The history of plant life, records of its settlement on land as well as its death and evacuation from these spaces, a census of plants and trees — all these constitute our national history, not only the life of kings, queens and the famous.
Read More about What will be the history of India without the history of its plant life?Dr. Iain McGilchrsit talks about the left-brain right-brain divide, culture and cognition in the West, metaphysics, philosophy and how science and technology affect our society.
Read More about [WATCH] We are living in a deluded world: Interview with Iain McGilchrist
What’s wrong with the popular Miyawaki method of ecological restoration?
Read More about How Mr Miyawaki Broke My Heart
The founder of Deccan Development Society not only popularised millets but also worked for agro-biodiversity, food sovereignty, women’s empowerment, Dalit rights, social justice and local knowledge systems.
Read More about P.V. Satheesh, the Original Millets Man of India
Author (with spectacles) at Narmada Sangharsh Yatra (Struggle Journey), 1990
Photo by Shailendra Yashwant
The many faces of India’s Narmada movement: Since the mid-1980s, the Narmada valley has also been the site of one of Independent India’s most iconic and globally well-known people’s movements, the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement). For the last nearly 40 years, this movement has raised questions about and tried to stop, a series of mega-dams along the river and its tributaries.
Read More about It did not stop the dam, but is it a failure?
There is no such thing as a perfect society, and anyone who tries to build one will either go mad or become a tyrant. Humans are fallen, or just natural, and both of those words are synonyms for ‘imperfect’. What is ‘perfection’ anyway? It is a concept designed by a part of the modern human mind – the part that likes clean lines, easy answers, plots that end by neatly tying up all the threads. The quest for perfection is a quest for homogeneity and control, and it leads to the gulag and the guillotine, the death camp and the holy war. Even if we could agree on what perfection amounted to, we would none of us be equipped to build it.
Read More about Paul Kingsnorth: The Great Unsettling
For years, normality has been stretched nearly to breaking-point, a rope pulled tighter and tighter, waiting for a nip of the black swan’s beak to snap it in two. Now that it’s snapped, do we tie its ends back together, or shall we undo its dangling braids, to see what we might weave from them?…
Read More about Charles Eisenstein: The Coronation
From Climate and Capitalism: Evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace explains the tight links between new viruses, the epidemiologically dangerous methods of industrial food production, and corporate profits. “To understand why viruses are becoming more dangerous, we must investigate industrial models of agriculture and livestock production. But, few governments, and few scientists, are prepared to do so.”…
Read More about Big Farms make Big Flu: The deadly connection between industrial farming and pandemics
From CBC Radio: Wind, rain, wildlife, and how they interact with the different sizes and shapes of leaves and branches all make up what David George Haskell calls the “distinct voices” of trees. His new book closely examines a dozen trees to show how they’re joined to the natural world, and to humanity as well….
Read More about The Songs of Trees: Stories From Nature’s Great Connectors
The science is telling us that the global economy will experience a depression as the reality of the coronavirus pandemic sinks in. Authorities pushing complacency as a short term financial panacea are doing an enormous disservice to the people. Instead, they should prepare to deal with a global depression while limiting the spread of the virus….
Read More about Charles Hugh Smith: Could Covid-19 overwhelm us in the months ahead?
From Live Mint: Dodgy numbers, a ‘flexible’ approach to the facts and self-serving definitions beginning with how “forest cover” itself is actually defined. This is what accounts for the unanimous skepticism among ecologists and other experts of the “growth” in India’s forest cover, claimed by the recently released India State of the Forest Report 2019….
Read More about Just like the economy, India’s forests too are thriving only on paper
Stephen Corry writes: The latest idea to be heavily promoted by big conservation NGOs is doubling the world’s “Protected-Areas” so that they cover 30% of the globe’s lands and oceans. What better answer to climate change and biodiversity loss? But it’s actually dangerous nonsense which would have exactly the reverse effect to what we’re told….
Read More about The conservation industry’s ‘New Deal for Nature’ is a disaster for people and planet
From The Conversation: People around the world and throughout history have used birds to think about and predict the future. This new research project that compared reports from six continents found that people from diverse communities pay attention to particular birds and what they reveal about the world around us, from approaching weather to illness….
Read More about Ethno-ornithology: What the birds have to tell us
Álvaro de Regil Castilla writes: Over the years, as I watched CSR evolve, it gradually became evident that it was really a hoax, for the simple reason that short-term maximization of profit is baked into the corporate DNA. Businesses thus cannot be socially responsible as long as the institutions of democracy remain captured by marketocracy….
Read More about Why “Corporate Social Responsibility” is a hoax
From Wired: It’s the worst locust outbreak to strike Africa in decades, and Pakistan and India’s border states too have been badly affected. And the problem is about to get a lot worse—the insect population could boom by a factor of 500 by June. Unlike other species, a rapidly-warming planet present an advantage to locusts….
Read More about The terrifying science behind the accelerating locust plague
Alyssa Hull writes: We desperately need narratives that move past apocalypse as an endpoint, not only because there are people and societies already living through the Western world’s vision of climate apocalypse, but also because it can only inspire a helpless waiting for the post-apocalypse to arrive, suddenly, to cleave the past from the future….
Read More about Hopepunk, Solarpunk: Here are climate narratives that go beyond the Apocalypse
From Al Jazeera: Scandinavian countries have some of the highest levels of happiness on the planet, and top virtually every ranking of human development. They re worth celebrating for all they get right. But there’s a problem. They’re an ecological disaster, with some of the highest levels of resource-use and CO2 emissions in the world….
Read More about Jason Hickel: The Nordic model is a disaster for the environment
From BuzzFeed: The 2010s will likely lock down the record for the hottest decade so far. The 10-year stretch boasted many of the most expensive and destructive catastrophes ever. Here’s a review of six of the most devastating climate-records we broke this decade. Also, a short video featuring expert views on looming climate tipping points….
Read More about This was the decade climate change slapped us in the face
Ted Trainer writes: The prize has gone to three people studying how the poor can derive more benefit from existing “development” practices. It sees no reason to question the existing market and growth-driven economy and its derivative, development theory. It doesn’t threaten the massively unjust and environmentally destructive global systems that keep billions in poverty….
Read More about The 2019 Nobel Prize shows why we need to dump conventional economics
In his new book ‘Blip’, Christopher Clugston synthesizes the evidence produced by hundreds of research studies to quantify the causes, implications, and consequences associated with industrial humanity’s predicament. He presents compelling evidence to show how industrial civilisation’s enormous and ever-increasing utilisation of nonrenewable natural resources will lead to global societal collapse in the near future….
Read More about Blip: Humanity’s 300 year self-terminating experiment with industrialism
