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After the Fossil Age, Future Civilizations Stand on a Thinner Floor

There’s a comforting story that circulates in collapse circles: even if this version of industrial civilization is doomed, the planet will eventually reset. The fossil binge will end, forests will return, the climate will cool, and in a few centuries or millennia new Romes and Han Chinas will rise on a refreshed Earth, running on biomass and clever agriculture instead of oil and gas.

It’s an attractive story, not least because it reframes our crisis as a …

The 2026 elections in Bangladesh have ignited considerable debate. While segments of the middle and upper-middle classes lauded the Bangladesh Nationalist Party’s (BNP) symbolic triumph over Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami (BJI), the election was markedly more complex than a routine political event. It has raised profound questions concerning the evolving political landscape, referred to as a ‘new settlement’, within Bangladesh.

The election underscored a second phase in the nation’s political development: it effectively served as a referendum on proposed constitutional reforms that have the capacity to modify Bangladesh’s fundamental identity and its secular character by revising the principles established after the 1971 Liberation …

Even though they make up only 8% of schools in the country, crimes, scandals, and arrests take place at a robust tempo in the nation’s privately-operated charter schools.

These non-stop wrongdoings usually include fraud, embezzlement, harassment, and a range of sex crimes.

This is not surprising given the weak accountability, transparency, and background checks that have plagued the crisis-prone charter school sector for more than 30 years.

A small sample of headlines from just this year speaks volumes:

It was celebrated with ghoulish delight. On March 30, the Israeli Knesset passed the Penal Bill (Amendment – Death Penalty for Terrorists), an instrument expanding the use of the death penalty for offences of a terrorist nature. The death penalty had previously existed in Israeli law for war crimes but was abolished in 1954 for ordinary crimes in peacetime. Technically, it remained on the books for crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity and certain cases of martial law.

The law’s purpose is articulated as establishing the death sentence “for the sake of the struggle …

Last Friday afternoon, Ontario Premier Doug Ford launched an attack on free speech, instructing his Attorney General to file an emergency injunction to prevent the Al-Quds Day march from taking place in Toronto. Ford’s action came just one day after his meeting with Israel’s Ambassador to Canada, Iddo Moed, and Israel’s Consul General in Toronto, Idit Shamir.

In response, we issued a statement condemning the use of state power to suppress a political demonstration in support of Palestinian rights. We argued that Doug Ford’s injunction posed a serious threat to the Charter-protected …

For decades, Panama successfully cultivated a foreign policy posture of strict neutrality defined by its unique geography centered on the operation of the Panama Canal.

This small-state hedging strategy allowed Panama to welcome commercial presence from both the United States and China while maintaining the waterway’s treaty-based impartiality.

However, in early 2026, this equilibrium shattered. Following Trump’s victory last year Panama has exited China’s Belt and Road Initiative and already signaled its alignment with US security concerns, yet it has secured no binding commitment that Washington to make up for the loss of investment.

Moreover, after sustained pressure from Washington characterized by Trump 2.0 rhetoric and Senate …

The closure of virtually all commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz occasioned by the Iran War is not merely a matter of oil and gas, the usual prized duo that feature in the nervous chatter of global markets. There are other less conspicuous products that have also been snared in the process. Consider fertilisers, with a supply shock that may well push prices beyond the 2022 peak following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Given their role in agriculture, another, less publicised shock arising from this prolonged war is in the offing. Prices, at this writing, are already biting. Egyptian …

Charter schools are privatized education arrangements that continually insist on being called “public” while routinely avoiding many public laws, standards, and requirements.

Charter school operators have always wanted to be both public and private for self-serving reasons—public so that they can seize public funds and private so that they can remain unaccountable.

Dr. Michael Mindzak at Brock University in Canada reminds us that, “The purpose of charter schools is to foster privatization under the guise of public education.” The Network for Public Education states that, “There …

Healthy soil, water, and ecosystems are the foundation of human life. The health of creation gives rise to the health of life.

Powerful outside interests are using America’s treasury and public policy to advance profit-driven agendas while the health, land, and future of the American people bear the cost.

The same public purse that finances war abroad is now underwriting policies that poison the land at home.

Political energy that should be confronting this system is instead being redirected into advertising, messaging, and branding, while the real decisions are made through law, …

Retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson said on the independent news channel Democracy Now! that the current U.S. administration, in a matter of days, has committed war crimes in Iran on a scale he has not seen in his lifetime.
He told viewers that, not for the first time, the U.S. had initiated an illegal war, violated the U.S. Constitution and international law, but that the attacks on Iran, and in the midst of talks, have eclipsed all previous violations.
As Chief of Staff to Colin Powell in the lead-up to the Iraq war, he admitted that he came from an administration of …

I don’t think it’s controversial any longer to proclaim that the ruling class of the US and Israel (USrael™) are idiot psychopaths (idiopaths™). Some around the globe have noticed the two administrations sinking all of us into a possible global economic meltdown / possible nuclear war / probable really shitty 2026 don’t seem to have a “plan” or “strategy” or “inkling” for what happens next. Even the lawmakers who attended a closed-door briefing about the administration’s Persian Incursion exited the room completely baffled as to A) the reasons …

When Israeli forces bombed Iran in June 2025, German Chancellor Merz praised them for doing “the dirty work for all of us.” His statement exposes the roots of Europe’s military, economic, and diplomatic support for Israeli genocide and regional aggression. To sustain their “business as usual” policy toward Israel, European governments are criminalizing Palestine solidarity. Our latest visual with The European Legal Support Center (ELSC) depicts this architecture of repression, which we must understand as we build the architecture of solidarity.

This visual builds on …

Ten years ago, Berta Cáceres, a campaigner against dams and mining projects that were displacing rural communities in Honduras, said that death threats had forced her to lead a ‘fugitive existence’. Most of the threats came from Desarrollos Energeticos SA (DESA), a company planning a hydroelectric project on the Gualcarque River, sacred to Cáceres’s Indigenous Lenca community.

Hired killers were tracking her movements. An attempt to assassinate her on 5 February 2016 was aborted. On 1 March, Cáceres said goodbye to her youngest daughter, who was returning to college. ‘This country is fucked,’ she said, ‘but if anything happens to me, …