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From the farmers' protest organised by the All Indian Kisan Sabha in Mumbai

Reuters/Danish Siddiqui

Farmers’ protests reveal growing anger against India’s development model

23rd April 2018

Ashish Kothari & Aseem Shrivastava write: The growing protests of farmers around the country-last month’s protests in Mumbai being the latest-is not just a claim for dignity. Even more portentously, it calls into question the paradigmatic rationality of the reigning development model. Alternatives do exist, practised and conceived of at hundreds of sites in India….

How much ‘carbon budget’ is left to limit global warming to 1.5C?

18th April 2018

Limiting global warming to 1.5C requires strictly limiting the total amount of carbon emissions between now and the end of the century. However, there is more than one way to calculate this allowable amount of additional emissions, known as the “carbon budget”. In this article, Carbon Brief assesses nine new carbon budget estimates released recently….

Bookshelf: River of Life, River of Death: The Ganges and India’s Future

16th April 2018

The Ganges and its tributaries are now subject to sewage pollution ‘half-a-million times over the recommended limit for bathing’ in places, not to mention unchecked runoff from heavy metals, fertilisers, carcinogens and the occasional corpse. ‘Where is this going?’ That’s the question at the heart of Victor Mallet’s book on the river, writes Laura Cole….

A blow from an axe: Ramachandra Guha on India’s new forest policy

Both social equity and environmental sustainability are critical to our republic’s future. The present government seems bent on reversing the modest gains of the past three decades by making the corporate sector, once more, the key beneficiary of State forest policies. This is the inescapable conclusion one reaches after reading the ‘Draft Forest Policy, 2018’….

India could see 200-fold increase in heat wave exposure by 2100: study

6th April 2018

From Down to Earth: According to an IIT Gandhinagar study, population exposure to heat waves is expected to increase by a massive 200-fold increase if carbon emissions continue under a business-as-usual scenario. Heat wave is already the third biggest natural killer in the country, but is not recognised as a natural calamity by the government….

Announcing the ‘Atlas of Utopias’

30th March 2018

From Transformative Cities: The Atlas of Utopias is a global gallery of inspiring community led transformation in water, energy and housing. The atlas features 32 communities from 19 countries who responded to the Transformative Cities initiative which seeks to learn from cities working on radical solutions to our world’s systemic economic, social and ecological crises….

Manshi Asher: Will the ‘educated’ save the environment?

28th March 2018

The Indian Himalayan region is seeing a myriad of conflicts and challenges, and somehow increasing literacy levels or education is not providing the answers we urgently seek. Reliance on an education providing merely literacy, connecting people to a wider world, but alienating them from their environments, has done little good to people or their ecosystems….

Growth and garbage: A tour of India’s waste mountain

26th March 2018

From Nature: In this in depth investigation of India’s feeble fight against consumerist waste, are robust statistics, compelling history and telling case studies. The authors, anthropologist Assa Doron and historian Robin Jeffrey, also throw the occasional philosophical curve ball, such as: “waste is in the eye of the beholder”. The result is both beguiling and disturbing….

Red alert: Runaway climate change begins as glacier melt passes point of no return

24th March 2018

This latest news immediately brings some questions to mind: Does this mean that we should stop working toward mitigating climate change? Should we stop worrying and enjoy mindlessly by indulging ourselves in senseless consumerism? I really don’t know. But what I definitely know is that the window of opportunity to act is closing really fast….

Latin America signs landmark agreement to protect environmental activists

22nd March 2018

Brazil, Colombia and Mexico top the list of countries where the most people die defending a patch of earth, a mountain, or a river. The region where most environmental activists die annually is taking action with a new landmark agreement. The “Escazu Accord” is only the second regional agreement on environmentalists’ rights in the world….

Volunteers taking readings to map the shoreline

A tide turns: Coastal community resilience in the age of climate change

21st March 2018

From ICSF: In the face of climate change and disastrous development projects like Sagarmala, stewardship of coastal land is the primary challenge for coastal communities. Sea level rise and increasing climate unpredictability require local communities to play an active role in creating knowledge-bases for appropriate action, to reduce disaster risk and recreate a healthy coastline….

Cracks in capitalism’s wall: Zapatistas and the struggle to decolonise science

17th March 2018

From Toward Freedom: The second iteration of ConCiencias, a conference creating dialogue between the Zapatista’s and leading left wing scientists from throughout the world, took place at San Cristobal de Las Casas. The struggle to decolonize knowledge is part and parcel of the Zapatista’s broader project of resisting indigenous genocide, neoliberal capitalism, and political repression….

Film: Schooling the World – The White Man’s Last Burden

13th March 2018

If you wanted to change a culture, how would you do it? You would change the way it educates its children. ‘Schooling The World,’ a film by Carol Black, takes a challenging, sometimes funny, ultimately deeply troubling look at the role played by modern education in the destruction of the world’s last sustainable land based cultures….

J.M. Korhonen: I’m no longer advocating for clean energy; here’s why

9th March 2018

We’re not going to get a decarbonized energy system by 2050. We’re going to fail the climate targets, probably by a large margin, and I suspect that a warming of about 3 degrees centigrade is going to be almost inevitable. It’s perfectly possible that self-amplifying feedback mechanisms under way will amplify this change even more….

A timeline of the historic Plachimada agitation, from Keraleeyam Magazine

7th March 2018

When in July 2017, Coca-Cola informed India’s Supreme Court that it won’t restart its bottling plant in Plachimada, Kerala, it brought to a close a decade-long agitation spearheaded by the local community comprising mostly dalits and adivasis. This historic struggle has now been comprehensively documented in a digital project by Neethu Das of Keraleeyam Magazine….

Photo by Chris Jordan depicting actual stomach contents of an albatross in Midway Atoll

Junk Planet: Is Earth the largest garbage dump in the Universe?

5th March 2018

Robert J. Burrowes writes: Just listing the types of rubbish generated by humans is a staggering task. Nevertheless, I will give you a reasonably comprehensive summary of the types of garbage being generated, the locations into which it’s being dumped and some indication of what’s being done about it and what you can do too….

Uttarakhand’s Kosi river is dying; only an immediate intervention will save it

27th February 2018

From Catch News: Uttarakhand’s Kosi river is dying, which could spell doom for the region. Data from the last 25 years shows that the lean flow capacity of the river during summers has witnessed a massive, over 700%, drop, while the river’s total length has reduced from 225 kilometers to just 41 in 40 years….

Seven lessons on starting a worldwide movement for change

22nd February 2018

“There was no name for what we were proposing. It was bold, imaginative, and beyond what most folks thought of as environmentalism. It wasn’t environmentalism, it was much more than that.” A blog by Naresh Giangrande Co-founder of Totnes, the world’s first Transition-Town, as he signs off after a ten-year adventure in global social change….

A zero sum game: The rail projects that spell doom for the Cauvery

21st February 2018

The fracas over water sharing has obscured the fact that the Cauvery itself is facing a major threat: two railway lines to be constructed through Kodagu, the forested hill district where the river originates. A river’s fate – and those of the millions that depend on it – now hangs in balance, writes Chirag Chinnappa….

What urban waste has to do with global warming

20th February 2018

From The Indian Express: Greenhouse gas emissions from solid waste disposal by India increased at the rate of 3.1% per annum between 2000 and 2010, and by China at 4.6% per cent between 2005 and 2012. In both cases it is likely that the figures are underestimated, since they don’t consider emissions from waste transportation….