COP 27 – Surviving the Apocalypse: From ‘me’ to ‘we’.

Ultimately, it comes down to political will, when confronting the climate crisis. Instead of indulging in Elon Musk’s fantasies about life on Mars, we need to focus on solutions in the here and now on earth, argued Alan Simpson in his final TED talk on how to confront the climate crisis. What is required is a visionary space for nature and the necessary political will to enact it. Money is not the issue.

 

Engaging the Imperial Mode of Living

In their powerful book The Imperial Mode of Living: Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism (Verso, 2021), Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen demonstrate how our life in the capitalist centres and its dominant forms of production, distribution and consumption can only be maintained, because the related social and ecological costs are externalised to other parts of the world. Published originally in German in 2017, this volume is now also available to the English reading audience. In this blog post, I will draw out some of the authors’ crucial findings.