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In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris, the French and European responses have focused on security and how to reinforce it. At the same time, far-right movements are making gains across Europe, attacks on mosques have increased and a distorted secularist discourse is leading to further marginalisation of religious groups.

Since enacting ambitious legislation in 2009, Scotland has been leading the way on climate change targets. But the campaign would never have been successful without the broad mobilisation of people across society, who came together to demand action. Now the activists are taking their story beyond Scottish borders, as efforts to build a European and global coalition gather momentum with Paris 2015 in sight.

Bashir Ahmad Fatehi has been busy with cultural and educational projects since completing post-graduate work in political science. Here he gives his impressions of the political scene in post-Taliban Afghanistan, the challenges which lie ahead and the important role of young politicians in the prospects for a stable and vibrant future.

To diagnose the malaise which political ecology suffers from in the current political system, beset by crises of both economic and cultural natures, we must first examine the position of the Greens in the political landscape, and their relation to both the Left and the Right.

An old friend once told me that being a decent person means having a guilty conscience. And there is enough to feel guilty about as 2015 unfolds. Ethical uncertainty over how a liberal society should deal with the intolerant has become strikingly evident following the murders of four French Jews in a kosher grocery and twelve editors and staff members of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine located in Paris, by partisans of al-Qaeda and, its rival, ISIS.

Was Marx an environmental activist before the term even existed? According to John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, he was. They claim the work of Karl Marx offers an insight into the relationship between the current ecological crisis and the historical crisis of capitalism.

Syriza’s victory in Greece once again raises a crucial question for Europe in the coming months: can a leftist policy be followed in the eurozone without changing the treaties or monetary rules now in force? It is renewing the discussions which divide the left in France and elsewhere in Europe about the virtues of the euro and the margins for manoeuvre of left-wing governments in a common monetary zone.

As European ecologists, we have duty to support the Greek left after their success, and to promote our alternative model throughout Europe. We will do this today with Syriza now, and tomorrow with Podemos based on how it progresses in the future, etc. We have the responsibility and the historic chance to take part in giving Europe a new direction. However, we should not take the Greek results as a way to resolve our national electoral challenges…

There is a remarkable extent to which Syriza is in practice a Green government. First, the Greek Green Party is a part of the Syriza coalition – they got one MP elected, who was promptly promoted to deputy environment minister. Secondly, they adopted the entire Green platform: look through the policy commitments of Tsipras’ government and the manifestoes of the Green parties in the UK, and you’ll find little to separate them.

Inequality is back on the agenda. French economist Thomas Piketty has drawn attention to it again with his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and that is a good thing. Green and Left-wing parties are drooling over the book, but I have heard few suggestions as to how we should fundamentally tackle that inequality. To do that, we need an idea from a completely different world.