The Green Planet Monitor

Snowball Earth Long before the explosion of multicellular life in Earth’s oceans, a half billion years ago, those oceans were covered in ice hundreds of meters thick. Beneath that ice, darkness reigned, and photosynthetic organisms fell silent (there were no animals back then). Snowball Earth , is how geologists describe the planet back then. Joe Kirschvink , a geophysicist at the California Insti...

Love of Rock By David Kattenburg Between the winter of 1992 and spring 1994, backpack on my back and vintage, analog Nagra III reel-to-reel tape recorder over my shoulder, I traveled across Canada – twice — visiting places and interviewing people from Prince Edward Island to the west coast of Vancouver Island. Out of this audio-recording adventure, thirty-two hour-length docs emerged, exploring pl...

At Columbia University, one of the US’s most prestigious academic institutions, the suppression of free speech and widespread adoption of artificial intelligence go hand in hand. On May 12, in front of the university’s closely guarded gates at Broadway and West 116th Street (one of the last places where Columbia students are free to stage loud, public protests), a small group of students and facul...

A Conversation With Nikhil Pal Singh From Caracas to Minnesota, from Iran and Cuba to the streets of Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City, from the Persian Gulf to the waters of the eastern Pacific and Caribbean, Donald Trump and his henchmen are collapsing US foreign military and domestic policing operations into a single, unified domain of imperial impunity. A domain where anything goes; where...

Forests are among planet Earth’s core biological systems. Covering about a quarter of its land surface, forest biomes regulate Earth’s climate, and host most of its biological diversity. Forests also provide humans with food, fiber, and energy. Their contribution to human cultural and psychic wellness, individually and collectively, is beyond calculation. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription In...

Battered and bloodied by US and Israeli bombs and missiles, weakened by years of economic sanction and US maritime blockade, Iran still thinks it’s come out on top. It may be right. Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu seem to think so, and are clearly frustrated. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription The Israeli Prime Minister spoke with Trump at least twice this past week . Read-outs of their ph...

Iran Turns Tables on Israel-USA On May 4, Donald Trump swore that Iran would be “blown off the face of the earth” if it didn’t immediately restore maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Trump’s genocidal fulminations have become familiar.  Late last month, he predicted that “a whole civilization will die” if Iran doesn’t do what he wants. Weeks earlier, Trump vowed to send Iran “back to th...

Imagine this: the incarceration of an entire people — thousands behind bars; millions more hemmed in by barbed wire, towering walls, and a seamless hi-tech surveillance system; their movements strictly monitored, mapped, controlled and restricted; millions of facial images, phone numbers, family and community networks, and past carceral history fed into the most sophisticated network of biometric,...

Complicity The Canadian financial sector is deeply engaged in supporting Israel’s unlawful occupation of Palestine, bankrolling Jewish colonization, apartheid and genocide there, along with internationally wrongful Israeli acts in Lebanon and the illegally annexed Syrian Golan Heights. That’s the finding of a new report released on April 9 by the Canadian human rights group, Just Peace Advocates....

Lawless World   In the purely notional realm of international law, nothing is more fundamentally unlawful than the war Israel-USA launched on Iran on February 28, 2026. Like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, almost four years earlier, the conjoined entity’s assault on the Islamic Republic was an act of naked aggression, pure and simple. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter prohibits the “threat or use of fo...

Critical Education in the Age of Genocide Earlier this month, in the Canadian House of Commons, a private member’s bill aimed at halting the flow of lethal weapons, munitions and their hi-tech components to Israel, via the US, was defeated. Although the ‘No More Loopholes Act’ did not mention Israel, or any other state, Israel-USA’s genocidal assault on Gaza was clearly on the mind of the Parliame...

Unsafe Operating Space In response to expanding climate system breakdown, in September 2023, UN Secretary General Antonio Gutteres warned that humanity has “opened the gates of Hell ” and is “hurtling towards disaster, eyes wide open.” Since then, a team of scientists have spelled out humanity’s predicament in drier fashion. Six out of sixteen planetary ‘tipping’ points may have been transgressed,...

Genocide Excused, Justice Condemned UN Rights Expert Francesca Albanese Under Attack “Speak out, you got to speak out against the madness. You got to speak your mind, if you dare.” David Crosby’s rallying cry for peace and justice back in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, rings loud and clear today. If US-backed Israeli genocide, ethnic cleaning and apartheid are what you’re speaking out aga...

Critical Pedagogy in the Age of Fascist Plague Independent Jewish Voices Are you worried about the direction the world is heading today? Does the relentless rise of fascism , anti-immigrant hatred , and authoritarian tyranny trouble you? Perhaps it’s the ceaseless enrichment of a handful of already obscenely rich men peddling climate-destroying AI technologies, or the perfidious silence of corpora...

Ecotoxicology / Ethnic Cleansing in Palestine Anyone who’s flown across Canada, coast to coast, knows the country is blanketed in lakes and rivers. To a greater or lesser extent, like everywhere else on planet Earth, Canadian surface waters contain chemically pollutants. Industrial effluents are the major source, right? Think again. The largest source of surface water pollution in Canada are domes...

Israel-USA & Palestine — Free Speech Chilled GPM # 110 Donald Trump wants Greenland, he repeatedly declares, and will seize control of the largely frozen island “one way or the other.”   Military force is a clear option. “We won’t get anything unless I use excessive strength and force,” Trump told a packed room at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week. Trump’s rationale for...

GPM # 109 Development is a human right. So are clean air and water, and a stable climate. No one is more engaged in advancing these ideas than McMaster University professor Bonny Ibhawoh. For the past year, Ibhawoh and his colleagues have been formulating a policy document exploring the connections between sustainable development as a human right, and climate justice – bringing a justice dimension...

GPM # 108 One in four Canadians live in households experiencing food insecurity. That’s the finding of a report from Statistics Canada , released in December 2025. Over the last five years, the rate of “severe food insecurity,” situations in which Canadians skip meals, has doubled. Food insecurity is highest in Nunavut – 60-70% of households experience it there — and the lowest in Quebec. For insi...

GPM # 107 Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza drags on, with no end in sight. Over 63,000 Palestinians have been killed by US bombs and missiles, almost twenty thousand of them children. Tens of thousands more lie dead and rotting beneath the rubble. Over 80% of the Gazans Israel has killed were civilians, its own data reveals. Indirect deaths — from infectious disease, chronic ailments that can no lon...

GPM # 106 Israel-USA’s genocidal war on Gaza drags on. Sixty-one thousand have been killed by US bombs and missiles. Some German and British ordnance in there. Indirect deaths — from infectious disease, chronic disorders that can no longer be treated (due to Israel-USA’s blockade), and malnutrition — may bring that number to 200,000. Over 150,000 have been injured. Israel-USA’s wanton destruction...