurdish PYD in Rojava (Syria) is motivated by the formulation of ideas condensed through the meeting of minds between Abdullah Öcalan and libertarian municipalists Murray Bookchin and Janet Biehl.

The goals remain the same: mutual aid, solidarity, justice. There is no reason why, today, the left cannot or should not band together to form political institutions around these tenets to confront the current global threats of climate change and the police state. In fact, there is every reason to perform and encourage such an act through radical new organizations.

Power bases are being built already. In Seattle, City Councilor Kshama Sawant has taken her seat under the party Socialist Alternative (SA). SA is not a conventional political party, nor is Sawant a typical candidate. An immigrant woman of color, she is the first socialist elected to City Council in Seattle since 1877.

Her forward momentum helped carry the $15 minimum wage into effect and inspire a like-minded organization called Right to the City in Portland, Oregon.

Nature in the blast zone (and us too)

Convening around issues of climate change and economic justice, Right to the City is one of several groups developing out of the Occupy movement that gets a sense of purpose from articulating a transformation of the relationships between private property and urban spaces.

The group will be supporting independent candidates in the coming city council elections with the platform of increasing the minimum wage, shutting down industrial polluters, and promoting free access to safer and more diverse public institutions.

The creative application of alternative networks and spaces is emerging with a new way of thinking labor policy in the US. In the Pacific Northwest, the climate movement and labor movement have joined together to shut down the Port of Vancouver and the Port of Longview in light of proposed fossil fuels terminals. Climate and labor activists are currently joining on the picket lines against refineries in the Pacific Northwest, as well.

The oil train derailments are rising at breakneck speed. On Thursday, an oil train derailed near the Mississippi River in Illinois, adding to the several other derailments already this year.

Because we are all in the blast zone, nature is in the blast zone, the environmental group Rising Tide posted an average of a blockade per month of fossil fuel infrastructure in the Pacific Northwest for the last half of 2014, and there is more to come.

Today in Pacheco, California, the IWW is joining with union workers at the Golden Eagle refinery to protest fossil fuel expansion. This confluence marks one of many ways that people are moving forward in defiance of conventional politics, bringing remarkable energy toward rethinking education, food distribution and production, energy and power.

Race, poverty, injustice

While productivity has increased, there has been a decline in median income since 2000, and rents are rising across the country. The poverty rate for African-Americans is nearly triple that of whites, and the environmental injustices related to real estate and inadequate health care mean that people of color are more likely to die of cancer than white people.

The fact that more than two-thirds of African Americans live closer than thirty miles to a coal-fired power plant translates to heart diseases, birth defects, and asthma.

To enforce de facto segregation, overwhelmingly white police departments are commissioned to disproportionately incarcerate and kill people of color. Although data is often sketchy, USA Today disclosed that between 2006 and 2012 a white police officer shot and killed an African-American every three and a half days.

That is saying nothing of the black sites maintained by the Chicago Police Department, for example, under the watch of the Democratic Party machine.

This is nothing new, and it only scratches the surface of the economic hardships experienced in the US. Being denied the meeting of basic needs, Native peoples continue to be dispossessed by land grabs from Peabody Coal in Black Mesa to Resolution Copper in Oak Flats.

Latino/a farm workers are exposed to the terrible crisis of industrial farming, from chemical fertilizers and poisonous pesticides to disproportionately low wages. With climate change-induced droughts, many will be forced to flee the Central Valley and Central Coast area of California, perhaps heading north to the Pacific Northwest.

A grand coalition of the local and grassroots

Something will have to compensate if a collapse in agriculture continues apace in California’s once fertile valley. According to the UN, sustainable compensation of food production can only come from local family and community farming. We will need to reformat the coding system and transform relations between urban and rural, farm and market in order to produce enough food for everyone – but it can be done.

The enormity of the problem is, perhaps, dispiriting, and manifests one reason left movements spin out into sectarian and fracture – after all, one lesson of left politics is that much can be done on a grassroots, local basis. But what if the groups organizing on a local basis joined together to form a Coalition of the Radical Left to confront these major dilemmas on a horizontal basis?

A primary place for such an entity to enter into existence would be the Pacific Northwest, as Portland and Seattle are both among the fastest growing and fastest gentrifying cities with climate refugees to come in the future.

This is how we rise up. It is how we return to our reason for being on this planet in order to overcome the despair, take and share power, and stop the die-offs.

Because when you look the cyclone of famine and drought in the eye, it looks like our own young will be the next to wash up starving on the shores of politics if we don’t seize the moments, the opportunities to stand for our right to live on this earth – a right that we won’t have if we don’t live up to the hard demands of liberation and dignity.

In direct opposition to the neoliberal agenda of the corporate political parties that brought about the financial collapse, a horizon of creative, local activism can be cultivated. This coalition, bringing together ideas of groups like Right to the City and Socialist Alternative, would have an eye to global relations, stopping free trade agreements that have proven to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

But it would also maintain accountability to grassroots activity for social and ecological justice on a local level – from switching agricultural production to a local level, as insisted upon by the UN, to transforming the daily relations of patriarchal and racist power associated with the police state and its capitalist agenda.

Is this the ‘coming together’ that Naomi Klein is asking for?

The Coalition of the Radical Left, or what might be called CORAL, would be able to dispose of the cancerous institutions of climate change and their power mongers on a regional level, replacing the dialectics of the city with ecologically sustainable and resilient regional networks.

Through this horizontal organization emerging out of the union of Occupy and Black Lives Matter, among other movements, the left could break down the sinister land and water politics that are exterminating native species and exhausting aquifers, acidifying oceans and choking the skies. We could galvanize opposition to capitalism, and generate power to be shared by all people.

Warming oceans, rising sea levels (four inches in two years, according to recent studies on the Atlantic seaboard), catastrophic droughts. They are destroying the complex diversity that the web of life requires to maintain an integral balance.

The coral reefs are an excellent metaphor for what is happening. Based on a diverse amalgam of life and calcium carbonate ecosystems built by groups of animals, the coral reefs have for a long time symbolized the dreamland of Aboriginal life.

Australia’s Indigenous peoples for centuries have mapped out their knowledge of the reefs’ systems through the composition of intricate artworks and musics that translate the vitality of those systems into a lived reality.

As climate change bleaches and destroys those ecosystems, the dreamscapes of the world’s peoples are obliterated. Scientists have begun working with Aboriginal peoples to restore the coral, because that collaboration is the only way to re-establish a sense of the place.

CORAL would have to work as a solidarity movement with Indigenous partnerships along with communities of color. Coming together, we can rediscover how to understand and appreciate both biodiversity and human diversity, how to live together amongst both Indigenous and migrant populations, and how to embrace both the new and the ancient forms of reconciliation and resilience.

It is not an easy path, but integrity and respect never is. It requires self-discipline and practicing our ideas in good faith, passing along the wisdom of life. That is how we spin the fabric of dreams into our realities and celebrate what makes us human.

Alexander Reid Ross is a contributing moderator of the Earth First! Newswire and works for Bark. He is the editor of ‘Grabbing Back: Essays Against the Global Land Grab’ (AK Press 2014) and a contributor to Life During Wartime (AK Press 2013). 

In a dire chain of cause and effect, the drought that devastated parts of Syria from 2006 to 2010 was probably the result of climate change driven by human activities, a new study says.

And the study’s authors think that the drought may also have contributed to the outbreak of Syria’s uprising in 2011. The ensuing civil war has left at least 200,000 people dead, and has displaced millions of others.

The drought, which was the worst ever recorded in the region, ravaged agriculture in the breadbasket region of northern Syria, driving dispossessed farmers to the cities where poverty, government mismanagement and other factors created the unrest that exploded four years ago.

The study, by scientists from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, US, is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The authors are clear that the climatic changes were human-driven (anthropogenic) and cannot be attributed simply to natural variability – but are careful to stress that their findings are tentative.

“We’re not saying the drought caused the war”, says Richard Seager, one of the co-authors. “We’re saying that, added to all the other stressors, it helped kick things over the threshold into open conflict. And a drought of that severity was made much more likely by the ongoing human-driven drying of that region.”

Climate link to violence

Their study, although it contains new material, is not the first to suggest a possible link between extreme weather and the likelihood of violence.

Some researchers have investigated whether there may be a link between El Niño and La Niña – the periodic Pacific weather disruptions – and outbreaks of unrest. Suggestions of a global connection between climate change and political instability is being taken seriously by two influential groups – insurers and military planners.

Syria was not the only country affected by the drought. It struck the Fertile Crescent, linking Turkey, Syria and Iraq, where agriculture and animal herding are believed to have started around 12,000 years ago.

The Levant has always seen natural weather swings. Other research has suggested that the Akkadian empire, spanning much of the Fertile Crescent about 4,000 years ago, probably collapsed during a long drought.

But the authors of the Lamont-Doherty study, using existing studies and their own research, showed that the area has warmed by between 1°C and 1.2°C since 1900, and has undergone a 10% reduction in wet season precipitation. They say this trend is a neat match for models of human-influenced global warming, and so cannot be attributed to natural variability.

Global warming has had two effects, they say. First, it appears to have indirectly weakened wind patterns that bring rain-laden air from the Mediterranean, reducing precipitation during the usual November-April wet season. And higher temperatures have increased the evaporation of moisture from soils during the hot summers.

Other researchers have observed the long-term drying trend across the Mediterranean region, and have attributed at least part of it to anthropogenic warming.

Government stuck with water-intensive cash crops

The government has also encouraged water-intensive export crops such as cotton, while illegal drilling of irrigation wells depleted groundwater, says co-author Shahrzad Mohtadi, an international affairs consultant at the US Department of State.

The drought’s effects were immediate and overwhelming. Agricultural production – typically, a quarter of Syria’s gross domestic product – fell by a third. In the northeast, livestock was practically wiped out, cereal prices doubled, and nutrition-related diseases among children increased steeply.

And Syria was especially vulnerable because of other factors – including a huge increase in population from four million in the 1950s to 22 million in recent years. As many as 1.5 million people fled from the countryside to cities already strained by waves of refugees from the war in neighbouring Iraq.

“Rapid demographic change encourages instability”, the authors say. “Whether it was a primary or substantial factor is impossible to know, but drought can lead to devastating consequences when coupled with pre-existing acute vulnerability.”

Solomon Hsiang, professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, says the study is “the first scientific paper to make the case that human-caused climate change is already altering the risk of large-scale social unrest and violence.”

Alex Kirby writes for Climate News Network.

In January, I went to the Oregon coast to get away from the city, clear my mind, and have some fun. While walking down the beach, though, we noticed a horrible sight.

Thousands of dead young birds, called cassin’s auklets, littered the sands, strewn amongst the bottles and random plastic like so many discarded dreams.

Scientists are baffled as to the reason for the die-off. National Geographic called it “unprecedented… one of the largest mass die-offs of seabirds ever recorded.” Between 50-100,000 birds as of the end of January.

The most direct explanation is simply starvation. The natural food of the birds has gone away this season, and it fits in with a larger trend of mass die-offs on the Northwest coast. It could be that ocean acidification is creating an ecological collapse, a lack of oxygen in the water, perhaps, but the main theory places the blame on the warming oceans.

It is climate change that is causing this death, just as climate change induced drought have led to the wars in Syria and Mali. It is killing our young; the entire planet is in grave peril.

Something must be done. But what?

The political party in power in Greece is called Syriza, an acronym meaning Synaspismós Rizospastikís Aristerás (Συνασπισμός Ριζοσπαστικής Αριστεράς) or ‘coalition of the radical left’. Their organization is not what one could possibly call a conventional political party: it is more of a work of rethinking politics and its relationship to the state.

They formed in 2004 as an anti-establishment party, and surfed into power on the waves of riotous discontent incumbent on austerity programs and police repression. Although they have found turbulent times amidst negotiations with global financial institutions, Syriza has shown the North Atlantic the possibility of taking hegemony from the core economic and political powers of neoliberalism.

In the US, we are way behind the times. Would it have been possible to formulate an organized political response to neoliberalism during the antiwar movement that surged into existence during 2003? Instead, the tangled ball of anti-war sentiment unraveled in sectarian provocations.

A friend of mine who joined some anarchist black bloc protests during that era recently recalled an example that illustrates this reality.

We talked about a panel where an audience member asked, “Why did the anarchists continually co-opt the anti-war protests?” The audience member went on to site a specific protest, to which my friend replied, “We were one of the groups that organized that protest.”

Over a century on the front lines of radical change

Anarchists are often attacked as the destabilizing force of left politics par excellence, yet when we approach politics from an anarchist perspective, we see these to be misconceptions. Anarchists bled and died for the eight-hour workday in the 1880s. The Magónista Liberal Party raised the banner of ‘Tierra y Libertad’ (Land and Liberty) in the fight for the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s.

The anarchist-syndicalist party, the National Confederation of Labor (CNT), joined the Spanish Popular Front during the 1930s. Anarchists played a driving role in the 1960s antiwar movement, the alter-globalization movement, and organized the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Today, the Kurdish PYD in Rojava (Syria) is motivated by the formulation of ideas condensed through the meeting of minds between Abdullah Öcalan and libertarian municipalists Murray Bookchin and Janet Biehl.

The goals remain the same: mutual aid, solidarity, justice. There is no reason why, today, the left cannot or should not band together to form political institutions around these tenets to confront the current global threats of climate change and the police state. In fact, there is every reason to perform and encourage such an act through radical new organizations.

Power bases are being built already. In Seattle, City Councilor Kshama Sawant has taken her seat under the party Socialist Alternative (SA). SA is not a conventional political party, nor is Sawant a typical candidate. An immigrant woman of color, she is the first socialist elected to City Council in Seattle since 1877.

Her forward momentum helped carry the $15 minimum wage into effect and inspire a like-minded organization called Right to the City in Portland, Oregon.

Nature in the blast zone (and us too)

Convening around issues of climate change and economic justice, Right to the City is one of several groups developing out of the Occupy movement that gets a sense of purpose from articulating a transformation of the relationships between private property and urban spaces.

The group will be supporting independent candidates in the coming city council elections with the platform of increasing the minimum wage, shutting down industrial polluters, and promoting free access to safer and more diverse public institutions.

The creative application of alternative networks and spaces is emerging with a new way of thinking labor policy in the US. In the Pacific Northwest, the climate movement and labor movement have joined together to shut down the Port of Vancouver and the Port of Longview in light of proposed fossil fuels terminals. Climate and labor activists are currently joining on the picket lines against refineries in the Pacific Northwest, as well.

The oil train derailments are rising at breakneck speed. On Thursday, an oil train derailed near the Mississippi River in Illinois, adding to the several other derailments already this year.

Because we are all in the blast zone, nature is in the blast zone, the environmental group Rising Tide posted an average of a blockade per month of fossil fuel infrastructure in the Pacific Northwest for the last half of 2014, and there is more to come.

Today in Pacheco, California, the IWW is joining with union workers at the Golden Eagle refinery to protest fossil fuel expansion. This confluence marks one of many ways that people are moving forward in defiance of conventional politics, bringing remarkable energy toward rethinking education, food distribution and production, energy and power.

Race, poverty, injustice

While productivity has increased, there has been a decline in median income since 2000, and rents are rising across the country. The poverty rate for African-Americans is nearly triple that of whites, and the environmental injustices related to real estate and inadequate health care mean that people of color are more likely to die of cancer than white people.

The fact that more than two-thirds of African Americans live closer than thirty miles to a coal-fired power plant translates to heart diseases, birth defects, and asthma.

To enforce de facto segregation, overwhelmingly white police departments are commissioned to disproportionately incarcerate and kill people of color. Although data is often sketchy, USA Today disclosed that between 2006 and 2012 a white police officer shot and killed an African-American every three and a half days.

That is saying nothing of the black sites maintained by the Chicago Police Department, for example, under the watch of the Democratic Party machine.

This is nothing new, and it only scratches the surface of the economic hardships experienced in the US. Being denied the meeting of basic needs, Native peoples continue to be dispossessed by land grabs from Peabody Coal in Black Mesa to Resolution Copper in Oak Flats.

Latino/a farm workers are exposed to the terrible crisis of industrial farming, from chemical fertilizers and poisonous pesticides to disproportionately low wages. With climate change-induced droughts, many will be forced to flee the Central Valley and Central Coast area of California, perhaps heading north to the Pacific Northwest.

A grand coalition of the local and grassroots

Something will have to compensate if a collapse in agriculture continues apace in California’s once fertile valley. According to the UN, sustainable compensation of food production can only come from local family and community farming. We will need to reformat the coding system and transform relations between urban and rural, farm and market in order to produce enough food for everyone – but it can be done.

The enormity of the problem is, perhaps, dispiriting, and manifests one reason left movements spin out into sectarian and fracture – after all, one lesson of left politics is that much can be done on a grassroots, local basis. But what if the groups organizing on a local basis joined together to form a Coalition of the Radical Left to confront these major dilemmas on a horizontal basis?

A primary place for such an entity to enter into existence would be the Pacific Northwest, as Portland and Seattle are both among the fastest growing and fastest gentrifying cities with climate refugees to come in the future.

This is how we rise up. It is how we return to our reason for being on this planet in order to overcome the despair, take and share power, and stop the die-offs.

Because when you look the cyclone of famine and drought in the eye, it looks like our own young will be the next to wash up starving on the shores of politics if we don’t seize the moments, the opportunities to stand for our right to live on this earth – a right that we won’t have if we don’t live up to the hard demands of liberation and dignity.

In direct opposition to the neoliberal agenda of the corporate political parties that brought about the financial collapse, a horizon of creative, local activism can be cultivated. This coalition, bringing together ideas of groups like Right to the City and Socialist Alternative, would have an eye to global relations, stopping free trade agreements that have proven to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

But it would also maintain accountability to grassroots activity for social and ecological justice on a local level – from switching agricultural production to a local level, as insisted upon by the UN, to transforming the daily relations of patriarchal and racist power associated with the police state and its capitalist agenda.

Is this the ‘coming together’ that Naomi Klein is asking for?

The Coalition of the Radical Left, or what might be called CORAL, would be able to dispose of the cancerous institutions of climate change and their power mongers on a regional level, replacing the dialectics of the city with ecologically sustainable and resilient regional networks.

Through this horizontal organization emerging out of the union of Occupy and Black Lives Matter, among other movements, the left could break down the sinister land and water politics that are exterminating native species and exhausting aquifers, acidifying oceans and choking the skies. We could galvanize opposition to capitalism, and generate power to be shared by all people.

Warming oceans, rising sea levels (four inches in two years, according to recent studies on the Atlantic seaboard), catastrophic droughts. They are destroying the complex diversity that the web of life requires to maintain an integral balance.

The coral reefs are an excellent metaphor for what is happening. Based on a diverse amalgam of life and calcium carbonate ecosystems built by groups of animals, the coral reefs have for a long time symbolized the dreamland of Aboriginal life.

Australia’s Indigenous peoples for centuries have mapped out their knowledge of the reefs’ systems through the composition of intricate artworks and musics that translate the vitality of those systems into a lived reality.

As climate change bleaches and destroys those ecosystems, the dreamscapes of the world’s peoples are obliterated. Scientists have begun working with Aboriginal peoples to restore the coral, because that collaboration is the only way to re-establish a sense of the place.

CORAL would have to work as a solidarity movement with Indigenous partnerships along with communities of color. Coming together, we can rediscover how to understand and appreciate both biodiversity and human diversity, how to live together amongst both Indigenous and migrant populations, and how to embrace both the new and the ancient forms of reconciliation and resilience.

It is not an easy path, but integrity and respect never is. It requires self-discipline and practicing our ideas in good faith, passing along the wisdom of life. That is how we spin the fabric of dreams into our realities and celebrate what makes us human.

Alexander Reid Ross is a contributing moderator of the Earth First! Newswire and works for Bark. He is the editor of ‘Grabbing Back: Essays Against the Global Land Grab’ (AK Press 2014) and a contributor to Life During Wartime (AK Press 2013).