In 13th Century England and Wales, the first enclosure of common land by the wealthy began a process that would reshape the countries for centuries to come. Land owned by nobody and everybody, land that had been held and worked collectively, land held for grazing, foraging, and subsistence, was fenced off and turned into private property and a resource for private profit. The people who had worked and depended on it were dispossessed. They did not consent, and they were rarely compensated. What had been shared became owned, and the logic of profit replaced the logic of community. The impact…
Author: Matt Hanley
Green Isles editor Matt Hanley speaks to Green MP Siân Berry. “Palantir has openly stated their intention to exploit and subjugate the British public for profit and power…” Palantir Technologies started out as a CIA-funded data intelligence company. Today it holds contracts worth over £670 million across at least ten UK government departments, including NHS England. Its own executives describe the strategy openly: “land and expand” — get in cheaply, create dependency, then extract. Green MPs wrote an open letter urgently calling for an immediate inquiry into the Government’s current contracts with US-based spy-tech giant and the influence that Peter…
‘A shallow, but presently rather powerful movement, and a deep, but less influential movement, compete for our attention.’ ~ Arne Naess, The shallow and the deep, long-range ecology movement: A summary, 1973. Deep ecology calls for an emotional, moral, eco-philosophical and intellectual response to the ecological crises, in a political project of re-embedding humans as equals in the natural world. In a 1973 essay in the journal Inquiry, the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess criticised the contemporaneous environmentalism as being human-centric, of saving nature to simply benefit human desires. He drew a distinction between two kinds of environmentalism: ‘Shallow ecology’ was…
Defining a progressive Englishness in a post-UK world
Dismantling hierarchy to save ourselves
Connecting the exploitation of women and nature
The framework that connects the environment to social justice and class struggle
Climate breakdown, poverty, inequality: It’s not bad luck, it’s by design
The place to discuss Green politics, political ecology, and the ideas that guide us
