Bookshelf
“What you see in a lot of countries is a predatory capitalism, from Afghanistan to Pakistan to Australia, which show the corporations that are involved in the neo-liberal agenda, an agenda that has been implemented without really any public consent. This is happening, I would argue, almost by stealth,” says author and journalist Anthony Lowenstein….
Read More about How vulture capitalism is swallowing the world
A Jarawa tribal receiving handout from tourist - a scene from the Andaman Trunk Road
Scmp.com
Bookshelf
Excerpt from Islands in Flux, by Pankaj Sekhsaria: These communities of thousands of individuals with a living lineage going back thousands of years have been brought to this sorry state in a mere 150 years. It began with the British and their policies, which have been kept up with clinical efficiency by modern, independent India….
Read More about How a statist vision of development has brought Andaman’s tribals close to extinction
www.degrowth.de
ALTERNATIVES
Jason Hickel writes: Growth isn’t an option any more–we’ve already grown too much. Scientists are now telling us that we’re blowing past planetary boundaries at breakneck speed. The hard truth is that this global crisis is due almost entirely to overconsumption in rich countries. Rich countries must “catch down” to more appropriate levels of development….
Read More about Forget ‘developing’ poor countries, it’s time to ‘de-develop’ rich countries
Kalpataru, the divine tree of life, depicted at the 8th century Pawon temple, Java
Indiafacts.info
ALTERNATIVES
Viva Kermani writes: Hinduism is the world’s largest nature based religion that recognises and seeks the Divine in nature and acknowledges everything as sacred. A loss of this understanding that earth is our mother, or rather a deliberate ignorance of this, has resulted in the abuse, and the exploitation of the earth and its resources….
Read More about What modern ecology can learn from ancient Hinduism
Gopal Aggarwal/Wikimedia Commons
Development/Growth
Andrew Russell writes: The most undervalued forms of technological labour are also the most ordinary: those who repair and maintain technologies that already exist. This shift in emphasis involves focusing on the constant processes of entropy and un-doing– and the work we do to slow or halt them, rather than on introduction of novel things….
Read More about Innovation is overrated; it’s maintenance that matters more
J. Vijaya, India's first female herpetologist, lived alone for many months in a forest cave in Kerala to study cane turtles
Zai Whitaker
Conserve/Resist
This day thirty years ago, the bodily remains of J. Vijaya, India’s first female herpetologist and turtle field biologist, was found in a forest. She was only 28. The cause of her death remains unknown to this day. A moving tribute to one of the most memorable personalities in Indian wildlife conservation, by Janaki Lenin….
Read More about Tribute: Viji, the Turtle GirlCLIMATE CRISIS
Carbon Brief reports: Four years of current emissions would be enough to blow what’s left of the carbon budget for a good chance of keeping global temperature rise to 1.5C. That’s the conclusion of this analysis, which brings the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s carbon budgets up to date to include global emissions in 2016….
Read More about Analysis: Just four years left of the 1.5C carbon budgetConserve/Resist
From TNI.org: While water privatisation continues to be imposed throughout the world, particularly in the Global South, more and more communities are demanding public management of water (also labelled remunicipalisation) and wastewater services and forcing out private actors. Here are 10 inspiring stories of communities and cities working to reclaim control over this essential resource….
Read More about 10 rousing struggles for public waterCLIMATE CRISIS
Climate Central reports: The early heat this year is due to a shift in wind patterns that has seen air flowing in from the south and west, across dry areas that quickly cause that air to warm. That heat-waves will become more common and intense is one of the clearest outcomes of human-driven global warming….
Read More about Early heat wave baking India is a sign of worse to come
Adani group chairman Gautam Adani is known to be close to PM Modi
ENERGY
I’ve come face to face with some of the world’s worst companies, but at the top of that list is mining giant Adani, which wants to develop one of the world’s largest coalmines in Australia, supposedly to meet demand from India. But the communities I work with patently do not want Adani or its coal….
Read More about Vaishali Patil: Exposing Adani’s environmental and labour abuses
A child labourer cries as he is rescued in a joint operation by Labour dept. and an NGO in Delhi
Reuters/Adnan Abidi
Education/Awareness
IndiaSpend reports: Nearly 46 million people live under conditions of slavery across the world, with 18 million (39%) of those in India, home to the world’s largest number of slaves, according to the 2016 Global Slavery Index. They have lost their freedom by way of bonded and domestic labour and sexual slavery, among other means….
Read More about ‘India has world’s best anti-slavery laws’ (and largest number of slaves)
ALTERNATIVES
From Kosmos Journal: What if we told you that humanity is being driven to the brink of extinction by an illness? That all the poverty, the climate devastation, the perpetual war, and consumption fetishism all around us have roots in a mass psychological infection? What if this infection is not just highly communicable but also self-replicating?…
Read More about Seeing Wetiko: On capitalism, mind viruses, and antidotes for a world in transition
Conflict/Dispossession
People living in villages, who are migrating in large numbers to cities, could be victims of our economic development or perhaps the dismal income growth of farm households is semi-deliberate to keep labour costs low… Are our rural brothers victims or collateral damage of economic development, of a deliberate though unstated strategy, asks Sanjiv Phansalkar….
Read More about Are farmers ‘collateral damage’ of India’s economic growth?Conflict/Dispossession
With the U.S. and Russia headed for a direct confrontation in Syria, the war in that country is moving a new, more dangerous phase. The Syrian war often seems like a big confusing mess but one factor that’s not often mentioned could be the key to unlocking the conflict: the struggle to control energy markets….
Read More about Is the fight over a gas pipeline fuelling the world’s bloodiest conflict?
The fishing community in Vizhinjam, Kerala, now threatened by a port being built by the Adani Group
Conflict/Dispossession
The Indian coastline no longer belongs to its traditional custodians— the small fisher people. A jamboree of development —cities, SEZs, power plants, ports, sand mining— is eating up the coastline and eroding it beyond repair. Debasis Shyamal of the National Fishworkers’ Forum speaks to Sayantan Bera on the present and future of India’s traditional fishers….
Read More about ‘If we go on like this, the entire mass of small fishers will be wiped out.’CLIMATE CRISIS
Rupert Read, a philosophy professor at the University of East Anglia, UK, recently shocked his new 1st year students with a ‘welcoming address’ that dealt with the looming dangers of climate change. Watch the video or read the transcript of his speech below to know why Prof. Read chose to dwell on this unexpected subject….
Read More about Rupert Read: Why I had to tell my students that I fear for them
P. Sainath/People's Archive of Rural India
Education/Awareness
Hari Pulakkat writes: The country’s water data has been largely hidden from public view, and what was available was poor or untrustworthy. This brings up a question rarely asked by policymakers. If scientists find it difficult to analyse the country’s water resources at the moment, how valid are the reports that forecast India’s water future?…
Read More about The precarious situation of India’s water problem
Bookshelf
This review by Alice Friedmann of Nafeez Ahmed’s new book has 3 parts: 1) Why states collapse for reasons other than economic and political 2) How Bio-Physical factors contribute to systemic collapse in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Nigeria 3) Predictions of when collapse will begin in Middle-East, India, China, Europe, Russia, North America…
Read More about Red alert: A timeline for global collapse
Rohan Chakravarty
INDIA
From The Hindu: The rights do not stem from an intrinsic identity or status of the river, but more from their use for humans; and giving them ‘personhood’ or legal status makes it very human-centred. Can rivers not be recognised as having identity, worth, dignity, and rights as intrinsic qualities, not because they serve us?…
Read More about What does it mean for a river to have rights?
