Pitches wanted (nature, climate) | $100-$250 per article

COMPANY/PUBLICATION: SCIENCE FOR THE PEOPLE

Deadline: 22 April 2022

Science for the People seeks proposals for articles, art, and other content for the upcoming issue, “Bleeding Earth” (Volume 25, no. 2, Autumn 2022).

Despite fierce resistance from frontline communities including Indigenous nations, environmental organizations, scientists, and concerned citizens, the Canadian pipeline company Enbridge succeeded in doubling the capacity of their Line 3 to carry tar sands oil—three million barrels a day—from Alberta through Indigenous Anishinaabe land, and over three hundred miles of Northern Minnesota, to Superior, Wisconsin, where it connects with Enbridge’s vast network of oil pipelines and Great Lakes shipping routes.

The 1,031 mile long Line 3 is but a fraction of the 1.6 million miles of oil and gas pipeline in the United States, and of the 2.2 million miles total worldwide. These lines, together with transcontinental oil tankers and rail cars, act as the circulatory system of our fossil fuel dependent world, a world that continues to extract carbons from below our feet and dump them into our sky above.

With the need to curb global temperature rise, renewable energy sources, with their low carbon emissions, are held up as the solution to climate chaos. Solar panels, however, need silica, wind turbine magnets need boron, and battery cells need lithium, of which yearly eight million, four million, and one hundred thousand metric tons are mined, respectively. These minerals follow the fate of hydrocarbons, leaving the earth and entering the troposphere—into our lives and our bodies.

Humanity’s extraction of natural resources on an unprecedented scale has been recent in the history of civilizations. It began sometime between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, the advent of modernity, of capitalism. In a few hundred years, capitalism has compelled humans to bleed the earth, as the drive toward endless accumulation, the tendency to break through all natural barriers, to take up more and more of what Marx called the “free” gifts of nature, is inherent to the system itself.

But capitalist extraction not only depletes nature; it organizes society and people in harmful ways. It goes hand in hand with colonialism (and neo-colonialism) as the metropoles siphoned resources from the colonies, pillaged aboriginal land and labor, reduced the peripheral economies to raw material export, and condemned colonial subjects to unbroken dependency till this very day. Consequently, the centers grow rich; with the stolen surplus to advance science and technology, they develop further ways of extraction and exploitation.

In the viciousness of our times and a future in peril, resistance to extraction, such as movements to stop pipelines in the United States, protests against gold mining in Peru and Colombia, or the fights against deforestation of the Amazon, are more urgent than ever. With solidarity to international struggles and the goal of enacting a different future, Science for the People seeks submissions on science, technology, infrastructure, and labor under extractive capitalism. We are looking for articles offering radical perspectives and holding up the voices of those effecting change.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:

• Submit proposals here (English) or here (Spanish).
• Deadline for submissions: April 22, 2022
• We ask prospective authors to provide a detailed outline.
• We accept proposals for features, opinions, book and media reviews, artwork and more. You can read more about the kinds of articles we publish and our rates here.
• Please keep outlines under one page and image uploads to 20 Mb total.
• Science for the People articles are geared toward non-specialists, and are written in a journalistic format and from a radical perspective. We consider submissions from scientists across the STEM fields, scholars working in science and technology studies, as well as non-scientists and non-specialists. We especially encourage submissions from activists and those organizing in the sciences, and those working in the humanities and arts at their intersection of science and technology. We particularly welcome women, people of color, non-binary individuals, and others traditionally underrepresented in these fields to send submissions to Science for the People.

CONTACT INFORMATION:

• Submissions: Via the webform
• Website: https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/

TO HELP YOU CRAFT YOUR PITCH:

• Learn more about the publication: Science for the People aims to build and promote social movements and political struggles around progressive and radical perspectives on science and society. It is committed to the democratic practice of science for the benefit of humanity and the planet. More information here.
• Read through a selection of recent articles/stories on its website.
• Review the submission guidelines here.
• Check out our collection of pitch excerpts on this page and find more sample pitches at The Open Notebook Database and at SuccessfulPitches.com.
• Do not forget to end your pitch with (1) a short introduction about yourself; (2) a paragraph highlighting your writing experience, relevant credentials and publication credits; and (3) links to your strongest work or portfolio, and online profile.

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