Portside

The United Nations Earth Summit in 1992 took place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and was supposed to establish guidelines for sustainable development. At the Summit, then Cuban President Fidel Castro gave a speech (short), warning of the dire consequences of failing to reverse course. Castro long warned that capitalism was threatening to destroy human civilization through ecological destruction, with the poor of the global South its first victims. Speech reprinted below.

Managing water to meet current and future demand is critical. Biophysical indicators, such as the ones we looked at, can’t tell us where a water shortage is stressful to society or ecosystems, but a good biophysical indicator can help us make useful comparisons, target interventions, evaluate risk and look globally to find management models that might work at home.

"Terracide." A new word - it's meant to encompass the almost unimaginable -- what the big energy companies are doing on and to our planet right now. Their execs are consciously destroying/melting it for profit and if that doesn't make them terrorists -- or terrarists - what does? And if that doesn't also make the companies themselves the biggest criminal enterprise in history, then how would you define that term?

With mass species die-offs, threats to human food supplies, toxicity of air and water, along with deforestation and ocean destruction and the justifiably dominant concern of climate change causing long-term droughts, floods, and extreme storms, the rule of law needs to be applied to the environment. The Green Shadow Cabinet will make putting in place the rule of law a top priority.