One of the first things that strikes me—quite literally—is the abundance of bugs. Whether I am shooing flies, trapping ants, swatting mosquitoes, combing my dog for ticks or saving moths from suicide by light bulb, I am surrounded by a plethora of creepy crawlers and frequent fliers. It seems counterintuitive then to learn that their kind may actually be dwindling.

Such is the depth of Trump’s planned assault on environmental regulation that it bathes his predecessors in a greenish light. As the U.S. turns back the clock on its already grossly inadequate measures to mitigate the most menacing ecological fallout from industrial capitalist civilization, the countdown to ecocide accelerates.

How can we gauge the implications for the American Left of the election of Donald Trump? What dangers does the Trump presidency pose and what opportunities, if any, does it present? To answer these questions, CD spoke with Bhaskar Sunkara, founder, publisher and editor-in-chief of Jacobin magazine. Founded in 2011, Jacobin has established itself as a leading voice of the Left in the Anglo-American world.

The renewed struggle for self-determination of Indigenous Peoples in Canada and Québec is slowly changing the character of left politics across the country, as the long overdue reckoning with the brutal historic dispossession of the original inhabitants of the places we call Canada and Québec “unsettles” our ways of seeing, putting the concept of settler-colonialism in the centre of much contemporary left analysis and activism.

The concept of a partially demonetized Basic Income disbursed in the form of vouchers for goods and services in addition to cash amounts in both national and local currencies is an interesting angle on Basic Income that warrants further consideration as a roadmap for how to “free our time and minds from subjection to capitalism” while moving in an ecologically sustainable direction.

The Left has long been divided on the issue of Basic Income. The argument recurs every generation or so. In the last few years it has resumed throughout much of the global North, especially in the wake of campaigns and initiatives in Switzerland and Finland, for example. And the debate is now ablaze in Canada.

But it was really in the 20th century, with the advent of automation and the ensuing reflections on the social impact, for good or ill, of productivity-boosting and labour-sparing technology, that an unconditional Basic Income began to be viewed as feasible, finding supporters in thinkers from Milton Friedman to Bertrand Russell to André Gorz.

The Harper government has waged an unrelenting attack on the interests of the vast majority of people living in Canada or seeking to live here: it has censored scientists, hamstrung trade union organizers, persecuted protestors, victimized refugees, battled veterans — the list of Harper’s targets is very long.

In 1935 the DuPont Corporation ran an ad campaign under the slogan “Better Things for Better Living… Through Chemistry.” Many of the vast number of synthetic chemicals introduced by industry and agriculture during the ensuing hundred years have indisputably made life far more comfortable for a considerable fragment of the world’s population. Although the origins of the discipline of toxicology date back to antiquity, little thought was given during the first half of the 20th century to the downside of the gathering tide of anthropogenic chemicals in which our world is now awash.

More than half of all the wild animals on Earth have been annihilated within my lifetime. This death notice was delivered by the World Wildlife Fund in its 2014 Living Planet Report. But the animals haven’t mysteriously vanished: the conditions of their existence were destroyed, directly or indirectly, by human action.