Planet: Critical

Honduras is being sued for a third of its GDP by an American company—why? Because the developing nation changed its mind about Prospera building a charter city on its territory. This case, which could bankrupt Honduras, will be judged in a back room of the World Bank by three people, none of whom are obliged to even have a law degree. Matt Kennard , investigative journalist and author of Silent Co...

Genocide. Israel will not stop until it subsumes the entirety of Gaza and, from the words of their leaders, destroys the Palestinian people. Brave people everywhere are protesting. Many are talking. Some stay quiet, for fear of losing their jobs. A minority around the world firmly believe the rhetoric developed by the Israeli state. The injustice in the Middle East, the violent impunity murdering...

“I don't think you want an organisation that is misleading the public about its achievements addressing the climate crisis, to necessarily be the one leading the global effort to do something about the climate crisis.” The UN claims they're "climate neutral"—it couldn't be farther from the truth. A recent investigation done by Mongabay and the New Humanitarian revealed many carbon credit projects...

It’s one rule for Israel and her allies—another for everyone else. Israel’s allies can turn a blind eye to its genocide of Palestine—as long as some of the war crimes are denied. The settler state received unequivocal backing from the vast majority of Western leaders whilst it committed war crimes under the Geneva Convention, including cutting off electricity, water and food—everything the EU decr...

“All of those sectors are rapidly changing and the incumbent industries in those sectors are going to collapse. This is being driven by economic dynamics. It's going to happen.” What if the only viable future is a better one? Whatever the future holds, one thing is certain: tomorrow’s world will not look like today’s. We could see fossil-fascism in which nations hoard their fossil reserves (coal a...

“We found more undocumented meetings between senior newspaper editors—especially his real boss, as Dominic Cummings called Boris Johnson's former employer, The Telegraph,—than any other industry by far. What do they get? What does the political class get? Boris Johnson's got one million pounds per year at The Daily Mail. That's what he gets. They get cover. They get support from these papers. What...

Can regenerative farming fix our food systems? One relatively effective action for an individual to combat climate change is going vegan. Industrial agriculture is razing the Amazon rainforest, facilitating endless suffering, and causing a health crisis. However, regenerative farmer Nikki Yoxall says whilst these things are all huge problems, going vegan doesn’t treat the root of the problem—capit...

“You can't go off and get growth. That's not the foundations of a pension, especially a public pension as a public good. It is about quality curating, stewarding a future for these people. And the reason why I get jazzed about this is because the money, the scale of mone—30 to 50 trillion dollars globally—if we started to move that money for just the beneficiaries, we fix it for everyone. Because...

“If the internet was based on a kind of commons, an almost scholarly freedom, then we need to pressure the people who are regulating the virtuality of our digital lives and say we need an early internet-like space and zone in this, where people can, for example, test out realities, test out new kinds of economy, prototype things, take those prototypes into reality, see if they work, take them into...

“From the 1963 up until today, they can't kill our ideology. They can't kill our philosophy. They can’t kill our fight. Because we believe what we fight for. We fight for our right, freedom, dignity, and truth. So, you can come with any number, you can come with any intelligence equipment, you can come with any kind of technology, you can come. I will fight you.” What can be justified in the name...

Humankind’s footprint threatens to squash life under its heel. Our impact on the planet cannot be understated. We have thrust Earth into a new geological period, destroyed the majority of the world’s wildlife, razed her forests, and rendered innumerable species extinct. We are expert consumers with no limits to our appetite, it seems. Unless the climate becomes so unstable our own systems break do...

“There isn't likely to be a future where all critters have no interest in themselves and are only interested in the collective. That's not gonna work. But to temper those two directions so that there is self maintenance, but also a self that joins the community, is, I would say, the goal.” What if religion wasn’t about God—but about each other? Religion is a divisive topic at best and the cause of...

Human population is a problem—tackling it through education isn’t. We need to slow our global fertility rate to 1.5 children per woman if we’re to lower our population to a sustainable level of around 3 billion. That decline is already happening in many post-industrial nations, to the chagrin and panic of their leaders. However, many cultures around the world still prize large families. But in a w...

It’s so much more than “climate change”. The most biodiverse regions of the world are under threat. Beyond the models, the data, the papers and the Twitter spats, the world’s ecosystems are collapsing under the pressure of mankind’s interference, extraction and exploitation. The Amazon, the world’s largest tropical rainforest, has been mined, plumbed and sawed for its resources to the extent it ma...

“The ways in which we really value property, that to me is an extremely infinite growth capitalism, hyper-masculine and extractive and colonialist thought — this idea that property is as important as like the lives and comfort and kindness that we show people. We must show that same love and kindness and respect to property. And so in that way, I think that we could redefine nonviolence to include...

“If you think about how you might get out of this and get to something better, what really matters is the distribution of resources. Who has what? Who holds the wealth? And what are they doing with it? Government borrowing and quantitative easing, this sort of thing, can change some of that, but really when you get down to it, you're going to have to think about how you're going to tax some of tha...

What to do when words get in the way? We see the world through language, reality shaped by the words we use to signify concepts, systems, relationships and even knowledge. This surreal layer over the world then becomes more true to us than reality itself, shaping desire, hatred, ideology and conviction. Yet, we have evolved with language, we need it to make sense of the experience of being human....

So do we have enough materials for a renewable economy or not? A few months ago, the energy-Twittersphere exploded into debate over Simon Michaux’s report detailing how we lack enough materials and minerals for a renewable economy . I interviewed Simon, a researcher at GTK Finland, about this report, in which he laid out the lack of raw materials and the ecological cost of mining which will impede...

How do we unlock the inherent creativity of people? Imagination activist, Phoebe Tickell , founded Moral Imaginations to provide an imagination-based approach to systems change. A “renegade scientist”, Phoebe has spent the past year training the London borough of Camden in imagination activism. You can read their Phase One report here as they prepare for Phase Two of the project. Phoebe joins me t...

We need an energy transition—a feminist energy transition. For years, Cara Daggett has been researching “petromasculinity” and how this patriarchal understanding of energy impacts our relationship to it, ourselves and the fabric with which we bind society. A political scientist at Virginia Tech, Cara’s investigations into the politics of work and feminist approaches to power reveal a new understan...

Exploitative elites are everywhere—so is resistance The Global North vs Global South divide fails to capture the reality of power dynamics as national elites extract from their own citizens—often in the name of development. Capitalism funnels wealth to the top in every country, facilitated by a globalised system built on economic growth. But around the world, people are organising to resist these...

The Amazon is in trouble—so are its people. Journalist Heriberto Araujo has been investigating the stories of the Amazon for over a decade. In his forthcoming book : Masters of the Lost Land. The Untold Story of the Amazon and the Violent Fight for the World's Last Frontier he presents a three-year investigation to uncover a widespread underworld of violence, corruption, and impunity that has deli...

If we can’t undo the damage, how do we survive it? Bob Jensen, political theorist, is the co-author of An Inconvenient Apocalypse : Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity . He joined me to discuss the book’s message: transitioning humanely to a more equitable and a smaller society will demand creativity, resilience and community. In this episode, we swap stories on those...

But What Can I Do? That’s the title of Alastair Campbell ’s latest book , a passionate treatise on how broken politics is and what to do about it. His answer? Teaching the youth to oust the old. Alastair’s message is simple: Learn how to campaign and don’t stop til you win. The original spin doctor, Alastair has decades of experience campaigning as a strategist for Tony Blair’s New Labour governme...

What if the answer is all of us? We need to change the system. But if the system is made up of individuals, should we start there? On this week’s episode, Colombian changemaker Isabel Cavalier negates the binary of systems vs individuals, explaining that while cultural change starts from within, its impact and progress can be non-linear—much like climate change. Isabel effortlessly weaves politica...