In a quiet corner of southern England a fight is brewing. Almost a thousand years after the Norman invasion, the prospect of a second battle of Hastings looms as protesters face off the government and East Sussex County Council over plans to build the 5km, £100m Bexhill-Hastings Link Road (BHLR). […]
Early morning in Nacogdoches, Texas on November 19. Protesters with the Tar Sands Blockade, dressed head-to-toe in camouflage gear, build wooden platforms 50ft up in pine trees. Three people will attempt to block construction of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline today. A few miles away, four more protesters lock themselves […]
The OT talked to Rebecca Solnit, author of ‘A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster’, about Hurricane Sandy and the Occupy Sandy response. The Occupied Times: After Hurricane Sandy, Occupy activists have been amongst the first to rush in with aid and support – it […]
Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute and professor of sustainable development at Columbia University, said recently that the urgency of climate change and the immaturity of the renewable energy industry, leave us with little option but to expand our nuclear power production. In so doing, he joined a group of vocal […]
Maverick organic farmer and activist Hector Christie was arrested in May for pulling up genetically modified (GM) crops at the Rothampstead Research centre in Harpenden. On 24 August, he was fined a total of over £4000 for the damage caused, though the valuation has never been released to the defence. […]
The UN’s Rio+20 declaration, ‘The Future We Choose’, warns that “the scientific evidence is unequivocal…the time to act is now!” With this document, the UN calls for “a great transformation” emerging from the recognition that business as usual is no longer sufficient. Humankind is now in the “Anthropocene” and must live within […]
‘Fracking’ is the commonly used term for hydraulic fracturing, or shale gas extraction. It is a method of extracting pockets of gas from deep underground by drilling into rock, then cracking it open through the injection of pressurised fluid and sand. Fracking – along with extraction of oil from tar […]
“We now have around $7trillion of subprime carbon assets in the global economy, and their value, like the subprime mortgages, is based on an assumption that is highly questionable,” Al Gore explained in his keynote speech to a sustainable business conference in San Francisco in 2011. Yet the idea that […]
Summer has arrived, and although the cold might not be biting too hard right now, the bite of our bills shows no respite. Fuel costs have grown seven times faster than income since 2004, and fuel bill debt has become a key aspect of UK private debt. As we struggle […]
Shell is the world’s fifth largest company and second largest energy company, producing 3.1m barrels of oil a day. The company’s track record is both dark and dirty: oil leaks and human rights abuses in Nigeria, destruction of first nation lands in Canada and Alaska, and $55bn to support Assad’s […]