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.

Supporting Native Americans and their tribes, environmental, climate protection, human rights, and many other groups joined the campaign against the pipeline. The Obama administration intervened to temporarily halt the pipeline. The Dakota Access Pipeline has become an issue of contention within organized labor. Why has this become a divisive issue within labor, and can it have a silver lining for a troubled labor movement?

The numbers on global warming are even scarier than we thought. The future of humanity depends on math. And the numbers in a new study released Thursday are the most ominous yet.

Reader Comments: Standing Rock - Protest, Solidarity and Pension Funds; Hillary Right About Trump Supporters; GOP Manipulation and Voter Suppression; Class War by Other Means; Saudi Arabia; Women's Boat to Gaza Sets Sail; Facts and Numbers to Fightback With - EPI's new data crunching tool; Announcements: Virtual Book Discussion about `Because of Sex; 50-Year Rag Reunion & Public Celebration - Austin, Texas

Reader Comments: 2016 Election Campaign - After the DNC, Hillary, Jill and the Donald; The Election and After - Strategy for this election AND going forward; Climate Change policy needs to be front and center; Campaign for Leonard Peltier's freedom; Ireland and Iceland set the example - jailing bankers that caused meltdown; Hiroshima and Nagasaki memorials at the UN and in New York; Letters to the Wall - What the Vietnam War was all about; and more . . . .

The call to Break Free from Fossil Fuels envisioned "tens of thousands of people around the world rising up" to take back control of their own destiny; "sitting down" to "block the business of government and industry that threaten our future"; conducting "peaceful defense of our right to clean energy." That's just what happened.

CSPG's Poster of the Week honors Internatio­­­­­nal Women's Day by commemorating Berta Cáceres, a well-known indigenous environmental leader in Honduras who was assassinated in her home recently.

Can disruptive social movements change the world or are we better served by take-it-slow, wait-a-year-or-more-to-speak-up, incremental change? Mark and Paul Engler make a case for the former, arguing in their new book, This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century, that supposed pragmatism often stands in the way of genuine progress. The grand slogan of Paris, 1968 -- "Be realistic, demand the impossible" -- is sage and sober advice.

The biotechnology giant continues attempts to build its GMO seeds plant in Argentina, despite three years of unflinching popular opposition.