Pandemics: Humans are the culprits

The intensive agribusiness in northeast Brazil is responsible for the massive deforestation of the Cerrado, one of the world’s most diverse tropical ecosystems.

The destruction of ecosystems is not just bad news for the planet, it’s also harmful for the health of humans. The emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 is just one manifestation of the proliferation of zoonoses – diseases transmitted from animals to humans.

John Vidal

Journalist, author, and former environment editor of The Guardian newspaper

The disconnect between religion and culture

Μαγιάσης Σταύρος – Stavros Magiasis [1921-1976] Λίνδος, 1944

It is no longer possible to contrast a «secular» West with a «religious» East, writes Olivier Roy. Secularization and the de-culturation of religion are taking place in both East and West. The difference is the political forms that the de-culturated religions take.

Olivier Roy

Digital solidarity

Edouard Vuillard -Self Portrait with Cane and Boater – ca.1891/92

As the culture and the institutions of the Gutenberg Galaxy wane, Felix Stalder looks to commons, assemblies, swarms and weak networks as a basis for remaking society in a more inclusive and diverse way, which expands autonomy and solidarity at the same time.

A Practical Vision of a More Equal Society

anselm kiefer

Thomas Piketty, JUNE 25, 2015 ISSUE

Inequality: What Can Be Done?

by Anthony B. Atkinson

Harvard University Press, 384 pp., $29.95

Toward a New Radical Reformism

Memory of the World: Documenting against collective amnesia

 

Medieval Icelandic vellum manuscripts in typical wooden bindings – © The Arnamagnaean Institute

Interactions of the technical and the social

benheine.deviantart.com

 

Saskia Sassen

Digital formations of the powerful and the powerless

Saskia Sassen compares the impact of two kinds of socio-technical formations on the public sphere: electronic capitalist elites concentrated in global cities and globally networked, local social activist movements. Both have the power to transform existing political and economic systems.

The aim is to contrast two kinds of socio-technical formations that have crystallized in recent years: global ICT-mediated financial markets and, a very different case, local social actors geographically dispersed yet increasingly part of a globally articulated space even though they mostly are not in direct communication with each other. Each of these two types of formations has variable and often complex relationships with territory, law, state authority, and diverse kinds of power. The emphasis here is on interactive domains, which include formations as diverse as electronic trading networks and elementary electronic community lists and boards.