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Inspiration/Musings

Indigenous Terra Madre festival – The Shillong Declaration

7th July 2016

The Indigenous Terra Madre festival 2015 at Shillong brought together indigenous peoples from around the world to share knowledge about food, nutrition and biocultural diversity. The Shillong Declaration, asserts that everyone has a right to good, clean and fair food and consequently the responsibility to protect the heritage, tradition and culture that make this possible….

The commons: A credible strategy for building a radically different world

29th June 2016

David Bollier writes: How are we to imagine and build a radically different world when the incumbent system aggressively resists change? Our challenge is not just articulating alternatives, but identifying strategies for actualizing them. The commons —a paradigm, a discourse, an ethic, and a set of social practices— holds great promise in transcending this conundrum….

Suprabha Seshan: Turn off the Lights

27th June 2016

The night is under assault, as indeed all planetary attributes are. Things that happen in the night, like plant respiration, the release of melatonin in our blood streams, the pollination of night-blooming flowers by a spectacular diversity of moths, the dark phase of circadian rhythms, the 24-hour timekeeper that nature abides by, are under attack….

It’s raining big cats on dogged, destructive development

23rd June 2016

Irfan Syed writes: After it finished reclaiming land from water and then claiming the air (high-rises), the city of Mumbai, being a financial, marketing, and glamour capital and therefore having ceaseless immigration, has been devouring land, like a super-starved T-Rex. After eating up most of legit land, it’s been turning its attention to… the forest….

The climate change PR disaster

20th June 2016

Bob Pickard writes: It is remarkable how little has actually been done to deal with climate change – and the current lack of public affairs urgency is absolutely breathtaking… There are many reasons why climate change is such a vexing communications conundrum; but as a PR professional, here is what I‘ve pieced together so far….

How a mass campaign helped vote out glyphosate in EU

12th June 2016

Europe recently took an extraordinary vote, refusing to grant Monsanto a license for its main product and cornerstone of its empire – the cancer-linked weed killer glyphosate. A key role was played by a massive campaign initiated by activist organization Avaaz, with 2 million signing their petition to the EU. Here’s how they did it….

Representative pic

Norway becomes world’s first country to ban deforestation

9th June 2016

EcoWatch reports: Norway has become the first country to ban deforestation. The Norwegian Parliament pledged May 26 that the government’s public procurement policy will be deforestation-free. Any product that contributes to deforestation won’t be used in the Scandinavian country. Norway’s action plan also includes a requires the government to exercise due care in biodiversity protection….

Charles Eisenstein: By their fruits ye shall know them

29th May 2016

If you’ve experienced the so-called impossible, then the impossibility of humanity making the transition is no longer so clear. If someone can recover from “incurable” stage 4 pancreatic cancer, what else is possible? What is the correlate of that on the level of politics or ecology? Many young people are beginning to explore this question….

Life in Syntropy: The story of a transformation

26th May 2016

“Life in Syntropy” is a short film that was screened at the Paris climate talks. It tells the story of Brazilian farmer Ernst Gotsch, who bought 1,200 acres of completely deforested land on the edge of the rainforest in 1984 and transformed it into a remarkably biodiverse farm that reverses climate change by sequestering carbon….

Hitler Denial: A comic on global climate action

25th May 2016

Today, global action to stop climate change is inconceivable. Yet, in 1938, global action to stop Nazi Germany was also inconceivable. The world was in Hitler denial. Australian cartoonist Stuart McMillen, whose acclaimed long-form comics are inspired by science, ecology, sustainability and economics, takes on the most daunting challenge of our times – climate change….

Ghagh: Why a 16th century farmer-poet is still relevant

24th May 2016

Mrinal Pande writes: For more than four centuries, Ghagh, literally “the sly one”, has been undoubtedly the most popular of poet philosophers for farming communities in the Indo-Gangetic plains. An astronomer and agricultural guru, Ghagh’s pithy couplets discuss crop cycles, seeds, tips for buying healthy cattle, and reflections on vagaries of both man and nature….

Anthropocene, or the art of living on a damaged planet

19th May 2016

Donna Harraway: I’m going to propose that the Cthulucene might be a way to collect up the questions for naming the epoch, for naming what’s happening in the airs, waters, and places, in the rocks, oceans, and atmospheres. Perhaps needing both the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene, but offering something else, something just maybe more livable….

Bastar: Conservation in the time of conflict

18th May 2016

Madhu Ramnath reports: Unknown to the rest of the country, a small group of adivasis from the forested villages in central Bastar have been busy doing work that would make conservationists proud. People from Sandh Karmari, Kakalgur, Kangoli and nearby villages have been gathering native seeds and raising them in nurseries in fairly large numbers….

What Gandhi can teach us about sustainability

9th May 2016

Vaidehi Daptardar writes: Though not a structured model, Gandhi’s concept of trusteeship envisioned every member of society as the trustee of wealth generated out of the collective efforts of all. He expected that trusteeship will result in non-violent and non-exploitative socio-economic relations and development models based on production systems centred around the preservation of nature….

Video: Demain – The documentary that’s taking over France by storm

8th May 2016

The rise of the film ‘Demain‘ appears unstoppable. Viewed in France now by almost a million people, winner of the Cesar award for Best Documentary, the film has been received with standing ovations, and has inspired many to roll their sleeves up and do things. Rob Hopkins’ of the Transition Network’ interviews director Cyril Dion….

Nesta.org.uk

Bookshelf: 150 Strong – A Pathway to a Different Future

25th April 2016

Rob O’ Grady explains why none of the existing large-scale systems —be they capitalist or communist— would work. For a community to function well, it must resolve conflicts as they arise. It can only operate if we personally know every other person. This limits the maximum size of the community to Dunbar’s Number—around 150 individuals….

Seven projects around the world that protect soil

15th April 2016

Rocco Pallin writes: Thirty-three percent of soil worldwide is degraded, and 50,000 square kilometers of soil are lost each year. Soil is not a renewable resource and “isn’t recoverable within a human lifespan,” but sustainable practices could increase the world’s food production by 58 percent. Here are seven projects helping to restore the world’s soil….

Video: Learning from water – What if we need to disobey to survive?

13th April 2016

Nikhil VJ writes: Although water is a liquid, it breaks nearly all the rules that liquids follow, and has characteristics that are totally unique. It is precisely the rule-bending characteristics of water that make life possible. In what other systems can a little breaking of the rules be essential to making life possible, sustainable, thriving?…

Video: Bhutanese PM Tshering Tobgay on growth, happiness and carbon emissions

11th April 2016

Deep in the Himalayas, on the border between China and India, lies the Kingdom of Bhutan, which has pledged to remain carbon neutral for all time. In this illuminating talk by TED, Bhutan’s Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay shares his country’s mission to put happiness before economic growth and set a world standard for environmental preservation….

Special: Ringing Cedars and the new, silent revolution in Russia

10th April 2016

The Ringing Cedars of Russia series of books have sold over ten million copies in Russia, and has inspired a massive movement in earth consciousness there. Its part of a new, silent revolution in Russia, where more and more people are leaving the cities to live closer to nature. Interestingly, the Russian government actively supports it….