The ocean is often seen as the last wild frontier: a vast and empty blue wilderness where waves, whales and albatrosses rule. This is no longer true. Unnoticed by many, a new industrial revolution is unfolding in our seas. The last several decades have seen exponential growth in new marine industries. This includes expansion of offshore oil and gas, but also exponential growth of offshore renewables, such as wind and tidal energy. Aquaculture, or farming underwater, is one of the world’s fastest growing food sectors. Fishing occurs across more than half of our ocean. More than 1m km of undersea data cables crisscross the high seas. And our ocean highways carry about 1,600% more cargo on ships than they did in the 1980s….
A floating device created to clean up plastic from the ocean is finally doing its job
Jeff Sparrow: Is battling back-to-back disasters distracting us from fighting the climate crisis?
Environmentalists once saw abstraction as the biggest obstacle to climate action. How, they wondered, could one focus the public on the distant future? Today, we confront the opposite problem, with the very immediacy of the crisis generating a strange paralysis. When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that global heating made extreme flooding more common, its new report at the end of February spurred relatively little discussion – in part because of the water covering swathes of Queensland and New South Wales.
As tinnies plucked desperate residents from the deluge, who could give due weight to the warning from Prof Brendan Mackey, one of the IPPC authors, that the science clearly projected “an increase of heavy rainfall events?”
JOSH DZIEZA – Save the Honeybee, Sterilize the Earth
Mass starvation is humanity’s fate if we keep flogging the land to death. By George Monbiot
Climate crisis: economists ‘grossly undervalue young lives’
Hundreds of global civil society representatives walk out of Cop26 in protest
ALFRED MCCOY: China Is Digging Its Own Grave (and Ours as Well)
Book review: The Mushroom at the End of the World review – life in capitalist ruins
The Anthropocene epoch: have we entered a new phase of planetary history? By Nicola Davison
JOHN BUELL: Living on a Newly Unrecognizable Planet
Chomsky: Internationalism or Extinction
Earthly Anecdotes: an alternative to the doom-saying of our times
Reynard Loki – Here’s a major lesson from the pandemic: We can save the planet from climate change
This obscure energy treaty is the greatest threat to the planet you’ve never heard of
After the truth-shower 