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Development/Growth

Red alert: The Centre’s new law spells doom for the environment

5th July 2016

Ritwick Dutta writes on the Environment Ministry’s new draft notification, which if finalised, will sound the death knell for the crucial process of Environment Impact Assessment of developmental and industrial projects in India, and thus legitimise all violations of environmental law. The notification holds serious consequences, for the environment, and for ‘Rule of Law’ itself….

Conserve/Resist

What incentivises local forest conservation efforts?

4th July 2016

This paper by multiple authors – published in the International Journal of the Commons – won the journal’s Ostrom Memorial Award for Most Innovative Paper of the Year. The authors use a unique longitudinal dataset of forest policy in 100 municipalities in Bolivia to examine the relationships between citizen pressures and economic incentives on forest policy….

Poverty/Inequality

The stark divide between rich and poor, from above

2nd July 2016

Photographer Johnny Miller wanted to capture South Africa’s dramatic rich-poor divide from a new perspective, and decided to shoot many areas from several hundred feet in the air. The result, as seen in the series titled ‘Unequal Scenes’ , are startling. They also make us us wonder; what if Miller had attempted the same in today’s India?…

Economy

Scoop: Govt cancels Rs 200-crore green fine on Adani

Nitin Sethi scoops the latest instance of cronyism: The environment ministry has withdrawn a Rs 200 crore fine from Adani Ports for damaging the environment imposed by the UPA government, the biggest penalty for green violations on record, and also extended a 2009 environmental clearance for the company’s waterfront development project at Mundra in Gujarat….

CLIMATE CRISIS

Ten years on: how Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ made its mark

1st July 2016

John Cook writes: An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary about the threat of climate change, starring former US vice president Al Gore, was released ten years ago. It has undoubtedly made a mark, winning two Oscar awards, and the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for Gore. But has the film achieved what it set out to do?…

Food/Farming

Why rural distress is not triggering organised farmer unrest

Sayantan Bera reports: The sorry state of India’s farm movement is inextricably linked to the non-viability of farming now, said Vijay Jawandhia, a farmer leader from Wardha in Maharashtra. “Land holdings have become smaller and farmers everywhere are struggling to run a family and survive. Where is the time or resource to invest in a movement?”…

A view of the Athirapilly falls

Countercurrents.org

Conflict/Dispossession

Athirappilly: Kerala’s destructive dam project that refuses to die

Neha Miriam Kurian writes: The Left-Front government in Kerala is reviving the Athirappilly Hydro Electric Project against stiff resistance from local tribes and environmentalists. If implemented, it will displace the ancient hunter-gatherer Kadar tribe and submerge the only remaining low elevation riparian forests left in the Western Ghats, one of the world’s eight biodiversity ‘hotspots’….

CLIMATE CRISIS

CO2 levels breach climate red line, and will remain there for our lifetime

30th June 2016

G.B.S.N.P. Varma writes: CO2 concentration levels in the atmosphere have risen above 400 parts per million (ppm), which scientists consider a red line for climate change, for the second year in succession, but this time they will endure for our lifetimes, according to the Mauna Loa Observatory, global record-keeper of carbon emissions since the 1950s….

ALTERNATIVES

The commons: A credible strategy for building a radically different world

29th June 2016

David Bollier writes: How are we to imagine and build a radically different world when the incumbent system aggressively resists change? Our challenge is not just articulating alternatives, but identifying strategies for actualizing them. The commons —a paradigm, a discourse, an ethic, and a set of social practices— holds great promise in transcending this conundrum….

The Economic Times

ALTERNATIVES

These green socialists want to see a ‘hundred flowers bloom’

Soumya Aji writes: They have no formal structure and operate in village level groups in Karnataka. The motto for the effort, as of now, is “green socialism”. And they are slowly gathering heft, showing by example and by spreading awareness that there can be an alternative way of living, one that is self-sustaining and satisfying….

Conflict/Dispossession

Video: Bihar’s great walls of destruction

Floods are not a new thing in Bihar, a state in the lap of these flood plains. Around the time of India’s independence, the state started caging its rivers with embankments. In this video, Dinesh Mishra explains why Bihar is so vulnerable to flooding and more importantly, why embankments have caused more harm than good….

Food/Farming

Video: P. Sainath at the Delhi assembly: Water and farm crisis are the defining problems of our time

28th June 2016

Catch News reports: In a new initiative by Speaker Ram Niwas Goel, proceedings for the day at the Delhi Assembly were kickstarted by a lecture series. The first lecture was delivered by veteran journalist P. Sainath, who spoke on ‘Water and Farm Crisis in India’, which he said were the defining crises of our times….

IISc

Development/Growth

Red alert: India’s technology capital headed for system failure

Recent research by IISc reveals startling numbers on Bangalore’s reckless urbanization and its consequences: during 1973–2016 (1005% concretization or increase of paved surface) has had a telling influence on the natural resources, such as decline in green spaces (88% decline in vegetation), wetlands (79% decline), higher air pollutants and a sharp decline in groundwater table….

ECOCIDE/EXTINCTION

Environment: It’s a question of survival now

Bharat Dogra writes: The full dimensions of the environmental crisis in the 21st century need to be understood in wider terms of several critical parameters, together disrupting the life-creating conditions on earth to such an extent as to pose nothing less than a survival crisis for many forms of life and ultimately for human beings….

Planning Commission

Development/Growth

S.G.Vombatkere: Neoliberalism: Its reality exposed

27th June 2016

Dr. Manmohan Singh was a World Bank employee before he became finance minister and later prime minister. As PM, he nominated Montek Ahluwalia from the IMF as Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission. The present RBI Governor, Raghuram Rajan, was Chief Economist in IMF. This is how the neoliberal agenda has been imposed on India….

Consumerism/Lifestyle

Suprabha Seshan: Turn off the Lights

The night is under assault, as indeed all planetary attributes are. Things that happen in the night, like plant respiration, the release of melatonin in our blood streams, the pollination of night-blooming flowers by a spectacular diversity of moths, the dark phase of circadian rhythms, the 24-hour timekeeper that nature abides by, are under attack….

Conflict/Dispossession

A calamity bigger than drought

Archana Mishra writes: Authorities failed to use MGNREGA and NFSA provisions meant for relief in difficult times. Even delayed wage payments forced downtrodden farmers to migrate towards cities. The national average of MGNREGA wages delayed beyond the statutory limit of 15 days is 62 percent of all wage payments for 2015-16, an RTI query revealed….

ALTERNATIVES

Video & report: Time to ditch industrial agriculture: here’s the evidence

25th June 2016

‘ From Uniformity to Diversity: A paradigm shift from industrial agriculture to diversified agroecological systems’, calls for breaking the chains that lock monocultures and industrial-scale feedlots to dominant farming systems in order to unleash truly sustainable approaches. In the accompanying video, Food MythBusters show why we really don’t need industrial agriculture to feed the world….

Conflict/Dispossession

Dmitry Orlov: Negative interest rates and the impending global financial collapse

What the flashing neon words on the wall seem to be saying is: negative interest rates are on the way throughout the “developed world.” In due course, they will demolish any remaining value of the US dollar, and blow up the bond bubble. In turn, this financial collapse will trigger the next stage: commercial collapse….