NEWS ARCHIVE
Chaitanya Mallapur reports: Forest fires over the first four months of 2016 surged 30% –20,667 fires were reported as on April 21, 2016 compared to 15,937 over 2015– according to data tabled in the Lok Sabha on April 26, 2016. This is 40% more than the 3,185 hectares burnt in Uttarakhand since February 2, 2016….
Read More about NEWS UPDATE #96
Ecologise Events
For the first workshop of Ecologise Hyderabad, we chose the topic of Rain Water Harvesting because it is of great current interest. We were both overwhelmed and humbled by the huge response we got for the workshop. The workshop was attended by 24 registered participants, 5 members of the Ecologise group and 5 resource persons….
Read More about Report on Ecologise Hyderabad’s first rainwater harvesting workshopBookshelf
Twelve years ago, John Perkins published his best-seller, ‘Confessions of an Economic Hit Man’, where he described his career convincing heads of state to adopt economic policies that impoverished their countries and undermined democratic institutions to promote U.S.’ interests. This new book is an updated version, and details how those methods have evolved since then….
Read More about Video & Report: More Confessions of an Economic Hitman
Morvarid Fernandez
Food/Farming
Maninder Dabas writes: With 35% of agricultural households having less than 1 acre of land, the shrinking of agricultural land holdings in India is a worrying trend. Since 1995-96, the average size land holding has decreased from 1.41 hectares to 1.15 hectares which accounts for the decrease of 30,000 hectares of cultivable land each year….
Read More about With cultivable land shrinking steadily, food surplus India stares at food deficient future
Culture/Cognition
Donna Harraway: I’m going to propose that the Cthulucene might be a way to collect up the questions for naming the epoch, for naming what’s happening in the airs, waters, and places, in the rocks, oceans, and atmospheres. Perhaps needing both the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene, but offering something else, something just maybe more livable….
Read More about Anthropocene, or the art of living on a damaged planet
Digests/Specials
As India reels under a back-to-back drought, with 10 states declared affected and nearly 2,00,000 villages affected, it’s time to ask whether the present situation could’ve been avoided. As many expert voices presented here point out, it’s not the weather alone that creates a drought, but bad planning and an often corrupt and apathetic administration….
Read More about Series: Combating drought – 1: What the experts say
ALTERNATIVES
Madhu Ramnath reports: Unknown to the rest of the country, a small group of adivasis from the forested villages in central Bastar have been busy doing work that would make conservationists proud. People from Sandh Karmari, Kakalgur, Kangoli and nearby villages have been gathering native seeds and raising them in nurseries in fairly large numbers….
Read More about Bastar: Conservation in the time of conflictConflict/Dispossession
Environmental activist and water expert Himanshu Thakkar tells Business Standard that India needs a comprehensive water use policy immediately. Making it clear that India is facing its worst drought ever, he says: “I do not think it is statement of pessimism but possibly reflects a reality. What we are seeing this year is unprecedented in many respects….
Read More about India facing its worst water crisis ever: Himanshu Thakkar
CLIMATE CRISIS
Nihar Gokhale reports: Tata Steel, which is selling its UK business, has indicated that energy – made expensive by climate change policies – caused its steel to be too costly. But, a new report says companies have made billions in profits from climate change policies like carbon-trading. Tata Steel itself made over a billion Euros….
Read More about How Tata Steel UK made a billion dollars from climate policies
ALTERNATIVES
Peter Smetacek writes: The question, naturally, is: What are we hoping to achieve by the process of planting forests? Because we don’t have a clear answer, it is no surprise that there is not a single success story in all the “watershed management” and “afforestation” drives that the public has paid for throughout the country….
Read More about How India’s forests have been lost in translation – in plantations
ALTERNATIVES
Sonal Shah writes: Cities have concentrated on bettering vehicle and fuel technologies and building bus rapid transit or metro rail systems. However, they need to focus on managing demand, augmenting their bus transport systems, improving last mile connectivity and enabling compact development. This will shift people towards non-motorised and public transport and avoid motorised trips….
Read More about What other cities can learn from Delhi’s experiments with public transportConflict/Dispossession
Speaking at a National Consultation on Drought, journalist P. Sainath explains how India’s ‘thirst economy’ makes profits. “If we think we are facing is only a drought, we’re in serious trouble. You’re in the midst of a mega water crisis,” he says, debunking the idea that a good monsoon will solve India’s crippling water crisis….
Read More about P. Sainath: “You are in the midst of a mega water crisis”
Bookshelf
Rob O’Grady writes in ‘150-strong’: Aldous Huxley suggested that “Our present economic, social and international arrangements are based, in large measure, upon organized lovelessness,” and, on the evidence, it appears that he was right. Our current system, governed by the reconciling force of profit motive, is dominated by greed and fear – certainly not love! …
Read More about How our economic system is designed to promote greed, fear and selfishness
Economy
The common assumption has been that the world will eventually “run out” of oil and other non-renewable resources. Instead, we seem to be running into energy surpluses and low prices. The real situation is that as prices rise, supply tends to rise as well, because new sources of production become available at the higher price….
Read More about Gail Tverberg: Energy limits – what most researchers have missedALTERNATIVES
Rina Saeed Khan reports: Under its “Green Growth Initiative”, the Imran Khan-led Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party has begun a number of activities to reverse sixty years of deforestation in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Along with a crackdown on the timber mafias, they have started a large scale afforestation project called “The Billion Tree Tsunami” to reverse this trend….
Read More about Pakistan’s ‘Billion Tree Tsunami’ takes holdECOCIDE/EXTINCTION
The State of the World’s Plants report “provides, for the first time, a baseline assessment of our current knowledge on the diversity of plants on earth, the global threats these plants currently face, and the policies in place and their effectiveness in dealing with these threats,” according to scientists at the Royal Botanical Gardens, London….
Read More about Study: Human activity puts one in five plant species at risk of extinction
Food/Farming
Sumit Chaturvedi reports: The 2011-’12 agricultural census and caste census, summarises the failure of India’s land reforms: No more than 4.9% of farmers control 32% of India’s farmland. A “large” farmer in India has 45 times more land than the “marginal” farmer. 101.4 million – or 56.4% – of rural households own no agricultural land….
Read More about Failure of reforms: 5% of India’s farmers own a third of the land
Bookshelf
The essential argument of Satyajit Das’ new book is: “The 2008 crisis showed that perpetual growth is an illusion. It exposed the high debt levels, credit-driven consumption, global imbalances and excessive financialisation that underpinned an unsustainable economic model, coinciding with an emerging scarcity of energy, food and water, and increasing evidence of climate change impact.”…
Read More about A Banquet of Consequences: A compelling critique of all that is wrong with the world economy
ALTERNATIVES
It is a peculiar combination of technological, economic and geopolitical factors that has led to the present crash in oil prices, lulling many observers into dismissing peak oil. Through it all, the fact remains that the production of ‘conventional oil’, drawn mostly from established oil wells, has not gone up since its peak in 2008….
Read More about Peak Oil returns to haunt the global economy
Development/Growth
India ranks in the top 20 in the Climate Change Vulnerability Index. Our average surface temperature, over the past four decades, has risen by 0.3° Celsius, accompanied by a rising incidence of floods, droughts and cyclones. With the majority of all landholdings measuring less than a hectare, farmers face a steep decline in household income….
Read More about Varun Gandhi: Insure farmers against climate change
