CLIMATE CRISIS
From The Daily Conversation: This video shows the top 10 countries threatened by the 6 meter sea level rise we are almost guaranteed to see in the not-too-distant future, according to the projected pace of global warming and ice melt in Greenland and Antarctica. India is No. 3 on the list, and China No. 1….
Read More about Watch: The top 10 countries in danger from future sea level rise
The Indian Quarterly
Forests/Wildlife
From The Indian Quarterly: Strange things happen in this forest. A bug sucks and then pees. Droplets of bright water shoot out of its bum and fall rain-like on the forest floor. I saw it today with my own eyes. Orange and black bug on a Heliconia leaf, shadow-spangled, tumbling in the gusting wind, peeing….
Read More about Suprabha Seshan: People of the rain
ALTERNATIVES
From Open Democracy: Open cooperativism is an effort to infuse cooperatives with the basic principles of commons based peer production. Here are six interrelated strategies for post-corporate entrepreneurial coalitions. The aim is to go beyond the classical corporate paradigm, and its extractive profit-maximizing practices, toward the establishment of open cooperatives that cultivate a commons-oriented economy….
Read More about How to form a global counter-economy
Monte Wolverton
Conflict/Dispossession
GRAIN.org reports: The world’s largest transnational food companies are rolling out a programme promising “market-based” solutions in agriculture. Vietnam’s highlands are the showcase for ‘GROW’, a global initiative under the World Economic Forum. A closer look reveals the programme’s real objective: to expand production of a handful of high-value commodities to profit a few corporations….
Read More about GROWing disaster: the Fortune 500 goes farming
Amit Dave/Reuters
CLIMATE CRISIS
From The Wire: The planned ten-fold increase in solar energy will add on an average only 20% of the total capacity, making little difference to India’s emissions. The government has not reduced its coal output targets and plans to raise coal output from the current 550 million tonnes to nearly a billion tonnes by 2022….
Read More about Why increasing India’s solar energy capacity won’t work
CLIMATE CRISIS
Rupert Read writes: In financial parlance, a ‘black swan’ is a radically unexpected event. Ever-worsening man-made climate change (that is, barring a system change) is not a potential ‘black swan’ event. It’s a white swan, an expected event. It is, quite simply, completely what anyone with a basic understanding of the situation should now expect….
Read More about Why climate change is a ‘white swan’
Consumerism/Lifestyle
A new modeling study published in The Lancet suggests that India’s agricultural need for water can be met if Indians introduce minor diet changes. Research team leader Alan Dangour tells Down to Earth that “dietary change is a potential way to improve resilience of the Indian food system in the face of future groundwater decline.”…
Read More about Study: A minor change in your diet can reduce water use for agricultureBookshelf
“What you see in a lot of countries is a predatory capitalism, from Afghanistan to Pakistan to Australia, which show the corporations that are involved in the neo-liberal agenda, an agenda that has been implemented without really any public consent. This is happening, I would argue, almost by stealth,” says author and journalist Anthony Lowenstein….
Read More about How vulture capitalism is swallowing the world
A Jarawa tribal receiving handout from tourist - a scene from the Andaman Trunk Road
Scmp.com
Bookshelf
Excerpt from Islands in Flux, by Pankaj Sekhsaria: These communities of thousands of individuals with a living lineage going back thousands of years have been brought to this sorry state in a mere 150 years. It began with the British and their policies, which have been kept up with clinical efficiency by modern, independent India….
Read More about How a statist vision of development has brought Andaman’s tribals close to extinction
www.degrowth.de
ALTERNATIVES
Jason Hickel writes: Growth isn’t an option any more–we’ve already grown too much. Scientists are now telling us that we’re blowing past planetary boundaries at breakneck speed. The hard truth is that this global crisis is due almost entirely to overconsumption in rich countries. Rich countries must “catch down” to more appropriate levels of development….
Read More about Forget ‘developing’ poor countries, it’s time to ‘de-develop’ rich countries
NEWS ARCHIVE
The Washington Post reports: Scientists have documented what they’re describing as the first case of large-scale river reorganization as a result of human-caused climate change. They found that the retreat of a very large glacier in Canada’s Yukon territory led to the rerouting of its vast stream of meltwater from one river system to another….
Read More about NEWS UPDATE #138
Kalpataru, the divine tree of life, depicted at the 8th century Pawon temple, Java
Indiafacts.info
ALTERNATIVES
Viva Kermani writes: Hinduism is the world’s largest nature based religion that recognises and seeks the Divine in nature and acknowledges everything as sacred. A loss of this understanding that earth is our mother, or rather a deliberate ignorance of this, has resulted in the abuse, and the exploitation of the earth and its resources….
Read More about What modern ecology can learn from ancient Hinduism
Gopal Aggarwal/Wikimedia Commons
Development/Growth
Andrew Russell writes: The most undervalued forms of technological labour are also the most ordinary: those who repair and maintain technologies that already exist. This shift in emphasis involves focusing on the constant processes of entropy and un-doing– and the work we do to slow or halt them, rather than on introduction of novel things….
Read More about Innovation is overrated; it’s maintenance that matters more
J. Vijaya, India's first female herpetologist, lived alone for many months in a forest cave in Kerala to study cane turtles
Zai Whitaker
Conserve/Resist
This day thirty years ago, the bodily remains of J. Vijaya, India’s first female herpetologist and turtle field biologist, was found in a forest. She was only 28. The cause of her death remains unknown to this day. A moving tribute to one of the most memorable personalities in Indian wildlife conservation, by Janaki Lenin….
Read More about Tribute: Viji, the Turtle GirlCLIMATE CRISIS
Carbon Brief reports: Four years of current emissions would be enough to blow what’s left of the carbon budget for a good chance of keeping global temperature rise to 1.5C. That’s the conclusion of this analysis, which brings the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s carbon budgets up to date to include global emissions in 2016….
Read More about Analysis: Just four years left of the 1.5C carbon budget
Gujarat-based Amul kick-started the milk revolution in India
Consumerism/Lifestyle
Many people think that milk is normal good food. But a large part of the world until recently never consumed the milk of other animals. Even today, Eastern Asia as a rule does not use milk. So, for some, milk is the greatest food, while for others, milk is one of the five white poisons….
Read More about How Indians started drinking milk (and what it has cost us)Conserve/Resist
From TNI.org: While water privatisation continues to be imposed throughout the world, particularly in the Global South, more and more communities are demanding public management of water (also labelled remunicipalisation) and wastewater services and forcing out private actors. Here are 10 inspiring stories of communities and cities working to reclaim control over this essential resource….
Read More about 10 rousing struggles for public waterCLIMATE CRISIS
Climate Central reports: The early heat this year is due to a shift in wind patterns that has seen air flowing in from the south and west, across dry areas that quickly cause that air to warm. That heat-waves will become more common and intense is one of the clearest outcomes of human-driven global warming….
Read More about Early heat wave baking India is a sign of worse to come
Adani group chairman Gautam Adani is known to be close to PM Modi
ENERGY
I’ve come face to face with some of the world’s worst companies, but at the top of that list is mining giant Adani, which wants to develop one of the world’s largest coalmines in Australia, supposedly to meet demand from India. But the communities I work with patently do not want Adani or its coal….
Read More about Vaishali Patil: Exposing Adani’s environmental and labour abuses
A child labourer cries as he is rescued in a joint operation by Labour dept. and an NGO in Delhi
Reuters/Adnan Abidi
Education/Awareness
IndiaSpend reports: Nearly 46 million people live under conditions of slavery across the world, with 18 million (39%) of those in India, home to the world’s largest number of slaves, according to the 2016 Global Slavery Index. They have lost their freedom by way of bonded and domestic labour and sexual slavery, among other means….
Read More about ‘India has world’s best anti-slavery laws’ (and largest number of slaves)
