Nayantara Narayanan reports: The UPA government left behind a legacy of weakened safeguards for India’s environment, forests and forest-dwelling people. The Narendra Modi government has lost no time in weakening them further. The process has been so accelerated that journalists have struggled to keep pace with them. Here is a look at seven reported changes….
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Kristian Buus
Bill McKibben writes: The time has come to turn up the heat on the small band of companies and people still willing to get rich off fossil fuel, even though it’s now utterly clear they’re breaking the planet. The time has come to show that we understand we’re in this together across borders and boundaries….
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Ugo Bardi writes: Their oversized antlers were beneficial for Irish Elk males in sexual competition. However, the weight of the antlers was also a burden and it has been argued that it was perhaps the main reason that led to the extinction of this species. With humans, we may consider language to be the same. …
Read More about How the greatest technology ever developed backfired on us
Pratham Books
The full text of a recent talk given by prominent ecologist Madhav Gadgil, a former member of the Scientific Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India and the Head of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP) of 2010. It tries to explore the significant issue of when and why people turn against conservation….
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Frans Lanting
Bill Laurance writes: Some 25 million km of new paved roads, thousands of dams, and hundreds of thousands of new mining, oil and gas projects, are being planned, roughly 90% of them in developing nations. Their environmental impacts could easily dwarf climate change as thousands of projects penetrate into the world’s last surviving wild areas….
Read More about An infrastructure tsunami is being unleashed on the environment in the name of ‘development’
The endangered Northern White Rhino
A planet where caged wild animals go extinct is also one that warehouses its elderly in nursing homes. A world where the last white rhinos age in zoos is also a world of war, racism, poverty, and ecocide. It’s impossible for one to exist without the others. All are part of the same unholy matrix….
Read More about Charles Eisenstein: In a Rhino, Everything
Frida Kahlo
Atulya Bingham, author of ‘Mudball’, writes: With an unwavering fascination in the end of the world, environmentalism has attempted to scare humanity into acting, and we are now seeing just how spectacularly these scare tactics have failed. Not that the scare isn’t based on solid foundations, it’s more that apparently, scared people are not particularly effective at mobilising….
Read More about Atulya Bingham: Where did environmentalism go wrong?Since its formation Chhattisgarh has become the new destination of domestic and foreign investment. Sunil Kumar’s award-winning documentary Daan Se Raakh (Rice Bowl to Ashtray) captures displacement and industrialization in Chhattisgarh. It critically investigates the impact of unbridled industrialization, privatization of water, and acquisition of agricultural land on the life and livelihoods of the rural population….
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My hypothesis—let’s call it the Technospheratu hypothesis—is that the technosphere, having risen up on top of and in opposition to Gaia and the biosphere, possesses a certain primitive emergent intelligence that allows it to grow in complexity and power and to dominate the biosphere to an ever-greater extent. Unlike Gaia, it is a parasite upon the biosphere….
Read More about Bookshelf: Shrinking the Technosphere by Dmitry Orlov
This is why so many seasoned activists succumb to despair after decades of struggle. Do you think we can beat the military-industrial-financial-agricultural-pharmaceutical-NGO-educational-political complex at its own game? But the modern environmental movement, and most especially the climate change movement, has attempted just that, risking defeat but also often worsening the situation even in its victories….
Read More about The Revolution is Love: A missive from Charles Eisenstein
A new study provides one of the strongest cases yet that Earth has entered a new geological epoch. The question of whether humans’ environmental impact has tipped Earth into an “Anthropocene” – ending the current Holocene which began 12,000 years ago – will be put to the geological body that formally approves such time divisions….
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Aarti Sridhar writes: It is in the ordinary everyday life of fishers and in the political strategies of their leaders that one finds the outlines of a new kind of environmentalism which’s fluid and defies water-tight categorisations. This ethic suggests that it is futile to remain wholly preservationist or utilitarian, or entirely biocentric or anthropocentric….
Read More about Marine parks in India – a case for maritime environmentalismAn alarming new study has shown that the world’s forests are not only disappearing rapidly, but areas of “core forest” are vanishing even faster. A tsunami of new roads, dams, power lines, pipelines and other infrastructure is rapidly slicing into the world’s last wild places, opening them up to fragmentation, poaching and other destructive activities….
Read More about The world’s forests will collapse if we don’t learn to say ‘no’
Grist / Amelia Bates
People are not going to be frightened into caring. Scientific evidence-based predictions about what will happen 10, 20, or 50 years in the future are not going to make them care, not enough. That requires making it personal. And that requires facing the reality of loss. And that requires experiencing grief. There’s no other way….
Read More about Charles Eisenstein: Climate Change, grief and carbon reductionismSciDev Net reports: India, Colombia and Nigeria have the most cases of conflict caused by climate change and environmental disputes, according to a map of global ecological conflict. The Environmental Justice Atlas shows that more than 200 conflicts in India are caused by ecological disputes and scarcities of basic resources such as water and forests….
Read More about Map shows India leads the world in ecological conflictColin Todhunter writes: A new paper by Rosemary A. Mason in the Journal of Biological Physics and Chemistry, titled ‘The sixth mass extinction and chemicals in the environment’ indicates that a ‘sixth extinction’ is presently under way (The Sixth Extinction, describes the ongoing extinction of species during the present Holocene epoch – since around 10,000 BCE). Download paper: The sixth mass extinction and chemicals in the…
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Frans Lanting
From the blurb: Around the world, people are increasingly facing a future that is crowded and hot, subject to violent weather extremes and a changing climate, where the rich and poor inhabit separate spheres and governments are unable or unwilling to confront these most vital challenges. For India, this reality is the very tangible present….
Read More about New book: Elemental India : The Natural World in Crisis
A Guarani family mourns the death of a member
Survival international
According to a new report published by Survival International, the rate of self-inflicted deaths within the Guarani tribe is 34 times the Brazilian national average, and statistically the highest among any society anywhere on earth. Suicide rates among many other indigenous peoples such as Aboriginal Australians and Native Americans in Alaska also remain exceptionally high….
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Frida Kahlo
Author Charles Eisenstein writes: We will not escape this crisis so long as we see the planet and everything on it as instruments of our utility. The present climate change narrative veers too close to instrumental utilitarian logic — that we should value the earth because of what will happen to us if we don’t….
Read More about Charles Eisenstein: What We Do to Nature, We Do to Ourselves
Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years, and if current rates of degradation continue all of the world’s top soil could be gone within 60 years, a senior UN official said Chris Arsenault, Reuters ROME (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years, and if current rates of degradation…
Read More about Only 60 years of farming left if soil degradation continues
