Here’s a thinker, who in the 1960s, declared climate change as a defining problem of the age. Who accused his fellow environmentalists of advocating mere “technical fixes” of capitalism, instead of addressing root causes. But today, his ideas are enjoying an unexpected revival. Damian White pays tribute to Murray Bookchin, who died on this day in 2006….
Read More about Tribute: Murray Bookchin and the ecology of freedom
Amita Baviskar writes: Pranay Lal’s Indica, describes the first 4,600 million years of the subcontinent, comprising a cast of fascinating characters in a drama that begins with the Big Bang and closes with the arrival of Homo sapiens, present-day humans, in India some 70,000 years ago. But along with sparking appreciation, it also raises apprehensions….
Read More about Bookshelf: Indica—A Deep Natural History Of The Indian Subcontinent
The Hindu
From The Hindu: An afforestation initiative led by naturalists and locals, with support from forest and revenue department officials, has resulted in the Arunachala hill in Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu, shedding its barren, brown visage. Lalitha Sridhar reports on the decade-plus-long turnaround of a damaged fragile, semi-arid ecosystem by successfully harnessing scientific expertise and local knowledge….
Read More about How a holy hill got its groves back
Will Falk writes: Just like an owl on a chain is no longer an owl, and an elephant in a zoo is no longer an elephant, humans cut off from the nature are no longer human. We are animals and animals are an ongoing process of relationships. When those relationships become impossible, we lose ourselves….
Read More about Layla and the owl’s eyes: Ecopsychology and being human
Save Western Ghats group/Facebook
From The Hindu: Straddling six states, the 1600-odd kilometre-long Western Ghats is home to an astonishing diversity of life and supports innumerable communities and cultures. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the remarkable 100-day ‘Save Western Ghats March’, a landmark event in Indian environmental activism, which became the model for numerous campaigns to follow….
Read More about Tribute: A mountain and a movement: the Save Western Ghats March
Satya Sagar writes: It’s time to step back, reflect and ask again and again the questions: who or what exactly are human beings, how we should live in this world and where we should go? For this time the very survival of the human species may lie in getting the answers right with great honesty….
Read More about Satya Sagar: What on earth is a human being?In the 1960’s David Bamberger owned a successful fried chicken business with over 1600 outlets in the United States (For perspective, there are less than 400 KFC’s in India today.) Then he decided to sell off his business and put the capital into buying some 5500 acres of the most degraded land he could find…
Read More about David Bamberger: Love of the land
Wikimedia Commons
From EarthaMag: India recently conferred biodiversity heritage status on the Ameenpur Lake on the fringes of Hyderabad. Other sites across the country also received this distinction. But what sets Ameenpur Lake apart is that the tag is the first of its kind in the country for a water body, and the first in an urban environment….
Read More about India’s first urban biodiversity heritage site – A ray of hope
Frida Kahlo
Will Falk writes: I’m an environmental activist. I have depression. To be an activist with depression places me squarely in an irreconcilable dilemma: The destruction of the natural world creates stress which exacerbates depression. However, acting to stop the destruction of the natural world exposes me to a lot of stress which, again, exacerbates depression….
Read More about Fight back: An ecopsychological understanding of depression
Kurt Cobb writes: The idea of progress is embedded in the socio-economic system, and we cannot attack carbon emissions without attacking the idea of progress itself. If the progress we’ve made since the beginning of industrial civilization only leads to a complete reversal of all our supposed gains, can we really call what’s happening progress?…
Read More about Can we live without progress?
India’s Tribal communities are under extreme pressure, right from big dams and mines to violent insurgencies and militarisation engulfing their lands. In 25 years, will these communities cease to exist? Or, will they represent thriving, revitalised models of egalitarian sustainability that the rest of the world has come to recognise and is learning from? Felix…
Read More about Felix Padel: Adivasi economics may be the only hope for India’s futureIn this wonderful TEDx talk, Kimi Werner, a free diver and fish hunter, uses her life’s story to illustrate a key lesson she learnt – that of slowing down when everything tells you to speed up. What really shines through is how her childhood memories of living in nature shaped her experiences later in life….
Read More about Spearfishing champ, chef and artist Kimi Werner on living in nature
From Vikalp Sangam: Located in the village Vinchurni, in Maharashtra’s Satara district, the 100-acre Maganlal Gandhi Smrutivan was originally a rocky grassland, that has since been transformed into a fertile estate that now teems with various interdependent lives. Behind this makeover is the 89-year-old former ‘Bhoodan’ activist Babulal Gandhi, aka Babu Kaka, and his family….
Read More about Vinchurni: A story of rejuvenated land, water and wilderness
Yale Environment 360
From Yale Environment 360: On this day last year, Bill Kayong, an up-and-coming political activist in Miri, a coastal oil town in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, was shot dead. At the time, Kayong was leading a campaign to protect native forest lands and stop incursions on traditional lands by logging and palm oil companies….
Read More about Tribute: Bill Kayong, Malaysian activist who fought to protect native forestsFrom The Guardian: The chief reason that we’re waking up to our entanglement with the world we’ve been destroying, Timothy Morton says, is our encounter with the reality of hyperobjects –the term he coined to describe things such as ecosystems and black holes, which are “massively distributed in time and space” compared to individual humans….
Read More about ‘A reckoning for our species’: the philosopher prophet of the Anthropocene
From Scroll.in: Thirteen-year-old Ramprasad Mahurkar, part of a long tradition of artists, writers and scientists obsessed with butterflies, says: “I love butterflies because they are beautiful and inspiring. A large proportion of the earth’s food crops are pollinated by butterflies, plus they’ve been studied to understand the phenomena of evolution and the role of genetics.”…
Read More about A teenage philatelist explains what butterflies can teach us about the ecosystem – and human spirit
Stephanie McMillan
From The Guardian: According to Paul Kingsnorth, environmentalism’s increasingly urban mindset means that instead of defending wild places we now spend our time arguing how to best domesticate these wild places –deserts, oceans, mountains– to generate the “green” energy needed to fuel things that, until recently, we couldn’t even imagine, let alone claim to need….
Read More about Environmentalism used to be about defending the wild – not any more
Joel Sternfeld
The Axial Age, which refers to the historical period between the eighth and third centuries BC, was a period of profound transformations, which created “the foundations upon which humanity still subsists today,” a period of collapse from which emerged new ways of seeing and being… We may be living through a second Axial Age now……
Read More about Paul Kingsnorth: The Axis and the Sycamore
Anuja Mital writes: A year ago, on this day, a young 23-year-old wildlife researcher and my classmate, Prashanth Ettaboina, passed away. Ever the optimist, and crazy about tigers like no one else, the news of his suicide shocked us all –although till date there has been no satisfying inquiry into the circumstances surrounding his death….
Read More about In memory of Prashanth Ettaboina: A passionate life cut short
Requiring no special equipment and no special expertise, and very economical to boot, earthbagging is famous as an ‘idiot-proof’ technique, popular with first-and-only-time owner-builders the world over. Venetia Kotamraju, who moved from busy Bangalore to a farm on the Western Ghats, writes on her experiment with earthbagging. The final installment in a series of four….
Read More about Earthbag Diaries 4: Finishing touches, and lessons learned the old-fashioned way
