“You can’t get this experience of listening to these birds second hand through a screen, or through an MP3 player, or YouTube.You get a simulacra.You get something similar but not in any way the same. Because it is a shallower engagement, the result of that is a shallower wish to act on behalf of it.”…
Read More about Rob Hopkins: Why our imagination needs the dawn chorus
The Aghanashini river
Manjunath Bhat/Flickr, CC BY 2.0
TheWire.in reports: The Aghanashini is one of the last free flowing rivers in Karnataka: it has no major industrial establishments, dams or townships on its banks. It is in this rich and highly productive estuary that the state government plans to build a multi-purpose estuarine port, which’s now one last step away from final clearance….
Read More about A rare, pristine estuary comes under threat in Karnataka‘Greenwashing’ has been defined as creating “a false or misleading picture of environmental friendliness used to conceal or obscure damaging activities.” Not something you would normally associate with the WWF, whose cute Panda logo has helped make it the face of wildlife conservation globally. But there’s more to the story, as this new report shows….
Read More about Not so cute: World Wildlife Fund declared ‘greenwasher of the year’
A record number of guns and animal skins were seized during a recent raid at the Meerut house of a retired Colonel
The Times of India
A recent raid at the Meerut house of a retired Colonel and his national-level shooter son unearthed a shockingly large cache of animal skins, parts and meat, apart from over 100 illegally imported firearms. This feature by Down to Earth analyses the magnitude and international nature of the flourishing illegal trade of Indian wildlife species….
Read More about The illegal and ignominious world of wildlife trafficking
A porter in the Himalayas
Kiril Rusev/Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
From The Wire: Compared to farm, fishery and factory work, Himalayan porterage is rarely the subject of labour scholarship. For that matter, the forest protection and conservation labour of Adivasis and Dalits too rarely occupies the labour scholar’s interest… The biologically and culturally diverse eastern Himalayas are an apt geography to locate this labour-conservation conundrum….
Read More about Spotlight: The invisible conservation workers
The Indian Quarterly
From The Indian Quarterly: Strange things happen in this forest. A bug sucks and then pees. Droplets of bright water shoot out of its bum and fall rain-like on the forest floor. I saw it today with my own eyes. Orange and black bug on a Heliconia leaf, shadow-spangled, tumbling in the gusting wind, peeing….
Read More about Suprabha Seshan: People of the rain
J. Vijaya, India's first female herpetologist, lived alone for many months in a forest cave in Kerala to study cane turtles
Zai Whitaker
This day thirty years ago, the bodily remains of J. Vijaya, India’s first female herpetologist and turtle field biologist, was found in a forest. She was only 28. The cause of her death remains unknown to this day. A moving tribute to one of the most memorable personalities in Indian wildlife conservation, by Janaki Lenin….
Read More about Tribute: Viji, the Turtle GirlFrom Friends of the Earth: The 2015 Indonesian forest fires, started by farmers and palm-oil companies to clear land for plantation, lasted for months and caused massive air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, at one point releasing more carbon dioxide than the entire U.S. economy, and causing an estimated 100,000 premature deaths in the region….
Read More about Historic verdict in Indonesia’s fight against deforestation
Villager Agni Devi at a papaya garden that is a part of the Hesatu forest
Chhandosree
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….
Read More about How growing a forest transformed a Jharkhand villageFrom Yale Environment 360: Ecologist Suzanne Simard, now at the University of British Columbia, has pioneered research into how trees communicate. She has shown how trees use a network of soil fungi to convey their needs and aid neighboring plants. Now she’s warning that threats like clear-cutting and climate change could disrupt these critical networks….
Read More about Suzanne Simard on the networked beauty of forests
The Art of Living Foundation event on the Yamuna floodplains blatantly violated green norms
The Wire reports: India’s environment ministry issued a notification that’s a remarkable show of partisan support to projects that have been illegally operating without environmental approvals. The document lays out a process by which illegal industrial units, mines, ports or hydro projects can be granted clearance and “brought into compliance” within the next six months….
Read More about Exposed: The Indian govt’s plan to get environmental violators off the hook
Representative pic
Souparna Lahiri writes: How will forests provide for such high energy demands being put on them, especially in the name of renewables? In the Global South, there’s a rise in monoculture tree plantations for biofuels, or wood. Biofuel plantations have already caused the clearing of rainforests and threatened animals and humans that depend on them….
Read More about Why our approach to World Forests Day is a threat to forests
Kolkata's endangered wetlands provide invaluable ecological benefits to the city
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….
Read More about When money does grow on treesDr George Schaller, considered one of the finest field biologists in the world, and has a close connection to India. His work with tigers in Madhya Pradesh’s Kanha National Park, revolutionised wildlife research in India. He tells Scroll.in how Indian conservation has changed, why scientists need to engage with governments and what keeps him going….
Read More about George Schaller: ‘India has far too casually allowed development in nature reserves’
Rohan Chakravarty
Rohan Chakravarty, creator of a popular comic column, writes: We know of Jane Goodall, Rachel Carson and Dian Fossey. But do you know about these heroes? This Women’s Day (8th March), Green Humour celebrates some ‘wild’ women of India- J.Vijaya, Prerna Bindra, Aparajita Datta, Divya Mudappa, Vidya Athreya, Kiran Pathija, Nandini Velho and Tiasa Adhya (click…
Read More about Spotlight: Some ‘wild’ women of IndiaIntercontinentalcry.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….
Read More about Court issues ruling in world’s first “Rights of Nature” lawsuit
Representative pic
Live Mint reports: Kerala is going through its worst drought in a century, damaging 30,353 hectares of agricultural land and resulting in a loss of Rs225 crore. Kerala revenue minister E. Chandrasekharan, during the budget session of the assembly on Wednesday, said only 44% of water remains in the state’s reservoirs as on 17 January….
Read More about ‘Wet’ Kerala reeling under worst drought in a century
The Bramble Cay melomys, the first mammal species to go extinct from climate change
Kurt Cobb wrtites: According to scientists, we are amidst the Sixth Great Extinction, caused by human activity. If you consider that the broader world with which we interact has millions of species of which we’re not aware of, we could easily cause an organism essential to our survival to go extinct without even realizing it….
Read More about Which species are we sure we can survive without?
In Kaziranga national park, rangers shoot people to protect rhinos. The park features in a new BBC investigation, which highlights some of the conflicts that characterise contemporary conservation, as the need to protect endangered species comes into contact with the lives and rights of people who live in and around the increasingly threatened national parks….
Read More about Kaziranga: The park that shoots people to protect rhinosRitwick Dutta, noted environment lawyer and founder of the highly accomplished Legal Initiative for Forest and Environment (LIFE), received the Bhagirath Prayas Samman, an award that recognises efforts towards protection and conservation of rivers. Manu Moudgil caught up with him on his journey so far and how we can further expand the constituency of environment….
Read More about Ritwick Dutta: ‘We need to have a selfish interest in environment’
