Ecowar

"Without Water, Revolution"

2013-05-19T10:01:00.000+02:00

From Without Water, Revolution by Thomas L. Friedman on The New York Times: THIS Syrian disaster is like a superstorm. It’s what happens when an extreme weather event, the worst drought in Syria’s modern history, combines with a fast-growing population and a repressive and corrupt regime and unleashes extreme sectarian and religious passions, fueled by money from rival outside powers "The

For the youth

2013-05-04T13:40:00.000+02:00

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George W. Bush is painting too many puppies

2013-03-09T11:37:00.000+01:00

My brain was going into my feet from reading Salon.com (not The Onion) / George W. Bush’s art teacher says he’ll “go down in the history books as a great artist”. He has painted "more than 50" puppies!? However, after posting this breaking news to Facebook, a friend of mine pointed out the cosmos in this chaos. It's been 23 years in the making... Too many puppies are being shot in

Review: EARTH WARS - The Battle for Global Resources

2013-01-08T19:09:00.001+01:00

"If the Earth wars were a sporting contest, here's how the half-time score might stand at the beginning of 2012..." Georff Hiscock concludes his near 300 pages factual account of who owns the world with a surprisingly relaxed "scoreboard": 1st: USA 10 points 2nd: China 8p 3rd - 4th: Europe, Japan 6p 5th - 6th: Russia, India 5p 7th: Brazil 4p 8th - 10th: Mexico, Canada, Australia 3p 11th -

Call for moratorium on extraction in contested territories

2013-01-07T22:52:00.002+01:00

As can be seen in this recent infographic by Information is Beautiful and The Guardian, we need to leave about 86 percent of known fossil fuel resources in the ground to stay within our carbon budget and hopefully avoid raising global temperatures by more than two degrees Celsius. Still exploration and extraction continues unabated. However, some resources are in undergrounds below contested

Come to Greenland

2012-11-02T20:54:00.001+01:00

Island for sale. 2,166,000 km² (mostly still ice). 56,744 inhabitants (many working at minimum wage, animosity towards Greenpeace is legendary). Watch some of the world's last ice melt to reveal a wealth of riches below. Copper, zinc, iron, gold. Make your investment before it's taken. Look at all the deposits that have already been found. Off shore the most daring oil companies are already

Government soldiers and rebel insurgents are slaughtering hundreds of elephants

2012-09-10T08:44:00.002+02:00

Protecting endangered wildlife is not just about donating to WWF, funding parks, keeping endangered lizards as "pets" and abstaining from buying ivory. It's an arms race and it's fighting a war. In 2012 the poachers have gone on blitz krieg killing more elephants than ever before, operating across borders from helicopters and shooting at park rangers who are forced to retreat. And it's not just

Amazonian tribal village razed, 80 people massacred by miners

2012-09-01T11:04:00.002+02:00

Several places in the Amazon illegal miners and loggers clash with indigenous tribes in conflict over access to and use of land. "Use of" as in clear cutting, strip mining or chemically polluting. This particular report is a tad more gruesome than most of them. Only three hunters who were away when the village was bombed and sniped from a helicopter survived. "This is another appalling tragedy

The Ecowar rages (especially elsewhere)

2012-08-06T23:41:00.001+02:00

[<a href="http://storify.com/bennohansen/ecowar-july-2012" target="_blank">View the story "Ecowar, July 2012" on Storify</a>]<h1>Ecowar, July 2012</h1><h2>No new stories were posted to the Ecowar blog July 2012. Generally, I write up fewer stories since publishing the book. But I started tweeting pretty much every online story I find in stead. Here is a summary of the month of July 2012 in

Greenland to export uranium & rare earth minerals to China?

2012-06-28T21:52:00.002+02:00

Perhaps you have already heard oil corporations are looking for oil in the Arctic seas around Greenland. But also the Chinese show some interest in Denmark, Greenland's mineral wealth especially. Greenland holds untouched resources of uranium which pose a dilemma to the nuclear free kingdom. Recently, Hu Jintao visited Denmark and Danish politicians visited China. "I hope we can soon change the

A quite frank comment on climate migration from Israeli expert

2012-05-26T13:57:00.001+02:00

Israeli expert says it exactly like he sees it after having researched his country's challenges: "The migration wave is not a problem for the future. It is today; it is going on now [...] It will just increase from day to day. [...] In India, they shoot; in Nepal, they shoot; in Japan, they shoot [at refugees...] Millions perished along the Sahel [...] It’s the deterioration of Africa [...] I

The US of A: Coal and oil right-wing battles life-saving sustainability initiatives in the military. Really.

2012-05-22T22:54:00.002+02:00

Even if wars are not all about oil, soldiers have certainly been killed for oil: Up to one in three US casualties has happened at gasoline convoys. Check out how solar panels are saving lives and improving the flexibility of US Marines deep in foreign deserts: Grist / U.S. military kicks more ass by using less fossil-fuel energy. "Other people are busy saving the planet; this is about saving

Addition to reading list: Club of Rome author writes 2052 prognosis

2012-05-12T15:28:00.000+02:00

In the book "2052," Jorgen Randers, one of the co-authors of "Limits to Growth," issues a progress report and makes a forecast for the next forty years. To do this, he asked dozens of experts to weigh in with their best predictions on how our economies, energy supplies, natural resources, climate, food, fisheries, militaries, political divisions, cities, psyches, and more will take shape in

Am I Marxist?

2012-04-24T17:38:00.003+02:00

No, I'm not. None the less, allow me to copy/paste some genuine Communist quotes of ecowar relevance: Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power. [...] And insofar as man

"Defining Peace" - talk by Zeitgeist's Peter Joseph

2012-03-03T18:26:00.000+01:00

The neo-guru of the Zeitgeist movement, Peter Joseph gave a good speech in Israel on 6th of February, 2012. It has been uploaded in its entirety to Youtube. A highlight at about half an hour into the speech Joseph quotes professor of history Richard A. Gabriel on the historical emergence of warfare. Joseph continues: ...since that time of those early forms of modern civilization there have been

Jacque Fresco, Venus Project interviewed on Russia Today

2012-02-10T18:19:00.000+01:00

"The Venus Project is an attempt to bring world peace and all the nations together. If you don't want war, killing, [?] crime you have to redesign the way society works, you have to declare all the Earth's resources as a common heritage of all the world's people [...] We don't go to another country to bring democracy, we go there for their resources. Oil, metal, cheap labor. We don't go to

Truck driver busted with stolen glacier - denialism & jokes ensue

2012-02-02T23:14:00.001+01:00

So, Chilean police have arrested a truck driver with 5 tonnes of "endangered" glacier ice. My first thoughts were of the tragic irony: poor people worsening an environmental catastrophe (glacier degradation) probably to mitigate its effects (droughts) in what affordable way they could conceive (theft in response to water supply being privatized). Then the denial forecast kicked in: Climate

Eco-terrorism and terrorist-journalism

2012-01-23T22:42:00.001+01:00

Course of events: a) Animal rights activists are raided by police b) Journalist cover the case Can you guess what's next? Probably not... c) Journalist is labelled 'extremist' and persecuted Can you guess the country? No, not the glorious nation of Kazakhstan. The USA. Get the facts straight for yourself: Check out Green is the new red blog and/or book which is about the

Abusing animals for fun & covering up pollution - busy day in the US Army

2012-01-14T10:56:00.001+01:00

Huffington Post / Camp Lejeune Water Contamination Cover-Up Hinted In Navy Letter The U.S. Navy is asking government investigators to suppress information concerning the toxic water scandal at the Marine Corps' Camp Lejeune, according to a letter obtained Thursday by The Huffington Post. [...] Government watchdogs and environmental advocates said they interpret the letter as further evidence of

Watch DIRT! The Movie

2012-01-12T21:36:00.000+01:00

I just watched DIRT! The Movie for free at dotSUB. A really good movie about soil and the importance of a healthy biosphere of rich biodiversity. Takes a couple of detours (ie one about various spiritual connections to soil) that may seem weird depending on who you are and is quite a bit pro-organic agriculture but all in all a good, educational movie about not just soil, but about deforestation,

Musings on optimism vs fear, innovation vs collapse

2012-01-05T22:10:00.000+01:00

Today I happened upon this near one hour long couch talk by Geoffrey West (visit the site for audio or video). Among the themes he discuss is drawing some lines in the sand in the very long debate between Malthusian fears of over-population / over-exploitation of nature and the technological optimism that future inventions will solve anything and everything. "One of the bad things about

The blog is now a book, long live both

2011-12-28T21:45:00.004+01:00

Dear reader, You may already have noticed the orange graphic in the right sidebar? Yes, I have self-published a book based on this blog. And I'm literally giving it away, the price barely covers printing. What will happen to the blog now? Why self-publishing? What is up with that ecowar.eu site? Answers in the tale below... After many emails back and forth between publishers, experts and I

Trouble in Kazakhstan oil city

2011-12-18T12:29:00.002+01:00

Oil industry workers have been protesting layoffs and demanding raises. Authorities have answered with a crackdown: reports of dead and injured, mobile network and internet censored. International networks of hackers are providing dial-up internet communication just like they did in Egypt early 2011. "The protesters blocking the railway refused to leave the area and the clashes started. I am now

War for territory - World tour November 2011

2011-11-27T13:45:00.001+01:00

We live in peaceful times. Conflicts being linked to something as mundane as natural resources is a conspiracy theory. Just kidding... Cambodia: Villages razed to clear land for sugar plantation Amnesty International and other organisations have exposed the Cambodian authorities' systematic failure to protect people from forced evictions. Forced evictions in the name of economic development

Grease is the new copper

2011-11-12T18:29:00.001+01:00

Materials and resources once common, inexpensive or just non-existing pop up in a new league of the craved for or expensive. Copper and solar panels have been new objects of theft in recent years. Now grease is getting locked up to protect it from thieves. Yes, grease. Biofuel producers are now buying used cooking oil from restaurants. What was once foul waste is today a resource for the