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ALTERNATIVES

Noam Chomsky: Indigenous people are our only hope for survival

4th November 2017

According to the legendary scholar Noam Chomsky, the world is “facing potential environmental catastrophe and not in the distant future,” and the only communities standing between humankind and catastrophe is the world’s Indigenous people. Here we present a selection of articles & essays on indigenous people and their fight to defend nature from ‘civilised’ humans….

ALTERNATIVES

15 start-ups in Africa contributing to a greener economy

24th September 2017

From Down to Earth: These locally led green start-ups across Africa are not just promising but also innovative in their approach. From providing clean energy to ensuring safe sanitation and reducing carbon emission to improving public health, the activities of these start-ups in Africa are guided by a common objective: sustainable management of natural resources….

ALTERNATIVES

Food sovereignty in rebellion: The Zapatista Solution

7th September 2017

From Solutions Journal: The stunning manner in which the Zapatistas presented themselves to the Mexican government, as well as the world, saw them descend upon several towns, cities, prisons, and wealthy landowners. During the revolt, guerillas liberated political prisoners, stormed military barracks, occupied government offices, set fire to trumped-up files that unfairly criminalized Indigenous people….

A village council meeting being held in Barkheda village to discuss community issues

Ishan Agrawal

ALTERNATIVES

How one village’s successful tryst with self-governance inspired others

13th August 2017

From The Wire: With a predominantly tribal population, Barkheda is a typical central Indian village. A few years ago, the villagers took charge of their natural resources and established a village executive committee. The committee governs all the water bodies of Barkheda, which now has rules on water usage, based on the principles of equity….

The Hindu

Conserve/Resist

How a holy hill got its groves back

24th July 2017

From The Hindu: An afforestation initiative led by naturalists and locals, with support from forest and revenue department officials, has resulted in the Arunachala hill in Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu, shedding its barren, brown visage. Lalitha Sridhar reports on the decade-plus-long turnaround of a damaged fragile, semi-arid ecosystem by successfully harnessing scientific expertise and local knowledge….

ALTERNATIVES

Felix Padel: Adivasi economics may be the only hope for India’s future

28th June 2017

India’s Tribal communities are under extreme pressure, right from big dams and mines to violent insurgencies and militarisation engulfing their lands. In 25 years, will these communities cease to exist? Or, will they represent thriving, revitalised models of egalitarian sustainability that the rest of the world has come to recognise and is learning from? Felix…

Breakwater being constructed for Adani's Vizhinjam port

Dredgingtoday.com

Conflict/Dispossession

Sagarmala: The Rs 10 trillion project that is wrecking India’s coast

24th May 2017

From DNA: Sagarmala is the Indian Government’s Rs 10 lakh crore programme to build Coastal Economic Zones (CEZ) and industrial clusters around 14 key ports. But, the Sagarmala plan document lays out its goals as if the coast has been an empty or unproductive space, and is now poised to be a “gateway” to growth….

ALTERNATIVES

How to form a global counter-economy

25th April 2017

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….

The fishing community in Vizhinjam, Kerala, now threatened by a port being built by the Adani Group

Conflict/Dispossession

‘If we go on like this, the entire mass of small fishers will be wiped out.’

12th April 2017

The Indian coastline no longer belongs to its traditional custodians— the small fisher people. A jamboree of development —cities, SEZs, power plants, ports, sand mining— is eating up the coastline and eroding it beyond repair. Debasis Shyamal of the National Fishworkers’ Forum speaks to Sayantan Bera on the present and future of India’s traditional fishers….

Volunteers taking readings to map the shoreline

Vivek Coelho

CLIMATE CRISIS

Fishers turn climate scientists to save beaches

7th April 2017

India Climate Dialogue reports: A community-managed shoreline monitoring project in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry is tracking changes to beaches to safeguard an ecosystem that is vital for the livelihoods of fishing communities. “A Tide Turns” is a community science initiative that has helped turn more than 120 people from local fishing communities into climate scientists….

Villager Agni Devi at a papaya garden that is a part of the Hesatu forest

Chhandosree

ALTERNATIVES

How growing a forest transformed a Jharkhand village

4th April 2017

From VillageSquare.in: The residents of Hesatu village have successfully raised a thriving forest without any intervention from the state or civil society organisations. They have demonstrated how to create a sustainable economy from ecology by raising a forest of over 100,000 trees on what used to be 365 acres of wasteland barely six years ago….

Sandeep Anirudhan addresses the audience at an Aikyam event

ALTERNATIVES

How I became a bankrupt monk: My journey towards building an eco-conscious community

24th March 2017

On the first anniversary of Bangalore’s Aikyam Community for Sustainable Living, founder Sandeep Anirudhan travels back in time to recollect the journey that led to a different approach to building sustainability awareness. ‘The biggest realisation was that there was no isolated solution for any of the problems we face, because everything is connected’, he writes….

ALTERNATIVES

Five families that gave up city life for the rural dream

9th March 2017

TheNewsMinute reports: About a half-hour distance from the Tiruvannamalai government bus depot lies the Marudam Farm School in Kanathampoondi… It was in 2009 that the idea for the farm school was born when Govinda and his wife Leela came here for an afforestation project. It was then the couple dreamt of building a sustainable community….

ALTERNATIVES

The bright spots: Global examples of a thriving social-ecological future

16th November 2016

There is indeed no lack of stories that document climate change, biodiversity loss, inequality and other examples of unsustainable development around the world. Efforts to envision what better futures could actually look like seldom receive the same attention. But now researchers from the Stockholm Resilience Centre have gathered hundreds of examples of such positive initiatives….

Medium.com

ALTERNATIVES

Something extraordinary is happening, and most of us haven’t noticed

1st January 2016

Gustavo Tanaka writes: A few months ago, I broke the chains of fear that kept me locked up into the system. I now see the world from a different perspective: the one that everything is going through change and that most of us are unaware of that. Here are 8 reasons why I believe this….

GREEN POLITICS

The Sharing Cities Toolkit

17th February 2015

Shareable.net Responding to the calls from organizers in the SCN who articulated the need for a cohesive repository of the tools and resources necessary to support their cities on the path to becoming a Sharing City. To meet this need we are creating the Sharing Cities Toolkit; an evolving compilation of resources comprised of a mix…