Home
ALTERNATIVES

ALTERNATIVES

Why we need ‘technologies of reunion’

9th April 2017

Charles Eisenstein writes: We need a parallel system of technology development that can guide society as conventional systems unravel and conventional technologies fail to adequately address our problems. Imagine a worldwide archipelago of land-based institutions of learning, sanctuaries of alternative technologies of earth, mind, matter, and body that are marginal or absent within conventional universities….

Watch: Leading thinkers on the converging crises and alternatives

8th April 2017

The 2017 Center For Progressive Urban Politics Summit brought together an amazing panel that consisted of John Michael Greer, James Howard Kunstler, Chris Martenson, Frank Morris, and Dmitry Orlov. In this video, the panelists talk about global issues ranging from politics, the economy, the food we eat, immigration, labor, poverty, minorities, war, and much more….

Villager Agni Devi at a papaya garden that is a part of the Hesatu forest

Chhandosree

How growing a forest transformed a Jharkhand village

4th April 2017

From VillageSquare.in: The residents of Hesatu village have successfully raised a thriving forest without any intervention from the state or civil society organisations. They have demonstrated how to create a sustainable economy from ecology by raising a forest of over 100,000 trees on what used to be 365 acres of wasteland barely six years ago….

False solutions? 3 ways to evaluate grand climate proposals

3rd April 2017

Jeremy Lent writes: We’re going to be hearing a lot about grand solutions to our climate emergency in the coming years. There’s no shortage of proposals for how to do this. We need a way to distinguish authentic pathways to a sustainable civilization from false solutions. I suggest three ways to consider any such proposal….

SvitalskyBros

Marxism, ecology and the Anthropocene: A debate

26th March 2017

Editor’s Note: Last week, Ecologise carried the well-known Marxist scholar John Bellamy Foster’s foreword to a new book, Facing the Anthropocene. In response, noted eco-socialist writer Saral Sarkar posted a comment questioning the usefulness of Marxist analysis in understanding the global ecological crisis. This short piece, first published on Ecologise, is Foster’s reply to Sarkar….

Sandeep Anirudhan addresses the audience at an Aikyam event

How I became a bankrupt monk: My journey towards building an eco-conscious community

24th March 2017

On the first anniversary of Bangalore’s Aikyam Community for Sustainable Living, founder Sandeep Anirudhan travels back in time to recollect the journey that led to a different approach to building sustainability awareness. ‘The biggest realisation was that there was no isolated solution for any of the problems we face, because everything is connected’, he writes….

Countercurrents.org

Information theory pioneer John Scales Avery on the planet’s converging crises

21st March 2017

From Countercurrents.org: Human cultural evolution can be regarded as an enormous success in many respects. However, thoughtful observers agree that civilization is entering a period of crisis. As all curves move exponentially upward: population, production, consumption, etc, one can observe signs of increasing environmental stress, while the existence of nuclear weapons threaten civilization with destruction….

How renewable energy advocates are hurting the climate cause

19th March 2017

Paul McDivitt writes: Making wind and solar seem like they’re doing better than they really are could come back to bite proponents —and the climate. If people think we are about to replace fossil fuels with renewables, they will be less likely to demand new policies and take actions to lower their own carbon footprints….

Bookshelf: Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System

17th March 2017

John Bellamy Foster writes in the foreword: It’s capitalism and the alienated global environment it has produced that constitutes our “burning house” today. Mainstream environmentalists have generally chosen to do little more than contemplate it, while flames lick the roof and the entire structure threatens to collapse around them. The point, rather, is to change it….

Learning from the past: A new protocol for agricultural education and research in India

16th March 2017

We scientists, each one of us, should ask ourselves what the agricultural establishment needs to do in order effectively to address our current agricultural crisis. Given our present mechanistic scientific paradigm, we are part of the problem, and thus cannot, be part of its solution. Our first task, therefore, is to change our outlook fundamentally….

Kolkata's endangered wetlands provide invaluable ecological benefits to the city

When money does grow on trees

11th March 2017

The services provided by Nature mostly bypasses markets, escapes pricing and defies valuation. Consider this. A 50-year-old tree provides services like oxygen, water recycling, soil conservation and pollution control worth Rs 23 lakh. Cutting and selling it fetches only Rs 50,000. Yet due to ignorance olf its ecological services, felling a tree seems more profitable….

Campaigners outside Pretoria high court during South Africa’s first climate change lawsuit.

James Oatway/CER

How climate change battles are increasingly being fought, and won, in court

10th March 2017

The Guardian reports: Around the world courts are stepping in when politicians fail to act, with South Africa’s government the latest to lose a groundbreaking climate lawsuit with judges ruling against its plans for a new coal-fired power station. The government’s approval of the proposed Thabametsi coal-fired power station was challenged by NGO EarthLife Africa….

Five families that gave up city life for the rural dream

9th March 2017

TheNewsMinute reports: About a half-hour distance from the Tiruvannamalai government bus depot lies the Marudam Farm School in Kanathampoondi… It was in 2009 that the idea for the farm school was born when Govinda and his wife Leela came here for an afforestation project. It was then the couple dreamt of building a sustainable community….

Herman Daly: Thoughts on Pope Francis’ Laudato Si

6th March 2017

The pioneering American economist who helped found the discipline of Ecological Economics, and presently a leading theorist of ‘steady-state economics’, muses on Pope Francis’ ground-breaking encyclical on environment and justice. “At a minimum, he’s given us a more truthful, informed, and courageous analysis of the environmental and moral crisis than have our secular political leaders.”…

10 years of Transition Network: A look back at the early days

The Transition movement refers to grassroot community projects that aim to increase self-sufficiency to reduce the potential effects of energy depletion, climate destruction, and economic instability. The UK-based Transition Network, founded in 2006, inspired the creation of many of the projects. Here, Rob Hopkins, one of its founders, looks back to when it all began….

Court issues ruling in world’s first “Rights of Nature” lawsuit

Intercontinentalcry.org reports: On January 11, 2017 Ecuador’s Esmeraldas Provincial Court handed down its decision on the world’s first constitutionally-based Rights of Nature lawsuit. Amazingly, this historic demand for justice—which simultaneously begs for a shift in merely human rights-based paradigms—was made by people who literally and figuratively live in Ecuador’s margins: The Canton of San Lorenzo….

Dylan Glynn

William H. Kotke: Civilization falls; a new culture emerges

28th February 2017

We must invent a whole new human culture. The human species cannot exist in perpetuity on the earth unless it lives in biological balance with the life around it. Running a net deficit drawdown of the earth’s fertility will not work. Is it not strange that children can understand this statement but world leaders cannot?…

The team from Safe Harvest interacts with Farmers in Niwali (Sendhwa)

YourStory

This company is helping 50,000 farmers across 11 states grow and sell pesticide-free food

27th February 2017

Safe Harvest is a conglomeration of eight civil society organisations that have been working towards and promoting non-pesticide management (NPM) practices among some of India’s poorest and most disenfranchised communities. Today, they work with a farmer base of close to 50,000 across 11 states, many of whom have seen a 20% rise in their income….

Gail Tverberg: The “wind and solar will save us” delusion

26th February 2017

Somehow, most people seem to believe that our economy of 7.5 billion people can get along with a very short list of energy supplies. Given climate change, this short list cannot include fossil fuels, but we believe Wind and Solar can save us. Unfortunately, a transition to such alternative fuels can’t really work. Here’s why….

A documentary on India’s agrarian crisis, by an award-winning young filmmaker

24th February 2017

This 27-year-old documentary filmmaker from Hyderabad has won 104 national and international awards. Anshul Sinha has spent more than a year now, studying and understanding the agrarian crisis that has affected the country. “The vision of the film is to save farmers in India,” says Anshul. Despite his credentials, Anshul’s new film has no takers….