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ALTERNATIVES

The Enlivenment Manifesto: Politics and Poetics in the Anthropocene

5th February 2017

Enlightenment thinking is coming to an end… But our civilization still operates as if reality is about organising inert, dead matter in efficient ways. It is impossible to achieve sustainability with our prevailing ‘operating system’ for economics, politics, and culture if the underlying ‘bios’—our unconscious assumption about reality—remains tied to an ideology of dead matter….

Conserve/Resist

Humans are killing the marine ecosystem. But this man is trying to reverse that

4th February 2017

Catch News reports: Siddharth Chakravarty worked for a decade in the merchant navy. It was a lucrative job, but one day, he realised it was not for him. He walked out of the merchant navy in 2011. The reason? Because the merchant navy’s goal was to maximise profits, and let the marine ecosytem be damned….

ENERGY

The draft national electricity plan paints rosy picture of power scenario

3rd February 2017

Every five years, the Central Electricity Authority prepares a National Electricity Plan. Last December, the CEA released draft of third NEP for 2017-2022 seeking comments from various stakeholders. Some of its conclusions, like ‘close to zero energy demand deficit’, may sound like music to power starved India but also raises serious questions about its authenticity….

Uncategorised

The saga of Indian mining: A long lineage of illegality

2nd February 2017

India has seen more than a handful of mining-related scams unravel in the last decade. The 2014 coalgate scam is perceived as the nemesis of the UPA government. The powerful but now infamous Reddy Brothers made headlines for the illegal operations in Bellary. Goan citizens confronted by mine-related pollution through successive governments nicknamed their…

CLIMATE CRISIS

How the world passed a carbon threshold and why it matters

Yale Environment 360 reports: Last year marked the first time in several million years that atmospheric concentrations of CO2 passed 400 parts per million. Frighteningly, this modern rise of CO2 is also accelerating at an unusual rate. By looking at the Earth’s climate history, scientists are getting a sobering picture of where we are headed….

Conserve/Resist

Ritwick Dutta: ‘We need to have a selfish interest in environment’

1st February 2017

Ritwick Dutta, noted environment lawyer and founder of the highly accomplished Legal Initiative for Forest and Environment (LIFE), received the Bhagirath Prayas Samman, an award that recognises efforts towards protection and conservation of rivers. Manu Moudgil caught up with him on his journey so far and how we can further expand the constituency of environment….

NEWS ARCHIVE

NEWS UPDATE #128

30th January 2017

Common Dreams reports: The symbolic Doomsday Clock inched closer to midnight on Thursda.. For the first time in the 70-year history of the clock, “the BAS board has decided to act, in part, based on the words of a single person: Donald Trump, the new President of the United States,” according to a press statement….

Sea level rise has washed away more than 50% of Ghoramara island, Sunderbans

Daesung Lee

CLIMATE CRISIS

Women bear the brunt of climate-forced migration

29th January 2017

Manipadma Jena reports: An ActionAid report released last month warns of the devastating and increasing impact of climate change on women in South Asia, stating how “Young females from neighbouring Nepal and Bangladesh who migrate to India as well as internal migrants from rural areas moving to cities are increasingly vulnerable to abuse and trafficking.”…

Bookshelf

Brace for the coming oil, food and financial crash

Nafeez Ahmed writes: A new research study by HSBC on global oil supply shows that the bulk of the world’s oil production has peaked and is now in decline. Welcome to a new age of permanent economic recession driven by our ongoing dependence on dirty, expensive, difficult oil — unless we choose a fundamentally different path….

ALTERNATIVES

Daripalli Ramaiah: The man who planted (ten million!) trees

28th January 2017

Daripalli Ramaiah, recently awarded the Padmashri, India’s third highest civilian honour, has dedicated his life to increasing the country’s green cover and in the process has been credited with planting one crore saplings. The fight of Ramaiah to plant trees was not alone, as his wife Janamma has also made significant contribution to tree planting….

A view of the Manhattan skyline

ALTERNATIVES

The mismeasure of progress: Is the West really the best?

27th January 2017

Western liberal democracies dominate the top rankings of progress indices. But are they the best models of development when their standard of living is unsustainable and their quality of life is, arguably, declining? Only when environmental impacts are given significant weight, as in the Happy Planet and Sustainable Society indexes, does this ranking change substantially….

Economy

Demonetisation, farmer suicides, and the Union budget

26th January 2017

Live Mint reports: Agriculture is likely to be the worst affected by the note ban, because 1) The policy coincided with harvest of kharif crops, and farmers are facing difficulty selling it. 2) Lack of cash must have posed difficulty in sowing of rabi crops. 3) Unlike other sectors, farm output is perishable in nature….

Conflict/Dispossession

The global road-building explosion is shattering nature

25th January 2017

Bill Laurance writes: An unprecedented spate of road building is happening now, with around 25 million kilometres of new paved roads expected by 2050. An ambitious new study that mapped all roads globally has found that roads have split the Earth’s land surface into 600,000 fragments, most of them too tiny to support significant wildlife….

NEWS ARCHIVE

NEWS UPDATE #127

24th January 2017

Business Standard reports: The NDA government changed regulations meant for protection of tribal rights and forests in order to ensure that more than 130 mines do not face fresh auctions and are instead retained by existing miners. Documents show regulations were changed in a coordinated manner by the environment, tribal affairs and the mines ministries….

Conflict/Dispossession

Amitav Ghosh: What nutmeg can tell us about globalisation

23rd January 2017

From The New York Times: …It is impossible to imagine a world without global connections: They have always existed, and no place has escaped their formative influence. But this does not mean that there is any inherent merit in interconnectedness, which has always been accompanied by violence, deepening inequalities and the large-scale destruction of communities….

CLIMATE CRISIS

2014 was hottest year ever recorded. Then it was 2015. Now it’s 2016.

Common Dreams reports: For the third year in a row, the world experienced its warmest year ever recorded. In 2016, a total of 22 nations set all-time records for their hottest ever temperatures. This breaks the record of eighteen all-time heat records in 2010 for the greatest number of such records set in one year….

Conflict/Dispossession

Why the Forest Rights Act is yet to achieve major milestones

22nd January 2017

G. Seetharaman reports: Activists say one of the biggest hurdles for FRA is that even states like Maharashtra, among the better performers, and Odisha are introducing policies which will help the forest department retain control of forest resources through joint forest management committees or similar bodies, which will dilute the powers of the gram sabha….

Education/Awareness

Richard Heinberg: The Peak Oil President?

21st January 2017

The final stages of capitalism, Marx predicted, would be marked by global capital being unable to expand and generate profits at former levels. Capitalists would begin to consume the government along with the physical and social structures that sustained them. These assaults would destroy the host. This final stage of capitalism is what Trump represents….

Jemima Rohekar

Conserve/Resist

Sounds of silence: a forest that survived ‘development’

20th January 2017

Jemima Rohekar writes: So secluded is Silent Valley that there is no written record of any human habitation in its core area. It is also the site of the first and most bitterly fought ‘environment vs development’ debate in India. Silent Valley reinforces the fact that forests and their resident biodiversity are our greatest wealth….

Economy

2017: The year when the world economy starts coming apart

19th January 2017

Gail Tverberg writes: Underlying problems are sufficiently severe that we seem to be headed for a crisis far worse than 2008. Our fundamental problem is that neither high nor low energy prices are now able to keep the world economy operating as we’d like it to. Increased debt can’t seem to fix the problem either….