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The New Emancipation Movement: Facing the Servitude of Energy and Machines

November 10, 2014 By Dennis Riches 1 Comment

The use of fossil fuels, and later nuclear energy, created a new form of slavery that degraded the masters’ spiritual well-being and social relations. It was a change that put the future in peril and increased human misery by damaging ecosystems and forcing millions of people to earn their living by the dictates of the extractive industries and the technological bureaucracies of nation states obsessed with security and control.

In “The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude,” [2] Andrew Nikiforuk provides an excellent discussion of the authors of the 19th and 20th centuries who decried the effects of the new servitude of machinery, yet these earlier critiques of energy have been largely forgotten in present times, even by people who are very active in the contemporary battle against climate change.

Nikiforuk began with a brief history of slavery in Rome and in the early Industrial Revolution. The new servitude is a continuation of the same problem in a new form, one which suggests the necessary energy transition will be as contentious as the emancipation struggles of the past. If we get it wrong, our way of life may collapse like Rome’s, which never gave up its addiction to slavery. The empire just kept trying to acquire more slaves until the unquenchable demand led to decline and invasion from the regions that once supplied the slaves.

Filed Under: Civil Liberties, Environment Tagged With: Andrew Nikiforuk, Climate change, energy, fracking, future, history, Human Rights, hydraulic fracturing, Idiocracy, nuclear, oil, Qatar, Rome, Saudi Arabia, slavery, Steven Pinker, technology, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude, Wall-E

Canada & The First Nations In The Manhattan Project

October 16, 2014 By Dennis Riches 1 Comment

In the summer of 1998, representatives of the Dene people of Great Bear Lake in the far north of Canada went to Hiroshima to express their remorse for having hauled the uranium ore that went into the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. They had had no foreknowledge of what they participated in, and they suffered […]

Filed Under: Environment, Foreign Affairs Tagged With: Alberta, Alberta Star, Alberta Tar Sands, Andrew Nikiforuk, atomic bomb, Buffalo, Canada, Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, Congo, David Henningson, Deline Land Corporation, Dene, Eldorado Mining and Refining Company, Fukushima, Great Bear Lake, Ham Royal Commission, Highway of the Atom, Hiroshima, Japan, Manhattan Project, New York, Niagara Falls, Northwest Territories, nuclear, nuclear power, Ontario, Port Hope, Port Radium mine, Rosalie Bertell, Russia, Saskatchewan, Somba ke: The Money Place, Soviet Union, spent nuclear fuel, Tar sands, The Calgary Herald, The Tyee, uranium, Village of Widows

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