the politics of climate change

So familiar has the social economy of energy become in modern societies, so routine its extraordinardinary wastefulness, so toxic its effects, that the capacity for a better way can be missed. By questioning the how, why and what of energy use, says Rebecca Willis, new possibilities - of living, travelling, eating, working and buying - can open

Water scarcity in the Middle East & North Africa is at the root of the region’s uprisings. In the coming years, it will also be the source of further social unrest across the region.

A fresh awareness of system-failure and resource-constraint draws on the experience and ideas of the 1970s. But this time the vision of radical change is real possibility as well as urgent necessity.

(This article was first published on 1 December 2011)

How much progress can be made in tackling climate change without a global deal?

The international response to the food crisis of 2011 is less energetic and coherent than during the last emergency, in 2008. Both economic understanding and political impetus need to be improved, says Simon Maxwell.

Both regional weather disasters and global climate trends present compelling arguments for political and economic action on a systemic scale. But the obstacles to this remain formidable.

The opening of the Arctic to ship-passage will transform the region’s political as well as environmental landscape, says Øyvind Paasche.

The effects of the catastrophic earthquake in Japan’s northeast will be felt for years to come. How Japan responds will help to define its capacity to meet other 21st-century tests, says David Hayes.

A high-level international report on how financial resources can be raised to help developing countries address climate change is a disappointing and politics-free compromise. Simon Maxwell proposes a way beyond it.

The election of a new leader of Britain’s opposition Labour Party is a rare opportunity to put fresh thinking on global security at the heart of the political agenda.

Paul Kingsnorth’s journey from a degraded environmentalism to nature-centred ways of living and thinking has many echoes for Andrew Dobson, but also clarifies a difference of outlook.

"Environmentalism, which in its raw, early form had no time for the encrusted, seized-up politics of left and right, has been sucked into the yawning, bottomless chasm of the 'progressive' left." A personal, twenty-year journey through the world’s wild places and the movements to protect them is also, for Paul Kingsnorth, an education in the limits of a project that has forgotten nature and lost its soul.

A series of careful reports into the leaked emails of climate scientists provides a consistent account of the "climategate" saga. This allows a welcome refocus on the problems of climate change and the role of the IPCC, says Øyvind Paasche.

The oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is poisoning more than the region’s sea life, finds Jim Gabour

The threat to a unique New Orleans culinary tradition is one measure of the Gulf of Mexico tragedy, says Jim Gabour.

A pristine nursery on the Florida coast awaits the plumes of oil headed in its direction. Jim Gabour reports, waits and fears.

The great oil-spill approaching the Louisiana coast raises echoes of Katrina and fears of a livelihood lost forever, writes Jim Gabour in New Orleans.

Does the pioneer of “gaia” have a point: could democracy be an obstacle to planetary safety?

The doubters of global warming are emboldened by their new ability - as in the “climategate” affair - to put climate researchers on the defensive. But the experience of comparable assaults on the discipline of peace studies in the 1980s suggests that hostile scrutiny can have longer-term benefits for the target.