Jason Hickel writes: When it comes to climate change, the problem is not just the type of energy we are using, it is what we’re doing with it. What would we do with 100% clean energy? Exactly what we are currently doing with fossil fuels: raze more forests, build more meat farms, expand industrial agriculture….
Read More about Clean energy won’t save us – only a new economic system can do thatIn this video, which has since gone viral, Binay Kumar, a corporate employee turned farmer addresses an audience in Bangalore, offering a sharp take on India’s rampant urbanization, catastrophic development model, the ongoing agrarian crisis and the rural-urban divide that feeds it. He states the obvious, but bitter truth: “Everybody wants to eat, but nobody wants to grow.”…
Read More about Watch: A blistering critique of India’s “destructive development”
Ted Trainer writes: Following is an outline of the case, firstly that present ways are grossly unsustainable and secondly that the solution must involve far lower rates of production and consumption and GDP, frugal and self-sufficient lifestyles in small, localized, and largely self-governing communities, in a zero-growth economy which is not driven by market forces….
Read More about Sustainability – The Simpler Way perspective
The Economic Times
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….
Read More about These green socialists want to see a ‘hundred flowers bloom’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….
Read More about Suprabha Seshan: Turn off the Lights
Broroti Roy writes that in India, many are reluctant to use the term ‘degrowth’ because growth is seen as the only way to get rid of poverty. However, there are many grassroots initiatives emerging here, too, which follow the same principles of respecting the planet’s limits and pursuing the core values of equity and justice….
Read More about Bookshelf: Degrowth – A Vocabulary for a New EraScience Daily reports: Mental illnesses and mood disorders are common in cities, scientists found that this is partly due to the reduced access to nature. The authors of the study published in the journal Science said that the growing tensions from the necessary role of the urban cities have disconnected humans from the natural world….
Read More about Video & Report: Disconnect with nature driving mental illness in urban areas
Economic development and modernity have transformed livelihoods into deadlihoods. They are wiping out millennia-old livelihoods that were ways of life, with no sharp division between work and leisure; replacing them with dreary assembly line jobs where we wait desperately for holidays… Less visible is the pauperisation of those deprived of natural resources they depended on….
Read More about Ashish Kothari: Livelihoods vs. Deadlihoods
David Blittersdorf writes: Our industrial society can handle about a 10% voluntary energy reduction across the board, doing things like walking more and carpooling. To get to the necessary level (which, by some estimations, will be about a 60-80% decrease in energy usage), will be impossible unless we change the way we think about things….
Read More about The Peak Oil dilemma
P.Sainath, People's Archive of Rural India
A resident of Pune, Maharashtra’s second-most developed city, uses five times as much water as her counterpart in Latur, the district most ravaged by drought in south-central Marathwada region. That’s the extent of water inequality in Maharashtra, according to a new analysis, characterised by disproportionate availability and consumption of water across regions, crops and consumers….
Read More about Consume more, pollute more, pay less, ask for more dams: The average Indian city’s water policy
Shonali Muthalaly writes: After all, ‘natural’ is an easy term to manipulate — bio-fertilisers and bio pesticides are technically natural too. When the farmer controls the entire process, using dung from village cattle, neem cakes and local earthworms, it’s a simpler, cleaner, and more straightforward process. It also means that the farmer has full control….
Read More about Does buying organic food also mean you are eating responsibly?
Rebecca Hendin
Gayatri Jayaraman writes on India’s new ‘urban poor’, “the metro-dwelling twenty somethings who’ve internalised the pressures surrounding them, and spend a majority of their salaries on keeping up the lifestyles that they believe are essential to earning those salaries.” We present the original BuzzFeed article which went viral recently, and some of the responses it provoked….
Read More about Spotlight: Millennials who’re broke, hungry, but on trend
Martin Simpson writes: It is impossible to read Farmageddon without coming to the conclusion that the world’s food and agriculture system is screwed. This is a system that produces enormous quantities of food, yet wastes up to a third of it… What it also produces is environmental disaster, ill health in humans and stressful and unhealthy animals….
Read More about Bookshelf: Farmageddon – The True Cost of Cheap Meat
Vidhyadhar Date writes: A developed country is not one where the poor drive cars, but one where the rich use public transport. Building more roads to reduce congestion is like trying to put out a fire with petrol. India has failed to learn from developed countries’ mistakes and is on a disastrous path of motorization….
Read More about Cars, Capitalism and India
Shail Shrestha writes at Local Futures: Technology transfer from the North to South has long been regarded as the path to a better life in less-developed regions of the world. But even the best and the most sustainable technology proposed in Paris would make Nepal less sustainable than it is today, leading us in the wrong direction….
Read More about The Paris Climate Talks: A Nepali View
Shutterstock
Maywa Montenegro reports: Very few technologies merit the epithet “game changer” — but a new genetic engineering tool known as CRISPR-Cas9 is one of them. Since we first developed the ability to alter genetic material, efforts to do so have required months or even years of molecular tinkering. With CRISPR, precision and speed have soared….
Read More about CRISPR is coming, with big implications for food, farmers, consumers and nature
Pradeep Gaur/Mint
Sudipto Mundle writes: India’s current high growth is organically linked to food price inflation, and the rising margin between the wholesale and retail price of food. Should we continue to celebrate India’s status as the world’s fastest growing economy, while leaving it to consumers to cope with rising food prices as best as they can?…
Read More about India’s high growth rate and the price of food
Letslunch.com
Way back in 2009, long before the term “sharing economy” was part of everyday conversation, Shareable.net started covering this movement that aimed to connect people, reduce environmental impact, put idle goods to use, and challenge the idea that there’s no alternative to capitalism as we know it today. Here are their top 10 most read articles….
Read More about Top 10 stories on the emerging global ‘Sharing Economy’
We can have it all; that is the promise of our age. We can own every gadget we are capable of imagining, without compromising Earth’s capacity to sustain us. The promise that makes all this possible is that as economies develop, they become more efficient in their use of resources. In other words, they decouple….
Read More about The false promise of economic growth
Elanthemag.com
Finding new ways to continue with the same model of growth and consumption will put enormous pressure on finite resources Swati Agarwal & Mihir Mathur, The Wire With two major conferences this year on the deeply integrated issues of climate change (to be held in Paris) and sustainable development (that took place in UNGA, New…
Read More about Curbing Consumption is the Only Way Out to Avoid Climate Change
