On the eve of the American presidential election, where the two leading candidates offer little hope for climate action, it’s worth revisiting this hard-hitting 2006 article by Chad Harbach, who warned, “(Other countries) will do nothing until the United States demonstrates that a grand-scale transition to renewable energy can be achieved by big industrial countries.”…
Read More about Flashback: On global warming
Development is more than an ideology; it is an ideology in service to an economic necessity which, in turn, is not a real necessity but contingent on a growth dependent debt-based financial system. Until that system changes, the pressure to develop— to convert natural resources into commodities and social relationships into services— will not abate….
Read More about Charles Eisenstein: Development in the Ecological Age
Does the concept of a living planet inspire and uplift you, or is it a disturbing example of woo-woo nonsense that distracts us from practical, science-based policies? While no amount of evidence can prove it false, we must acknowledge that the science that militates against an intelligent, purposeful, living universe is ideologically freighted and culturally-bound….
Read More about Charles Eisenstein: Fear of a living planet
Felix Padel writes: An Adivasi economy, in its traditional or pre-globalization form at least, was based in many ways on ecological principles. In the words of a Kond elder in Kandhamal district, Odisha, “Where are the saints in your society? In this village we are all saints. We consume little, share everything, and waste nothing.”…
Read More about Felix Padel: Adivasi economics and re-awakening the indigenous mindTrees operate on very different time-scales from the ones we are used to, both in terms of life-spans and in terms of how long it takes them to process information and translate it into action. Is this the main reason why we find it so difficult to recognise them as truly sentient beings, Wohlleben wonders….
Read More about Video & Review: The Hidden Life of Trees
Australian educator, author and co-inventor of Permaculture, Bruce Charles ‘Bill’ Mollison, died on the 24 September 2016. He has been praised across the world for his visionary work, and left behind a global network of ‘peaceful warriors’ in over 100 countries working tirelessly to fulfill his ambition to build harmony between humanity and Mother Earth….
Read More about Obituary: Peaceful warrior: Permaculture visionary Bill Mollison
From TheWire.in: Ecological economist, Gandhian thinker and author Mark Lindley has some stark warnings for the future of hi-tech societies, and a few ‘prescriptions’ for India and for economists, who he says vastly underestimate the gravity of the looming environmental crises. Ecologise and Graama Seva Sangha recently organised a lecture series by Lindley in Bangalore….
Read More about ‘Gandhi was perfectly sensible to call industrial civilisation “a nine days wonder”’Yesterday, with protests over the Cauvery water dispute bringing Bangalore to its knees, many of the city’s techno-optimists found themselves stranded on its burning roads, like bunnies caught in headlights. It might just be another sign that ‘life as we know it’ is about to change forever, both in India and the world, writes Vijay Kundaji….
Read More about A ‘time-lapse’ view of the water wars, in Bangalore (and soon, the world)Samuel Alexander writes: ‘Wild democracy’ is a new political orientation, sensibility, and practice. A localised politics with a global perspective, positioning itself ‘in the wild’ beyond the state and yet, at times, pragmatically engaged with it. In short, wild democracy is a revolutionary politics without a Revolution, as such–a paradox I will unpack and defend….
Read More about Wild democracy: A biodiversity of resistance and renewalWatch video recordings of keynote presentations of the just concluded 5th International Degrowth Conference. They cover a range of subjects from critiques of economic growth and capitalism and green economy, to radical alternatives on economic, political, social and cultural fronts; alliances between global north and south; climate justice; the nature and future of work, etc….
Read More about Video: Keynote presentations from the recent International Degrowth Conference
Navi Radjou writes: My thesis is that powerful centripetal forces are gaining great momentum and are about to usher in the Age of Convergence. This epochal shift provides India a once-in-a-millennium opportunity to assume global leadership in co-creating innovative solutions to tackle socio-economic challenges that will severely afflict the whole of humanity in coming decades….
Read More about India can lead the world in solving ‘problems without borders’Professor Immanuel Ness, author of Southern Insurgency: The Coming of the Global Working Class which has India, China and South Africa as case studies, spoke to The Wire on trade unions and labour laws in India, social relations between labour and capital in the global south, merits of spontaneity in workers’ agitations and much more….
Read More about Watch: Immanuel Ness on the ‘super-exploitation’ of contractual workers in India
The Guardian reports: Planet Earth has entered a new geological epoch dubbed the Anthropocene because of the extent of humanity’s impact on the planet, according to a group of scientists. An international working group set up to consider the question voted by 30 to three, with two abstentions, that the Anthropocene was real in a geological sense….
Read More about The Anthropocene is here: Scientists declare dawn of human-influenced era
Archival photo of a boat rally in protest against the Sardar Sarovar dam
The Narmada Bachao Andolan began 31 years ago as a protest against the Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada river, and went on to raise questions about the very development model India has embraced. Today, with the NBA reviving their landmark struggle for justice, we are re-publishing author Arundhati Roy’s landmark 1999 essay on the topic….
Read More about Flashback: Arundhati Roy’s classic essay on the Narmada resistance
Suprabha Seshan writes: Modern education serves a version of Gulag, by forcing our young to suffer unspeakable conditions in their most vulnerable years. It ultimately breaks them, in order to refashion them into a pliable workforce. This psychic predicament goes hand in hand with the destruction of life, with the catastrophic end of the biosphere….
Read More about How modern schooling is aiding the destruction of the biosphere
Dongria Kondh boy Kalia stands in front of the Niyamgiri hill range
Lewis Davids/Survival
India is home to about 700 tribal groups with a population of 104 million, as per 2011 census, constituting the second largest tribal population in the world after Africa. Down to Earth magazine examines the many grave threats they face from government, corporations and phenomena like climate change, and our continuing indifference to their plight….
Read More about Spotlight: India’s adivasis and the web of indifferenceJohn Michael Greer writes: I’ve had any number of well-meaning climate change activists ask me, in tones of baffled despair, why they can’t get ordinary people to take climate change seriously. My answer is not one they want to hear, because I tell them that it’s because well-meaning climate change activists don’t take climate change seriously….
Read More about Why climate change activism is dead in the waterGeorge Monbiot writes: If humanity fails to prevent climate breakdown, the industry that bears the greatest responsibility is not transport, farming, gas, oil or even coal. All of them can behave as they do, shunting us towards systemic collapse. The problem begins with the industry that, wittingly or otherwise, grants them this licence: the media….
Read More about The climate crisis is already here – but no one’s telling us
Gaurav Sangwani writes: Permaculture tries to utilise the existing elements in the land to take human freedom further, with a far lower ecological effect. Primitivism is the perennial belief in the need to go back to where we started, the lost Golden Age of freedom and guiltlessness which is at the heart of all the world’s religions….
Read More about Permaculture and Primitvism: Two alternatives to the technological destruction of nature
A Warli painting depicting collective life
David Bollier writes: The brute facts of climate change are calling into question models of economic development, transforming the terms of debate, compelling us to mythologies of development and growth, and quickly imagine credible alternative paths. Suddenly, the social economies of indigenous peoples, traditional communities and localized systems seem highly relevant to the challenges ahead….
Read More about Beyond development: The commons as a new/old paradigm of human flourishing
