Half-Earth: A biodiversity ‘solution’ that solves nothing

Variants of the half-Earth biodiversity conservation initiative, recently popularized by E.O. Wilson, have increasingly been gaining acceptance among conservationists. While the boldness of their proposal is commendable, placing half the Earth in protected areas only addresses the immediate causes of the biodiversity crisis, and even this conflicts with the land-use mandates of capital. As I argue in a recent article in Climate & Capitalism, ecological Marxism does not reject protected areas, but more fundamentally points out the need for a co-revolutionary struggle against alienation.

Mexico’s students today and the spirit of ’68

Together with Héctor Agredano Rivera, I translated an analysis by Edgard Sánchez Ramírez of the Partido Revolucionario de Trabajadores on the student mobilizations that emerged in response to a recent incident on the UNAM campus in Mexico City that was just published by Socialist Worker.

The crisis of the Mexican regime and the 2018 elections

A statement of the Partido Revolucionario de Trabajadores (Revolutionary Workers' Party) on the Mexican elections of 1 July 2018 that I translated into English together with Héctor Agredano River and Fernando Estañol Tecuatl  was just published by MRonline. The article outlines a revolutionary perspective on these historic elections and what they mean for the Mexican Left.

Ecological Marxism vs. environmental neo-Malthusianism

A short piece I wrote for Climate & Capitalism on this age-old debate between Marxism and populationism was just published. It offers a brief overview of the Marxist critique of Malthus's original argument and their contemporary Green permutations. The main thesis is that this ideology misrepresents social and ecological problems, and thereby promotes solutions that exacerbate the underlying contradictions of which these problems are symptoms

Has (even Marxist) political ecology really transcended the metabolic rift?

A brief article advocating for stronger engagement with the concept of metabolic rift in political ecology that I authored together with several colleagues was just published in Geoforum. In this article, we address several of the criticisms of metabolic-rift scholarship that have been made in political ecology by explicating some basic aspects of the concept's underlying materialist dialectic and contrasting this with some of the predominant post-modernist theorization in political ecology. The article details are provided below.