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Ideas/Ideology

Ideas/Ideology

Project Drawdown: Mapping the 100 most substantive solutions to global warming

10th May 2017

Amy Brady writes: Project Drawdown is a coalition of more than two hundred experts who have gathered 100 of the most viable ways to “draw down” carbon from the atmosphere. The result of their research is an immensely readable volume of solutions to climate change written for laypeople but informed by the world’s top experts….

Avijit Pathak: I’m not a Marxist, but I’m grateful for Marx

9th May 2017

Karl Marx was possibly the founder of the most appealing secular religion in modern times. On his birth anniversary I hear a call from within; I feel like paying homage to the prophet of modern times. Though I’m not a Marxist, the oceanic currents in his thinking continue to fascinate students and wanderers like me….

Charles Eisenstein: A New Story of the People

4th May 2017

From TEDxWhitechapel: “Our hearts know that a more beautiful world is possible; but our minds do not know how it’s possible”. In this intelligent and inspiring talk, writer and visionary Charles Eisenstein explores how we can make the transition from the old story of separation, competition and self-interest to a new Story of the People….

How to form a global counter-economy

25th April 2017

From Open Democracy: Open cooperativism is an effort to infuse cooperatives with the basic principles of commons based peer production. Here are six interrelated strategies for post-corporate entrepreneurial coalitions. The aim is to go beyond the classical corporate paradigm, and its extractive profit-maximizing practices, toward the establishment of open cooperatives that cultivate a commons-oriented economy….

www.degrowth.de

Forget ‘developing’ poor countries, it’s time to ‘de-develop’ rich countries

21st April 2017

Jason Hickel writes: Growth isn’t an option any more–we’ve already grown too much. Scientists are now telling us that we’re blowing past planetary boundaries at breakneck speed. The hard truth is that this global crisis is due almost entirely to overconsumption in rich countries. Rich countries must “catch down” to more appropriate levels of development….

Kalpataru, the divine tree of life, depicted at the 8th century Pawon temple, Java

Indiafacts.info

What modern ecology can learn from ancient Hinduism

19th April 2017

Viva Kermani writes: Hinduism is the world’s largest nature based religion that recognises and seeks the Divine in nature and acknowledges everything as sacred. A loss of this understanding that earth is our mother, or rather a deliberate ignorance of this, has resulted in the abuse, and the exploitation of the earth and its resources….

Gopal Aggarwal/Wikimedia Commons

Innovation is overrated; it’s maintenance that matters more

Andrew Russell writes: The most undervalued forms of technological labour are also the most ordinary: those who repair and maintain technologies that already exist. This shift in emphasis involves focusing on the constant processes of entropy and un-doing– and the work we do to slow or halt them, rather than on introduction of novel things….

Gujarat-based Amul kick-started the milk revolution in India

How Indians started drinking milk (and what it has cost us)

17th April 2017

Many people think that milk is normal good food. But a large part of the world until recently never consumed the milk of other animals. Even today, Eastern Asia as a rule does not use milk. So, for some, milk is the greatest food, while for others, milk is one of the five white poisons….

Seeing Wetiko: On capitalism, mind viruses, and antidotes for a world in transition

15th April 2017

From Kosmos Journal: What if we told you that humanity is being driven to the brink of extinction by an illness? That all the poverty, the climate devastation, the perpetual war, and consumption fetishism all around us have roots in a mass psychological infection? What if this infection is not just highly communicable but also self-replicating?…

Rutger Bregman: Wealth isn’t created at the top; it’s only devoured there

10th April 2017

Now, we may disagree about the extent to which success deserves to be rewarded–but virtually all agree that wealth is created primarily at the top. In reality, it is precisely the other way around. This is one of the biggest taboos of our times– the truth that we are living in an inverse welfare state….

Why we need ‘technologies of reunion’

9th April 2017

Charles Eisenstein writes: We need a parallel system of technology development that can guide society as conventional systems unravel and conventional technologies fail to adequately address our problems. Imagine a worldwide archipelago of land-based institutions of learning, sanctuaries of alternative technologies of earth, mind, matter, and body that are marginal or absent within conventional universities….

Watch: Leading thinkers on the converging crises and alternatives

8th April 2017

The 2017 Center For Progressive Urban Politics Summit brought together an amazing panel that consisted of John Michael Greer, James Howard Kunstler, Chris Martenson, Frank Morris, and Dmitry Orlov. In this video, the panelists talk about global issues ranging from politics, the economy, the food we eat, immigration, labor, poverty, minorities, war, and much more….

Meat-eating and the environment: An open letter to Sunita Narain

5th April 2017

Global Environmentalist writes: Your blog post has given every urban Indian a free pass to continue to devour animals as it pleases their taste buds, all in the name of ‘saving the farmers’. The question is, will these people be able to save themselves when we don’t have enough clean water, air and good health?…

Illustration by Jasper Rietman

Warning: living in a city could seriously damage your health

2nd April 2017

Florence Williams writes: Unfortunately for city dwellers, the closer we live to roads, the higher our risk of autism, stroke and cognitive decline in ageing, although the exact reasons haven’t been teased out. Scientists suspect it has something to do with fine particles causing tissue inflammation and altering gene expression in the brain’s immune cells….

Sunita Narain: Why I would not advocate vegetarianism

28th March 2017

Farmers need options to take care of animals that are not producing milk. Or they will be forced to let them stray, to eat the plastic cities throw away and die. By banning meat we are literally taking away half the potential income the livestock owner possesses. It is stealing from the poor, nothing less….

SvitalskyBros

Marxism, ecology and the Anthropocene: A debate

26th March 2017

Editor’s Note: Last week, Ecologise carried the well-known Marxist scholar John Bellamy Foster’s foreword to a new book, Facing the Anthropocene. In response, noted eco-socialist writer Saral Sarkar posted a comment questioning the usefulness of Marxist analysis in understanding the global ecological crisis. This short piece, first published on Ecologise, is Foster’s reply to Sarkar….

Bookshelf: Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System

17th March 2017

John Bellamy Foster writes in the foreword: It’s capitalism and the alienated global environment it has produced that constitutes our “burning house” today. Mainstream environmentalists have generally chosen to do little more than contemplate it, while flames lick the roof and the entire structure threatens to collapse around them. The point, rather, is to change it….

Learning from the past: A new protocol for agricultural education and research in India

16th March 2017

We scientists, each one of us, should ask ourselves what the agricultural establishment needs to do in order effectively to address our current agricultural crisis. Given our present mechanistic scientific paradigm, we are part of the problem, and thus cannot, be part of its solution. Our first task, therefore, is to change our outlook fundamentally….

Herman Daly: Thoughts on Pope Francis’ Laudato Si

6th March 2017

The pioneering American economist who helped found the discipline of Ecological Economics, and presently a leading theorist of ‘steady-state economics’, muses on Pope Francis’ ground-breaking encyclical on environment and justice. “At a minimum, he’s given us a more truthful, informed, and courageous analysis of the environmental and moral crisis than have our secular political leaders.”…

Dylan Glynn

William H. Kotke: Civilization falls; a new culture emerges

28th February 2017

We must invent a whole new human culture. The human species cannot exist in perpetuity on the earth unless it lives in biological balance with the life around it. Running a net deficit drawdown of the earth’s fertility will not work. Is it not strange that children can understand this statement but world leaders cannot?…