Ecology Councils: Grassroots Climate Strategies from Mesopotamia

By Yavor Tarinski

“The councils have always been undoubtedly democratic, but in a sense never seen before and never thought about.” ~ Hannah Arendt

As Greece and other parts of the world are once again engulfed by wildfires, while almost each day a new heat record is reached, an increasing number of people are realizing that the effects of climate change are here and are changing the face of our localities, while years of neoliberal policies have left preventive public services underfunded and ill-equipped for the disaster periods to come. It is also becoming crystal clear that there seems to be no plan for action to stop the forthcoming catastrophe. The summits of the ruling classes—the so-called COPs—have been widely recognized as failures.

The elites can’t stop climate change, but democratic cities can

By Yavor Tarinski

We should not kid ourselves: the climate catastrophe is an epic war of the rich on the poor; corporate criminality on a global scale.

~Dimitrios Roussopoulos[1]

Climate Change, domination and the temporality of Direct Democracy

By Yavor Tarinski

[Being masters or possesors of nature] has no meaning – except to enslave society to an absurd project and to the structures of domination embodying that project.

~Cornelius Castoriadis[1]

The debates surrounding Climate Change almost always contain certain urgency and it couldn’t be otherwise as it is an issue that, if unattended on time, will develop into a catastrophe with existential for humanity consequences. So of course, there is need of a well coordinate action on global scale so as to avoid the grimmest of projections.

Environmental Crisis and the perspective of Social Ecology

Zarina Glaveva interviews author and activist Yavor Tarinski for the Bulgarian student radio ”Reakcia”.

Climate Change and the Need for a New Paradigm

By Yavor Tarinski

Despite many international meetings, dealing with every subject from biodiversity to climate change, the national political elites have found it impossible to come to meaningful agreements to deal with the environmental crisis. […] There is no avoiding imagining new and different scenarios than the status quo. Surely another world is possible.
– Dimitrios Roussopoulos[1]

Our best chance for solving the climate crisis — direct democracy and equality

Illustration by Yuko Shimizu

By Yavor Tarinski

The apocalyptic images that we see in contemporary fictional cinema and literature seem to be not that far from materializing and in real life. Talks about the end of life as we know it are beginning to make more sense as information about the possible consequences of the unfolding global warming is coming from the scientific community, as well as from communities from the global South, already facing droughts and other related meteorological phenomena.

Democratic energy and climate change

By Yavor Tarinski

Thoughts on the book “This changes everything” by Naomi Klein

Today, man is still, or more than ever, man’s enemy, not only because he continues as much as ever to give himself over to massacres of his fellow kind, but also because he is sawing off the branch on which he is sitting: the environment.

Cornelius Castoriadis[1]

Climate change, caused by human activity, is forcing itself to the center of  public debates. And that shouldn’t surprise us since the crisis it’s about to cause is of much bigger magnitude than any other economic or refugee crisis we have experienced by now. If such a crisis occurs it is possible that it will change the face of the planet entirely, possibly making it uninhabitable for humans as well as for most animal species. This gives new strength and importance to the debate about how we will continue the development of our societies, without endangering our very existence.