The fact that the language of localism is being increasingly co-opted by authoritarians around the world is itself a sign of localism’s appeal. Left uprooted and adrift by the globalized economy, people are desperate for a sense of connection: to one another, to the living world, to a place and culture that’s familiar to them….
Read More about Helena Norberg-Hodge: The promise and pitfalls of localism
When thinking about climate solutions, people often picture technical fixes. In principle, scientists and engineers could deploy any these–but should they? To answer this, society needs the humanities and its intangible tools, argues Steven Allison & Tyrus Miller. Also included, a talk on ‘Climate Change and the Humanities’ by Subaltern Studies pioneer Dr Dipesh Chakrabarty….
Read More about Why science needs the humanities to solve climate change
From Down to Earth: India is going through one of the worst farm crisis in its history. To understand about this crisis we have to investigate the roots of the celebrated Green Revolution and what happened after that. This is the story of Jaunty, the village which was once the flagbearer of the Green Revolution….
Read More about Jaunti Live: The first Green Revolution village now has a farm crisis
From The New York Times: Scientist Monica Gagliano’s botanical research, which has broken boundaries in the field of plant behavior, indicate that plants are, to some extent, intelligent. Her experiments suggest that they can learn behaviors and remember them. Her work also suggests that plants can “hear” running water and even produce clicking noises, perhaps to communicate….
Read More about Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries
From The Guardian: Roasted by heatwaves, this year the world went into ecological overshoot on 29 July, the earliest yet. Unless we begin again with economics, understanding and letting go what has gone wrong, one day soon everything will have fallen apart and nobody will quite know why. But the answer will be: it was the economy, stupid….
Read More about Andrew Simms: Economics is doing great harm – so let’s rethink it
Two botanists stumbled across this living kauri stump while on a walk in the woods
Sebastian Leuzinger/The Atlantic
From The Atlantic: When Leuzinger saw the stump on a walk with fellow botanist Martin Bader, his head turned. He saw that even though it had no leaves, stems, or greenery of any kind, it did still contain living tissue—and when he knocked, it sounded different from deadwood. All appearances to the contrary, it’s still alive. But how?…
Read More about Super-organism, or the mystery of the undead kauri tree
David B. Lauterwasser writes: Very few people today think that our global civilization is on the brink of collapse. Most of the news consist of disturbing stories on increasingly overwhelming issues that, plainly spoken, seem impossible to solve. And yet, no one even recognizes that it is collapse that’s started to unfold all around us….
Read More about Global collapse has begun, but this doesn’t mean we have to give up hope
Subhash Palekar receives the Padma Shri in 2016
The Indian Express
Influential natural farming advocate Subhash Palekar recently approved the use of Genetically Modified crops in his well-known “Zero Budget Natural Farming-ZBNF” method. In an equally startling interview, he described organic farming as “worse than the atom bomb.” Here, two veteran practitioners respond to Palekar, while reviewing the history of the Organic/Natural Farming movement in India….
Read More about Budget & Zero Budget Farming: A response to Subhash Palekar
The irony couldn’t be crueler. Even as large parts of India battle floods, a new report has ranked the country 13th among “extremely highly water-stressed” nations. Alarming news, since India has “three times the population of the other 17 combined”. Former Water Resources chief Shashi Shekhar casts a knowing eye on India’s ballooning water crisis….
Read More about Shashi Shekhar: “We are not allowing sub-soil water to recharge”
In Richard Louv’s words: “Glenn Albrecht is among the most important eco-philosophers today. He is also a map-maker: he names the roads ahead, the dead-ends, the detours, and potential destinations. And, unlike so many scientists, he does so with a new language of emotions―those now emerging from the tragedy and the possibility of the Earth.”…
Read More about Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World
From BBC: “The climate math is brutally clear: While the world can’t be healed within the next few years, it may be fatally wounded by negligence until 2020,” said Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, founder of the Potsdam Climate Institute. The sense is that the end of next year is the last chance saloon for climate change….
Read More about Climate change: 12 years to save the planet? Make that 18 months
From The Wire: This specific patch of some 1,000 acres near Dargah Honnur village in Anantapur district –once covered by millet cultivation– has over many decades become more and more a desert. That has been driven by often paradoxical factors –and created the kind of space that filmmakers send out location scouts to look for….
Read More about P. Sainath: How a patch of Anantapur came to be a desert
From Trophic Tales: The focus on the welfare of individual domesticated animals might be an extension of the modernist tendency to simplify and discriminate. The morality of living, eating, and dying is more complex than two-word slogans can prescribe. If we care about animals —wild or domesticated— we’ve to think in terms of entire ecosystems….
Read More about Eating for a better world: Some questions and a guide
The fact is, wild animals do not make sense under capitalism. Capitalism operates according to a quite simple set of rules. Your desires are respected in accordance with the amount of financial resources you have available to you. Every wild animal is poor, thus no wild animal gets a “vote” over how resources are used….
Read More about Nathan J. Robinson: How wild animals became the proletariat
Literature has always conditioned our philosophical understanding of nature. Likewise, ecology as a way of seeing and reading the world has irrevocably changed the study of literature itself. We must examine literary/cultural production in relation to questions of environmental impact, ecological thinking and the implications of revising conventional ways of articulating human with extra-human nature….
Read More about K. Ramachandran: Literature in the age of climate change
In 2018 April, a 81-year-old Peruvian indigenous healer was murdered by a Canadian man while attempting to extract her knowledge of traditional healing practices. He was in turn lynched by the local people. The sordid incident has since brought together traditional healers in the Peruvian Amazon to resist the growing threat of Western ‘spiritual extractivism’….
Read More about ‘Spiritual extractivism”: Ayahuasca, colonialism, and the death of a healer
Jack Thomas writes: I have worked for the last 15 years or so as a professional in various parts of the environmental movement. And I’m sorry. All of us who have feasted off the carcass of a dying planet bear some responsibility, but those of us who got paid to know what was happening and…
Read More about An apology from an environmentalist
The task of explaining the wider issues associated with air conditioning is a daunting task as the weather gets warmer. In ‘Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer)’, author Stan Cox shows how indoor climate control is colliding with an out-of-control outdoor climate….
Read More about Air Conditoning: The all-too costly feeding and care of a familiar beast
From Ecohustler: Carnival Corporation, the world’s largest luxury cruise operator, emits 10 times more air pollution than all of Europe’s cars, says a new study. Carnival’s cruise ships emitted nearly 10 times more sulphur oxide around European coasts than did all 260 million European cars in 2017, a new analysis by Transport & Environment reveals….
Read More about Carnival: One corporation to pollute them all
“I sprouted, thrust into this world without anyone consulting me…” Thus starts US Astronaut Don Pettit’s quasi-fictional account of ten days in the life of a plant growing on the International Space Station. Among other things, the plant expresses its growing awareness of people it interacts with, and the fact that they eat its ‘kind’….
Read More about Diary of a Space Zucchini: An Astronaut Imagines His Vegetable’s Voice
