Ecologise - Page 19 of 85 - The 21st century's converging crises and alternative pathways

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Making War on the Planet: Geoengineering and Capitalism’s Creative Destruction of the Earth

19th January 2018

Making War on the Planet

Appuppen/Braindedindia

Conserve/Resist

Shriya Mohan: The Aadhaar of all things

From The Hindu: From a severely critical stand against Aadhaar in 2014, the Modi-led BJP in power has made a sharp U-turn to bulldoze its way into having every Indian scanned, tagged and labelled. As the Supreme Court begins hearing of petitions that challenge Aadhaar, a timeline of the country’s chequered date with the project….

ALTERNATIVES

Module 8: Think Resilience – Explore the interrelated crises of the 21st century

18th January 2018

Ecologise has consistently driven home that humanity needs to prepare for unprecedented environmental, economic and socio-political upheaval and uncertainty in the 21st century. In this new series, we showcase free short-duration online courses that focus on these various emerging crises and possible responses. Created by the world’s leading universities, they offer a good starting point to explore these complex challenges….

Development/Growth

Why should India risk an economic disaster to save the American Dream?

17th January 2018

Shelley Kasli writes: Recent changes in India’s foreign direct investment policy allows 100 percent FDI (from current 49%) for single brand retail trading and construction, among others, paving the way for global players. In reality, India is being drawn into the spiral of debt economics to protect the American Dream from turning into a Nightmare….

CLIMATE CRISIS

Does Iran’s water crisis play a role in its growing political turmoil?

16th January 2018

Louis Proyect writes: As a rentier state, Iran’s economy was based on handouts rather than the production of manufactured goods. Cheap oil and subsidies made the massive use of pumps feasible just as was the case in neighbouring Syria. Groundwater extraction nearly quadrupled between the 1970s and 2000 while the number of wells rose five-fold….

NEWS ARCHIVE

NEWS UPDATE #170

15th January 2018

HIGHLIGHTS: *New York will divest $5bn in fossil fuel-linked money, to sue oil majors over global warming *Air pollution caused 1.1 million deaths in India in 2015 *One-fifth of India consumes water with high arsenic content *It’s snowing in Sahara Desert! *World’s Richest Made Another $1 Trillion in 2017 *World’s biggest wildlife reserve planned for Antarctica…

ALTERNATIVES

Claude Alvares: How to sponge off your loved ones and save the world while you’re at it

14th January 2018

This article is not about giving anyone a sponge bath. But it’s about cleaning up your family networks of purposeless cash lying around in those quarters which, if not salvaged and used for your personal learning and liberation, will invariably get squandered on some new discount racket at the mall-next-door or Ponzi schemes like bitcoins….

ALTERNATIVES

Jean Dreze: Jholawala Economics for Everyone

13th January 2018

‘Jholawala’ is a derogatory term that India’s urban elites use to dismiss the arguments of social activists without having to contend with them. Jean Drèze is a prime example of a jholawala who is also a first-rate economist whose arguments cannot be dismissed easily. A condensed version of the thought-provoking introduction to his new book….

ALTERNATIVES

On the wildness of children

12th January 2018

Carol Black writes: Some of our children, it turns out, are more like pigeons and squirrels, and some are more like bears. Some of them adapt to the institutional walls we put around them, some pace till their paws bleed. The bleeding of these children, if we listen, can tell us many stories about ourselves….

ALTERNATIVES

Dr. Amory Lovins on India’s ‘sustainable energy future’

11th January 2018

Amory Lovins, Chief Scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute, is one of the world’s leading energy experts and a key figure behind China’s ongoing transition to renewable energy. His appointment as a strategic advisor to NITI Aayog suggests that India’s top development policy agency maybe finally be rethinking the country’s present fossil fuel-based energy path….

ALTERNATIVES

Why the Bitcoin frenzy heralds a massive financial meltdown

10th January 2018

From WSWS/Automatic Earth: Bitcoin has been hailed as the currency of the future; and dismissed as a bubble at best, or a tool for organised crime at worst. But one thing is clear; its soaring demand is a direct result of a broken global financial system trusted by nobody and on the verge of breakdown….

Food/Farming

Video: Farmers’ voices from around the country confirm a nationwide crisis

9th January 2018

This series of videos feature farmers – many of them from remote villages – from Assam to Andhra Pradesh, expressing their views, concerns and apprehensions about the future. Produced by farmer support organisation I4Farmers, they confirm once again what we know well – the agrarian crisis that has gripped rural India is only getting worse…

ALTERNATIVES

For saving the earth we need to tell the whole truth: A response to Richard Smith

8th January 2018

No doubt, capitalism has largely enabled the huge growth of human numbers in the last two hundred years. But human population growth has been occurring even in pre-capitalist eras. Parallel to this, also environmental destruction has been occurring and growing in these eras. It is not good to tell our readers only half the truth….

Conflict/Dispossession

Koodankulam: The world’s most expensive pieces of useless machinery

7th January 2018

Nityanand Jayaraman writes in Dianuke.org: We do not need four more nuclear plants in Koodankulam. The need of the hour is to shut down the existing two risky units and to prosecute the ministers, technocrats and bureaucrats who led the nation up the garden path and wasted more than Rs. 35,000 crores of our money….

Development/Growth

Tejal Kanitkar on the contradiction at the heart of India’s National Energy Policy

6th January 2018

From Newsclick: Prof. Tejal Kanitkar, who heads the Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability Studies at TISS, says that while the government’s National Energy Policy claims it will provide 24×7 electricity to the entire nation by 2022, this lies in contradiction with the mode through which they plan ensure its distribution; that is, the market….

Conflict/Dispossession

A disaster for the whole world: Anuradha Mittal on agribusiness in Africa

Displacing pastoralists, displacing smallholder farmers, arresting and charging them as terrorists if they protest–and the land is given away to foreign investors to grow what? Sugar and cotton. Imagine trucks full of food aid coming into Ethiopia, while trucks full of cotton and sugar are leaving the country. Hunger in Africa is a political problem….

NEWS ARCHIVE

NEWS UPDATE #169

5th January 2018

The Guardian reports: Ocean dead zones with zero oxygen have quadrupled in size since 1950, scientists have just warned, while the numbers of very low oxygen sites near coasts have multiplied tenfold. Most sea creatures cannot survive in these zones and current trends would lead to mass extinction in the long run, risking dire consequences….

Prime Minister Narendra Modi with former environment minister Prakash Javadekar

Development/Growth

India’s political leadership failed the environment in 2017

4th January 2018

From DNA: Under the leadership of PM Modi, governments pushed down the bar on environmental standards this year. At both Centre and state levels, there have been numerous reversals in environmental legislation. Today, there are 2357 applications with the Centre that were rejected approvals by state institutions or have nearly completed construction with no approvals….

ALTERNATIVES

The seven megatrends that could beat global warming: ‘There is reason for hope’

3rd January 2018

From The Guardian: A series of fast-moving global megatrends, spurred by trillion-dollar investments, indicates that humanity might be able to avert the worst impacts of global warming. From those already at full steam, including renewable energy, to those just emerging, such as plant-based alternatives to meat, global trends show that greenhouse-gas emissions can be halted….

Representative pic

Development/Growth

The price of development: Gujarat’s dams are now drowning the state

2nd January 2018

Sneha Vakharia reports: Gujarat’s chronic floods, underreported and devastating, tell the story of Narendra Modi’s failure to deliver the state from water scarcity, and the onset of a new kind of problem, with crucial political implications. Since the state began its battle to control its water, increasingly and unforgivingly, the water has started fighting back….