Sam was a great thinker and fearless scholar. At the height of the political crisis in Zimbabwe and the fast track land reform programme, or invasions if you wish, Sam was amongst the few scholars who acknowledged that reform had benefitted small scale farmers, the rural poor.

I knew Sam before Independence. I worked with him on land, energy and forestry issues. My abiding memory of him is his open, radical, good natured approach to life. He was a true geographer, driven by the empirical evidence that landscape meant lifescape and that lifescape was built by bias in race, class and gender.

Not my judgement, but one of his doctoral examiners left the room after questioning Sam about his doctoral thesis, obviously on land in Zimbabwe. “It was like asking Bismark about his foreign policy” was the judgement. What a loss felt around the world!

Phil O’Keefe. Newcastle, UK.

The first heavy snow in the winter of Beijing,
With the heartbreaking chill,
Came the message of the sudden death of my old friend, Sam Moyo.
He seemed to be quietly leaving amidst the fleeting snowflakes…

Beijing, Chongqing, Hong Kong -- his traces were everywhere,
Conference halls, villages, classrooms -- his voices echoed around,
In my mind, I see his image active in different places in China,
In my heart, I cherish his warm smiles and sharp views.

Sam Moyo has departed. Yet, he is still among us.

* Prof Wen Tiejun is with Rural Reconstruction Movement, Beijing, China.

Prof enriched our lives in an immeasurable way. We have lost a caring father, a leader, a mentor, a friend and above all a fine human being.

Sam stood for integrity and steadfastness, a calm intelligence and a cool deliberation, a level head in a crisis situation, and a free spirit in a party that was sure to follow every difficult episode.

If those crusading for a separate state are doing so because of the failures of previous governments to serve the needs of Nigerians adequately, that is not a good enough reason to seek secession. The grievance is shared across Nigeria. Moreover, the idea of a separate nation based on religious and ethnic calculations is unworkable.

The government-appointed Commission was wound up last month and directed to compile its report by 30 November. The report is expected to be published on 15 December. The Commission faced a lot of huddles deliberately thrown on its way including a campaign mounted by government figures to discredit it.

Joseph Kabila is doing everything to remain in power in DR Congo. He knows that he cannot hold on to power solely by force, hence he is in a mad pursuit to establish any form of legitimacy to justify holding on to the presidency. His options are increasingly limited and in the end, his schemes are likely to fail.

Sam was highly regarded for his sharp intellect and rigor. Among the young and old, men, women, children, he was a welcome presence wherever he journeyed. He was warm and kind, going out of his way to assist; he made people feel good; and he loved laughter.

The tendency of attributing to Islam everything a Muslim does harbours a major fallacy, which simply presumes that all Muslims are devoted to ‘their creed’ and that whatever they do is necessarily guided by what ‘their religion’ sanctions. In fact, however, the bulk of those identified with Islam, like other people everywhere, attend to their worldly things largely motivated by the mundane logics of desire and power.

Our identity no longer resides in the nation-state but is located rather as human earthlings within the unfolding evolutionary journey of the universe. A new ethic of care and compassion to build our common home – the Cosmos - is essential.

The entry of financial markets into environmental issues can only be disastrous. All the functions of Nature can be converted into financial assets that can be bought and sold in a market. Those who can buy them can use them and those who can use them can continue to pollute.

Why does the internationally accepted definition of “forest” only include trees and not the human beings and animals that inhabit forests? This definition is at the heart of the global plunder of forests and the false solutions imposed by the industrial North ostensibly to mitigate climate change.

Contrary to UN hype, REDD+ is destroying biodiversity and damaging ecosystems including forests, while undermining local communities and Indigenous People’s rights

The “green economy” is nothing more than capitalism of Nature. It is a more extreme attempt by corporations, extractive industries and governments of mainly the industrialized countries towards developing mechanisms for cashing in on Creation. This is achieved by privatizing, commodifying and selling off all forms of life.

Since the intergovernmental agreements for the construction of the huge EU pipeline were signed in 2013, the government of Azerbaijan has felt politically covered to arrest every non-embedded voice in the country, to close every independent media and every international organization in the attempt to cut connections between civil society in the country with the rest of the world.

We now posses tools that are so powerful they enable us to create, recreate, resurrect and redesign life forms that evolved on earth over millions of years. Or do they? Perhaps what they really enable us to do is mess things up royally.

We need to think beyond Paris and to stand in active solidarity with those who are at the frontlines of fighting the climate and environmental criminals. We need to hear what they have been saying for a long time and in different ways. Building radical solidarity with social movements and communities in resistance may be a way forward.

Regardless of the reality of carbon trading contradictions, if policy continues to favour corporate strategies, an even greater speculative bubble in carbon finance can be anticipated in the next few years.

The green economy does not present a contradiction to the continuity of the current extractive and energy intensive economy; the “green” mechanisms are designed to create value and to be complementary and interdependent on the current economy.