Uploaded April 2016 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
The environmental crisis represents ‘one of the gravest and most severe existential threats to our species survival’. International agreements aimed at curbing fossil fuel emissions have largely been a failure, with the most recent Paris CoP21 conference labelled ‘a fraud and a fake’ by leading climatologist and activist James Hansen. Capitalism’s unrelenting assault on the natural environment has pushed us past the point of continuing any pretence of ‘safe carbon mitigation’. It is becoming more widely accepted that we now need a global restructuring of the economic mode of production; capitalism must be dissolved.
Speakers:
Janet Biehl, a theorist and writer who has written on topics such as Social Ecology and Libertarian Municipalism, Ecofeminism, and the dynamics and threats posed by ‘Ecofascism’. Biehl is a supporter of the Kurdish rights movement. The Kurdish Worker’s Party have taken inspiration from work in which she was involved, notably Murray Bookchin’s theories of Social Ecology.
Erjan Ayboga is an active member of the Mesopotamian Ecology Movement and was involved in a campaign to oppose the damming of the Tigris river
"After completing my studies in civil engineering and hydrology, I worked for more than two years in the municipality of the largest city of Turkish Kurdistan, called Diyarbakir (in Kurdish: Amed). Between the fall of 2004 and the beginning of 2007, I was heavily involved in establishing a campaign to oppose the large Ilisu Dam Project on the Tigris River, which would have grave social, cultural, ecological, and political impacts on many many people. Since 2007 I worked in this campaign, called the Initiative to Keep Hasankeyf Alive, as international coordinator also from Germany, but spent two to three months annually in Kurdistan. The Initiative has as its objective, not only to see the cancellation of the Ilisu project, but to build up a coalition of dam-critical and water-issue movements in the Republic of Turkey. At the same time I began a Ph.D. on river restoration."
The environmental crisis represents ‘one of the gravest and most severe existential threats to our species survival’. International agreements aimed at curbing fossil fuel emissions have largely been a failure, with the most recent Paris CoP21 conference labelled ‘a fraud and a fake’ by leading climatologist and activist James Hansen. Capitalism’s unrelenting assault on the natural environment has pushed us past the point of continuing any pretence of ‘safe carbon mitigation’. It is becoming more widely accepted that we now need a global restructuring of the economic mode of production; capitalism must be dissolved.
Speakers:
Janet Biehl, a theorist and writer who has written on topics such as Social Ecology and Libertarian Municipalism, Ecofeminism, and the dynamics and threats posed by ‘Ecofascism’. Biehl is a supporter of the Kurdish rights movement. The Kurdish Worker’s Party have taken inspiration from work in which she was involved, notably Murray Bookchin’s theories of Social Ecology.
Erjan Ayboga is an active member of the Mesopotamian Ecology Movement and was involved in a campaign to oppose the damming of the Tigris river
"After completing my studies in civil engineering and hydrology, I worked for more than two years in the municipality of the largest city of Turkish Kurdistan, called Diyarbakir (in Kurdish: Amed). Between the fall of 2004 and the beginning of 2007, I was heavily involved in establishing a campaign to oppose the large Ilisu Dam Project on the Tigris River, which would have grave social, cultural, ecological, and political impacts on many many people. Since 2007 I worked in this campaign, called the Initiative to Keep Hasankeyf Alive, as international coordinator also from Germany, but spent two to three months annually in Kurdistan. The Initiative has as its objective, not only to see the cancellation of the Ilisu project, but to build up a coalition of dam-critical and water-issue movements in the Republic of Turkey. At the same time I began a Ph.D. on river restoration."
