Pratham Books
The full text of a recent talk given by prominent ecologist Madhav Gadgil, a former member of the Scientific Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India and the Head of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP) of 2010. It tries to explore the significant issue of when and why people turn against conservation….
Read More about Development is for the people: A talk by Madhav GadgilSunitha Natti reports: A New Indian Express analysis shows we are witnessing four back-to-back droughts for the first time in at least 100 years and are coursing through another as we speak. At least two of them were severe. Analysis of rainfall data across states for the past three decades threw up some startling findings….
Read More about Express Study: Fourth Successive ‘Drought’ in 100 Years
Shunya.net
Some of us have recently created a small group called ‘Ecologise Hyderabad’. The aim of the group is to look at the many ecological crises of the city holistically, interact with experts and social activist and run programmes to strengthen the efforts of the activists in running green programmes in different localities of the city….
Read More about Ecologise Hyderabad: Workshops for Sustainability and Equality
Many parts of India is in the grip of severe drought, some for the third consecutive year, leading to growing hunger, mass migration, water conflicts and farmer suicides. We present four well-known voices – Yogendra Yadav, Jean Dreze, Sunita Narain and the late Anil Agarwal – on India’s perennial drought problem, its causes and possible solutions….
Read More about Four critical voices on India’s perennial drought problem
Nesta.org.uk
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….
Read More about Bookshelf: 150 Strong – A Pathway to a Different FutureThe physics of energy and the economy evokes some trepidation. An economy seems to be a dissipative system, but what does this really mean? Not many people understand dissipative systems, and very few understand how an economy operates. The combination leads to an awfully lot of false beliefs about the energy needs of an economy….
Read More about Gail Tverberg: The Physics of Energy and the EconomyKurt Cobb writes: Latour understands that the natural world — which politics has always held at arm’s length while nevertheless dealing daily with nature’s demands — must now explicitly invite that natural world to the bargaining table. This is not about being a “nature lover” who only cares about animals and plants, but not about humans….
Read More about Bookshelf: The Politics of Nature by Bruno Latour
Billy Brack writes: Shattering: Food, Politics and the Loss of Genetic Diversity by Fowler and Mooney is one of the important books of our times, explaining how agribusiness is putting the world at risk by limiting the world’s food crops to a few genetic strains. Quite literally we are putting our eggs in one basket….
Read More about Bookshelf: Shattering: Food, politics, and the loss of genetic diversity
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….
Read More about Seven projects around the world that protect soil
Vidhyadhar Date writes: A developed country is not one where the poor drive cars, but one where the rich use public transport. Building more roads to reduce congestion is like trying to put out a fire with petrol. India has failed to learn from developed countries’ mistakes and is on a disastrous path of motorization….
Read More about Cars, Capitalism and India
From the point of view of greens, the Left in general, and Marxism in particular, is often seen as being myopic about the looming environmental crisis. Here we present a selection of articles and essays by leading writers from the Left, who are among the most interesting and constructive voices to engage with the issue….
Read More about Special: A view from the Left: Capitalism, climate change and the environmentThe 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….
Read More about Special: Ringing Cedars and the new, silent revolution in RussiaChetan Raut, founder of the intriguingly named startup Cowism, aims to empower distressed Maharashtra farmers to become self-reliant and financially independent by integrating commercially useful assets like native cattle into farming practices to improve soil fertility, lower input costs, and raise profits. “Invariably, the solutions to our problems lie right under our noses,” says Chetan….
Read More about Video: Cowism! How an engineer is transforming Indian agriculture
Frans Lanting
Bill Laurance writes: Some 25 million km of new paved roads, thousands of dams, and hundreds of thousands of new mining, oil and gas projects, are being planned, roughly 90% of them in developing nations. Their environmental impacts could easily dwarf climate change as thousands of projects penetrate into the world’s last surviving wild areas….
Read More about An infrastructure tsunami is being unleashed on the environment in the name of ‘development’
This first of its kind Green Development Agenda for Kerala was collectively drafted by green collective Paristhithi Aikya Vedhi, and has been submitted to the leaders of the main political parties in the fray for the upcoming Assembly Elections in May. It was released on 30th March by Dr.V.S.Vijayan, Member, Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel….
Read More about A Green Development Manifesto for KeralaChris Martenson writes: The data seems to confirm this: Humanity is not going to painlessly wean itself off of fossil fuels. Instead, we will hit some sort of a wall: a food/population crisis, a climate crisis, or a debt/fiscal/economic crisis. Each of those candidates has its roots in our global society’s addition to fossil fuels….
Read More about Industrial civilisation can’t wean itself off fossil fuels painlesslyTechno-economic fixes do not address the underlying “zero-sum game” nature of water resource use. Ultimately, the problem is that of allocating the water available each year among users — both people and the ecosystem. Without understanding how much water is available, how much is used and by whom, solving India’s water crisis will be impossible….
Read More about Why we must have water budgets
Much of the mainstream media, corporate lobbyists and politicians would like the public to think of climate change as something akin to a natural phenomenon. In this second part of our series on Capitalism and Climate Change, we present a selection of articles that examine the deep-seated connections between climate change and a rapacious global economic order….
Read More about Digest: Climate crisis and the myth of ‘green’ capitalismThe high water intensity of global energy generation is leading to water-coal conflict caused by coal power production. Greenpeace International has prepared a groundbreaking analysis of the impacts of the world’s coal power plants on global water resources. The world’s coal power plants are consuming water that could meet the basic requirements for nearly 1 billion people….
Read More about How the coal industry is deepening the global water crisis
Richard Norgaard writes: Two centuries of explosive economic growth have radically altered our world. With human activity now the major driver of geological change, the industrial era has come to be called the Anthropocene. In this essay, I instead adopt the term Econocene, thereby underscoring its ideological foundation: economism, the reduction of all social relations to market logic….
Read More about The Church of Economism and its discontents
