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Guatemala is severely polluted with plastic waste, with open burning, illegal dumping, and leaking landfills causing widespread harms. What actions, this article asks, are local people taking to reduce this pollution? What, more broadly, does this suggest for the power of grassroots environmentalism to influence plastics governance in Guatemala? Drawing on fieldwork in 2023 and 2024, our study finds that local efforts to eliminate single-use plastics have been surging across Guatemala since 2016. Formidable political and industry forces, however, are limiting the scaling up of these efforts. This article, the first to investigate the politics of reducing single-use plastic waste in Guatemala, deepens the understanding of the agency and power of local people in the Global South to shape environmental governance while emphasizing the importance of accounting for the political and economic forces thwarting the scaling up of community actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global environmental politics is at a critical juncture as the Earth System emergency deepens. The core environmental policies and actions of governments, intergovernmental organizations, corporations, and, to a lesser extent, mainstream nongovernmental organizations are visibly failing to deescalate this emergency. In response to these failures, we argue, dispossessed individuals, Indigenous peoples, grassroots activists, and civil society campaigners are joining forces to challenge market-liberal and institutionalist thinking and initiate new ways of organizing political and social life that prioritize biological integrity and social justice: what we describe as "biojustice environmentalism from below." Global environmental governance, meanwhile, is at a crossroads, becoming increasingly polycentric as biojustice environmentalism surges and as corporations seek to capture governance spaces through multistakeholder initiatives. How surging biojustice environmentalism in a polycentric governance landscape plays out in the coming years, we conclude, will be crucial for humanity's ability to stem the escalating global environmental crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The globalization of artificial intelligence is supercharging the technological base of the world order. What are the consequences of the rising power of AI for environmentalism? Machine learning and intelligent robotics can advance environmental knowledge and conservation. Yet other AI technologies – from facial recognition to automated online surveillance – can enhance the power of states and corporations to suppress activism. The consequences of AI for environmentalism are highly variable, empowering some campaigns and depowering others. Still, a broad pattern is discernible. Going forward, AI technologies would seem set to advance technocratic, incremental, and moderate forms of environmentalism while hampering confrontational tactics and grassroots resistance, especially in authoritarian states. At the same time, AI is going to spur wasteful consumption, natural resource extraction, and the production of electronic waste. The globalization of AI, as these findings reveal, is set to unsettle the politics of environmentalism, doing some good, but bringing many dangers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Activists use emotional language and images - what Greenpeace co-founder Bob Hunter coined 'mindbombs' - to convince people that some actions are wrong, morally and environmentally. For instance, for over 50 years anti-sealing activists have employed mindbombs to transform seal pups into babies and seal hunters into barbarians. Although 'image politics' contributed to the decline of the Canadian sealing industry in the 1980s, its effectiveness has been - and continues to be - rocky, particularly as pro-sealing voices counter with competing claims of cultural rights, traditional livelihoods and sustainable use. Drawing on Tilly and Tarrow's 'cycles of contention' framework, this article argues that controlling and predicting the global uptake of messaging is becoming harder as activists operate in an increasingly crowded discursive landscape, as campaigners and counter-campaigners articulate scientific and moral frames that resonate differently across changing social and cultural contexts, and in light of globalising markets, transnational networks and changing media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies the impact of globalization of environmentalism on the commercial tropical timber management in the Asia-Pacific region. Discussion on globalization; Information on the timber corporations in the region; Conclusion.