Economy
T Sabri Öncü writes: Some insist that the global economy is in “secular stagnation,” but the facts suggest we may be entering the “worst” depression in history. Global markets have been on a slippery slope since 2007, and things have only been getting worse. The picture looks dismal, no matter which theoretical lens one uses….
Read More about Has the crash of the global financial markets begun?
Wikimedia Commons
Development/Growth
Devinder Sharma writes: Arun Jaitley’s economic agenda revolves around pushing reforms in order to lift growth and create jobs. But what is not being realised is that agriculture alone – the sector that has been neglected all these years – has the potential to create massive gainful employment, build domestic demand and thereby revitalise the sluggish economy….
Read More about More than Make in India, Jaitley needs to focus on Farm in India
Shanker Chakravarty/The Hindu
Development/Growth
The Union Budget 2015-2016 will be presented in amid dwindling fortunes of the NDA government. Agriculture is already on a downswing while the economic slowdown is perceptible – all this when nine states are going to polls in 2016-17. Down to Earth presents a series of analyses of the Union Budget from the environment and development perspectives….
Read More about Make (Or Break) In India: Down to Earth special issue ahead of the Union Budget
CLIMATE CRISIS
SkyMet founder Jatin Singh says: When SkyMet had said there was an El Nino and the 2014 monsoon won’t be good, the reaction of the then person in charge of IMD was that El Nino was a western conspiracy to play with our devices. But the IMD’s forecast after 2014 became very El Nino based….
Read More about CEO of India’s first private weather forecasting organisation on strange weather trends
Attackers threw a toxic substance on Adivasi leader Soni Sori
Conflict/Dispossession
Sreekumar Kodiyath writes: The final phase of the Sri Lankan Government’s war with the LTTE in 2009 saw a systematic program to make the affair a private one, by expelling reporters and human rights activists from the war zone. Those who stubbornly remained either disappeared or were detained. The army called it a “War without witnesses”….
Read More about Chhattisgarh: A ‘War without witnesses’ in the making?
ENERGY
John Michael Greer writes: While the standard peak oil scenario did not happen, quite a bit of the economic, political, and social turmoil we’ve seen since 2005 or so was in fact driven by the impact of peak oil—but that impact didn’t follow the linear model that most peak oil writers expected it to follow….
Read More about Whatever happened to Peak Oil?
CLIMATE CRISIS
January was the globe’s most unusually warm month ever recorded, and the past three months have been the most unusually warm three-month period on record as well, according to NASA. It is the combination of manmade global warming and a record strong El Niño that’s bumped up temperatures to never-before-seen levels since at least 1880….
Read More about NEWS UPDATE #84
“The mindset of the Indian elite is: the poor are different from me and I don’t want them around”
R. V. Moorthy
Bookshelf
“India’s economic policies are determined by the World Bank. They are therefore pro-capital, and anti-labour. Today the World Bank’s at the end of its tether. Its formula of formal capital in the informal economy failed because the poor don’t own capital. Having run out of ideas, they’ve now started blaming the poor for being poor.”…
Read More about Jan Breman: “76 per cent of the Indian population is living in poverty”
ECOCIDE/EXTINCTION
Aarti Sridhar writes: It is in the ordinary everyday life of fishers and in the political strategies of their leaders that one finds the outlines of a new kind of environmentalism which’s fluid and defies water-tight categorisations. This ethic suggests that it is futile to remain wholly preservationist or utilitarian, or entirely biocentric or anthropocentric….
Read More about Marine parks in India – a case for maritime environmentalismDevelopment/Growth
Jahnavi Sen reports: According to a new research paper by Radicka Anand, capital intensity of production has been increasing across industries in the last decade. This is true not only in capital intensive industries (or those industries whose capital intensity is higher than the median of the manufacturing sector), but also for labour intensive industries….
Read More about As automation increases in India, so does inequality
Bookshelf
Everyone, deep in their hearts, is “waiting for the end of the world to come,” said Murakami. If not the end, then at least a good showdown’s definitely expected. Sarnath Banerjee‘s latest graphic novel envisions a similar war in the near future. Fittingly, the war’s going to be fought over something as elemental as water….
Read More about Graphic novel: The beginning of Delhi’s water wars
Economy
Financial bubbles arise when asset prices inflate above what incomes can sustain. The mathematical reality is that the current over $200 trillion in debt and perhaps another $500 trillion of un(der)funded liabilities really cannot ever be paid back under current terms. In order for these obligations to be reset to a reality-based level, something has to give….
Read More about Chris Martenson: Explaining the chaos in global financial markets
CV Subrahmanyam/The Hindu
ALTERNATIVES
He did not form a people’s movement. Nor did he plead with the government to popularise his natural farming method. Palekar took a more direct route instead. He reached out to the farmers. Met them in person and trained them in his cultivation practices. He continues to spread awareness and hold training workshops for farmers….
Read More about Subhash Palekar: From farmer to national treasure
CLIMATE CRISIS
Common Dreams reports: A new analysis, published in Science Advances journal, reveals that global water scarcity is a far greater problem than previously thought, affecting 4 billion people—two-thirds of the world’s population. Previous analyses looked at water scarcity at an annual scale, and had found that water scarcity affected between 1.7 and 3.1 billion people….
Read More about NEWS UPDATE #83ALTERNATIVES
Dates: April 16-17, 2016 Venue: A Small Three Acre Farm (“Asta Farm”), Hosur-Thally Road, Krishnagiri District, Tamil Nadu Land custodians: Gracy Elezebeth & Vijay Kundaji Contacts Vijayendra t.vijayendra@gmail.com +91 94907 05634 Vijay Kundaji vijay.kundaji@gmail.com +91 98450 87530 Gracy Elezebeth gracyvijay@yahoo.com +91 94484 82572 “When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned,…
Read More about Announcing Ecologise Camp 4, near Thally, Tamil NaduConflict/Dispossession
Colin Todhunter writes: There is a notion that we can just continue as we are, with an endless supply of oil, endless supplies of meat and endless assault on soil, human and environmental well-being that intensive petrochemical agriculture entails. Given the statistics, this is unsustainable, unrealistic and a recipe for continued resource-driven conflicts and devastation….
Read More about Arms, Agribusiness, Finance and Fossil Fuels: The Four Horsemen of the Neoliberal Apocalypse
Dongria Kondh protest against the Vedanta mine appeal.
Bikash Khemka/Survival
ALTERNATIVES
Ashish Kothari & Pallav Das write in State of Power report: People are recognizing that the current power dispensation is frozen in an intellectual paradigm defined by free-market orthodoxy and will change only if confronted by worldviews such as swaraj or Radical Ecological Democracy. India (and the world) needs that change in order to continue to thrive….
Read More about Power in India: radical pathways to local self-ruleDevelopment/Growth
An alarming new study has shown that the world’s forests are not only disappearing rapidly, but areas of “core forest” are vanishing even faster. A tsunami of new roads, dams, power lines, pipelines and other infrastructure is rapidly slicing into the world’s last wild places, opening them up to fragmentation, poaching and other destructive activities….
Read More about The world’s forests will collapse if we don’t learn to say ‘no’
Conflict/Dispossession
Kumar Sambhav Shrivastava reports: Groups like JJMP and TSPC thrive on a levy collected from mining. Jharkhand accounts for nearly a third of India’s coal, a quarter of its iron ore and 16% of copper. In return, the armed groups provide protection to mining companies and intimidate villagers to facilitate land acquisition for the companies….
Read More about Video & Report: The jungle gangs of Jharkhand
Grist / Amelia Bates
ALTERNATIVES
People are not going to be frightened into caring. Scientific evidence-based predictions about what will happen 10, 20, or 50 years in the future are not going to make them care, not enough. That requires making it personal. And that requires facing the reality of loss. And that requires experiencing grief. There’s no other way….
Read More about Charles Eisenstein: Climate Change, grief and carbon reductionism
