In a ceremony at the Quemado Government Palace in La Paz, Bolivia's President Evo Morales on Oct. 15 signed a new Law of Mother Earth and Integral Development for Living Well—MTDIVB, by its Spanish acronym—enacting several measures that had long been demanded by the country's popular movements. The law will extend Bolivia's agrarian reform program, calling for the complete "elimination of the latifundia," with women, indigenous peoples, Afro-Bolivians and "intercultural communities" to be given preference for redistributed lands. It creates a Defender of Mother Earth office to hear public complaints related to ecological issues, and a Climate Justice Fund to oversee remediation of lands impacted by the Andean climate crisis. It tightens Bolivia's ban on genetically modified seeds, entirely prohibiting GMO seeds from the country—their importation, use, or release into the environment. The measures together are intended to bring about the country's "integral development in harmony and balance with Mother Earth," the law states.

Arctic sea ice cover this month fell to the lowest summer minimum extent since satellite records began in 1979, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). "We are now in uncharted territory," said NSIDC director Mark Serreze. "While we've long known that as the planet warms up, changes would be seen first and be most pronounced in the Arctic, few of us were prepared for how rapidly the changes would actually occur."

The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed on Sept. 21 the dismissal of the Alaskan village of Kivalina's nuisance claims against energy companies for greenhouse emissions it claimed contributed to global warming and threatened its existence. Kivalina brought suit against 22 energy corporations, attributing the destruction of its land to the effects of global warming, which it alleged partially results from emissions of greenhouse gases by the defendants. The US District Court for the Northern District of California had dismissed the claim on standing in 2009, stating that because it was a political question the courts could not intervene. Citing to the Supreme Court's ruling in American Electric Power Co. v. Connecticut, the Ninth Circuit ruled that:

Global domination and corporate power are obviously inextricably linked to white supremacy, and certainly the prior two rose along with the last. But the three no longer form the seamless unity they did even a generation ago. This is what those on the left who repeat like a mantra that there is "no difference" between Romney and Obama don't seem to get. We have pointed out before Mitt Romney's use of coded messages to play to the racist vote while still maintaining  a veil (however diaphanous) of plausible deniability. Among his supporters at the GOP convention in Tampa last month, the veil was sometimes not there at all. Note this enlightening litany from the Washington Post, Aug. 29:

We don't doubt that Big Oil has its money on the Republicans and Mitt Romney when push comes to shove. But we noted back in 2008 that the reigning petro-oligarchs were deftly playing both sides in the presidential race. The nature of the game is that no matter who gets in, the petro-oligarchs win. But a part of the game is that Romney gets to bait Obama as a Green Stalin for suggesting that some remnants of federal oversight over the oil industry be retained—which only causes Obama to capitulate yet further. In terms of actual policy on oil and energy, the difference between the two parties has been narrowing almost from the moment Obama took office, until today it is vanishingly small. From AP, Aug. 23:

The African Union is calling for a speedy investigation into the ethnic violence in southeast Kenya's Tana River District (Coast province) that has so far claimed 50 lives. The outbreak began Aug. 22, when some 100 members of the Pokomo people raided Reketa village, inhabited by members of the Orma group. Among those hacked to death were 31 women, 11 children and eight men. The attack was apparently prompted when members of the pastoral Orma strayed into lands claimed by Pokomo farmers. While Pokomo accuse the Orma of allowing livestock to encroach onto their farms and destroy their crops, the Orma complain that Pokomo farmlands encroach on their traditional grazing lands on the banks of the Tana River, and prevent herders from using the river to water their cattle. (Xinhua, Capital FM, Nairobi, via AllAfrica, The Star, Nairobi, Aug. 23; CBC, IRIN, Aug. 22)

It hasn't won the merest fraction of the coverage enjoyed by the London Olympics, but last week's massive Chevron oil refinery fire in Richmond, Calif., sent hundreds of people rushing to hospitals, darkened the skies over East Bay, and has gasoline prices headed back up towards $4 a gallon. AP notes this "was just the latest pollution incident at the facility that records show has increasingly violated air quality rules over the past five years. The refinery is one of three such facilities near San Francisco that rank among the state's top 10 emitters of toxic chemicals, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency's Toxic Release Inventory. Chevron's Richmond refinery...has been cited by San Francisco Bay area regulators for violating air regulations 93 times in the past five years."