In 2007, the Marcellus Shale Play was opened for production in Pennsylvania. The fracking of the shale unlocked massive fossil fuel reserves previously considered inaccessible. But it also unleashed an especially expensive and wasteful extraction process that involved flushing hundreds of millions of tons of highly toxic chemicals a mile deep into the ground and into the water table. And it brought up natural gas contaminated with unprecedented levels of radioactivity.
The Finger Lakes region of western New York State is distinguished by a series of long and narrow glacial valleys, dammed by moraine, that now contain lakes. Glacial scouring created some of the deepest lakes in North America, including Seneca, Cayuga, and Skaneateles lakes. These spectacular natural features give the region its identity.
The region features ample farmland and forest and a relatively sparse population. Tompkins County,
The post Tompkins County, the Finger Lakes Hub of Sustainability appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.
Imagine a landscape with some of the richest wildlife habitats in North America. Settlements are scarce and water is plentiful. Birds dot the skies, mammals abound on the ground, and fishes fill the rivers and lakes.
That’s Tippecanoe County, Indiana. In 1800.
The county’s transformation over the past two centuries would make it unrecognizable to its original inhabitants. Today, much of Tippecanoe consists of flat plains of fertile soils.
The post Water Theft in the Heartland: The Case of Tippecanoe County appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.
The USA, Canada, and other countries have long recognized sprawl as a vexing dimension of urban development. Especially challenging is the difficulty creating the public consensus needed for political and planning responses to the problem.
But growing numbers of residents today are expressing their distaste for sprawling approaches to development and are primed to resist it. Perhaps surprisingly, sprawl afflicts a U.S. state better known for its natural beauty and its potatoes: Idaho.
The post Conservative Idaho: Poised to Resist Sprawl? appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.
What is the water crisis’ relationship to the ecological crisis? To the crisis of social reproduction? Or the crises of political legitimacy? And could it be a potential crisis for capitalism? These are all questions that animate my new book Water Struggles as Resistance to Neoliberal Capitalism: a time of reproductive unrest, in the Progress in Political Economy book series with Manchester University Press.
The post Water Struggles as Resistance to Neoliberal Capitalism: a time of reproductive unrest appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).
Since 1998, the City of Las Vegas and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) have been gambling with nature. By auctioning off public land from the BLM for development and using the proceeds to preserve natural areas, policymakers and federal officials have bet that development and conservation can go hand-in-hand.
But it hasn’t worked out that way.
As the Las Vegas region has grown from 1.3 to 2.7 million people since 1998,
The post Learning from Las Vegas: The Costs of Growth appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.
The catastrophe unfolding in Israel and the Gaza Strip is the product of many factors, including colonialism and religious fanaticism. But another impulse driving this disaster deserves discussion: competition over growth and the natural capital—particularly energy, water, and land—that ensures it. These resources provide the basis for economic and population expansion in the Middle East and elsewhere. As nations continue to recklessly pursue this expansion in a finite world we will see more and more struggles over fewer and fewer resources.
The post The Crisis in the Middle East is a Crisis of Growth appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.
Experts have warned for decades of potential water scarcity in many regions, but over the past decade the warnings have nearly morphed into large-scale catastrophes. In 2014, water in reservoirs supplying Sao Paulo, Brazil dropped to just five percent of capacity, and residents found themselves on the threshold of severe shortages. In 2017, the mayor of Cape Town warned residents of the impending arrival of “Day Zero,” when critically low reservoir levels would trigger a shutoff of city taps and lead to queues of residents waiting for water at standpipes.
The post Whose Taps Will Go Dry First? appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.
Drought profiteers - financial industry executives buying up public freshwater resources in a time of increasing drought - are pushing the US water supply to the brink of collapse, reports Lee Camp.
The post Drought Profiteers: Wall Street Billionaires Are Snatching Up America’s Water appeared first on MintPress News.
Capital has identified water as an important opportunity for profitable investment. Whether it is the privatisation of public water infrastructure, the expansion of the bottled water industry, the construction of dams for energy generation or the free expropriation of water for mineral extractivism or large-scale agriculture, private capital has poured into water in large quantities. And yet, water is also an area where resistance to capitalist exploitation has been most successful as reflected in a wave of re-municipalisations of water services across the world (Kishimoto, Lobina and Petitjean 2015). How can we make sense of these struggles against water commodification? In our recent article Water Grabbing, Capitalist Accumulation and Resistance in the Global Labour Journal, we develop a conceptual-methodological approach to this question.
The post Conceptualising struggles over water grabbing appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).