CLIMATE CRISIS
The Guardian reports: A new study shows that oxygen levels in oceans have fallen 2% in 50 years due to climate change, which threatens future fish stocks and the habitat and behaviour of marine life. Related: Amitav Ghosh warns that the Bay of Bengal’s depleted fish stocks and huge dead zone signal a tipping point….
Read More about Red alert: Fish under threat from ocean oxygen depletion
ALTERNATIVES
There’s a fundamental difference between the ecology movement and social movements of the past. The demands of social movements could be fulfilled to a large extent, thanks to the growing cake. But with the emergence of the ecology movement, the situation has changed completely. Now, not only must the cake not grow, it must shrink….
Read More about The ecology movement is not a social movement: A response to John ForanConserve/Resist
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….
Read More about Ritwick Dutta: ‘We need to have a selfish interest in environment’Conflict/Dispossession
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….
Read More about The global road-building explosion is shattering natureECOCIDE/EXTINCTION
Fidel Castro, the legendary Cuban revolutionary and politician who passed away on November 25th was known for his pioneering policies in health and education, but was equally committed to environmental issues. In this short talk given at the 1992 Earth Summit, Fidel described the global environmental crisis and identified its causes more powerfully than any other delegate….
Read More about Watch: Fidel Castro: Tomorrow will be too lateECOCIDE/EXTINCTION
From Nature Video: It’s a simple question: how many trees are there on Earth? The answer required 421,529 measurements from fifty countries on six continents. Their findings? The earth is losing 10 billion trees every year. Now this data has been combined to produce a stunning visualisation of earth as you’ve never seen it before….
Read More about How scientists counted every tree on Earth—and the startling results
The Alternative
ALTERNATIVES
Noted water conservationist Anupam Mishra passed away at the age of 68 on Monday. Here’s a tribute and a video where he talks with wisdom and wit about the amazing feats of engineering from centuries ago by the people of India’s desert regions to harvest water. These ancient aqueducts and stepwells are still used today….
Read More about Tribute: Anupam Mishra, the chronicler of India’s indigenous water wisdomCLIMATE CRISIS
Scroll.in reports: These timelapse videos were created with images of Landsat Satellite showing massive global transformations from 1984 to 2012 via Google Earth. Timelapse events include transformations such as the coastal expansion of Dubai, the retreat of the Columbia Glacier in Alaska, Saudi Arabian desert, Amazonian forest land in Brazil and Las Vegas urban growth….
Read More about Watch: 10 extraordinary timelapse videos show earth’s transformation in 30 yearsCulture/Cognition
Set in the world of a spoofed prescription drug commercial, Nature Rx offers a hearty dose of laughs and the outdoors – two timeless prescriptions for whatever ails you. This award-winning comedy series is a friendly reminder to us Earthly inhabitants what feels good and what is worth protecting once we take an adventure outdoors….
Read More about Warning: this prescription may lead to spontaneous euphoria
Conflict/Dispossession
From GRAIN.org: Powerful actors, driven by narrow economic interests rather than long term sustainability are concentrating the political power to determine how resources are to be used, by whom, and for what purposes… The Global Convergence of Land and Water Struggles is a response to these injustices by frontline communities from all over the world….
Read More about Voices from the global convergence of land and water struggles
Bramble Cay melomys’ is the first recorded extinction of a mammal due to human-caused climate change
Conserve/Resist
Growing numbers of scientists have asserted that our planet might soon see a sixth massive extinction— driven by the escalating impacts of humanity. Others, such as the Swedish economist Bjørn Lomborg, have characterised such claims as ill-informed. We argue that the jury is in and the debate is over: Earth’s sixth great extinction has arrived….
Read More about Paul Ehrlich: Radical overhaul needed to halt earth’s sixth great extinction
CLIMATE CRISIS
On the eve of the American presidential election, where the two leading candidates offer little hope for climate action, it’s worth revisiting this hard-hitting 2006 article by Chad Harbach, who warned, “(Other countries) will do nothing until the United States demonstrates that a grand-scale transition to renewable energy can be achieved by big industrial countries.”…
Read More about Flashback: On global warming
The White Rhino - one of many endangered large animals
Conserve/Resist
The Guardian reports: The number of wild animals on Earth is set to fall by two-thirds by 2020, which a new report attributes to an ongoing mass extinction. The analysis, the most comprehensive to date, indicates that animal populations plummeted by 58% between 1970 and 2012, with losses on track to reach 67% by 2020….
Read More about Report: World on track to lose two-thirds of wild animals by 2020
ALTERNATIVES
Rajni Bakshi writes: Votaries of degrowth are the first to acknowledge that they are deploying a ‘bomb-word’. Yet it highlights an inconvenient truth–that infinite economic growth is not possible on a finite planet. Even ‘green’ growth, supported by technological wizardry cannot, by itself, address the deepening global crisis of under-employment, social dislocation, and environmental degradation….
Read More about Rajni Bakshi: Degrowth – a “bomb-word” comes of age
The Bramble Cay melomys is the first mammal recorded extinct due to climate change.
Conserve/Resist
Aaron M. Ellison writes in Nature: Better data will not save elephants, rhinos or any other species. Countless individuals, institutions, governments, and multinational and non-governmental organizations have been collecting, assimilating and organizing such data for decades, essentially fiddling while our biological heritage burns… I suggest three crucial actions that scientists can take, beginning right now….
Read More about Ecologists are fiddling while our natural heritage burns, says Harvard scientist
Coral bleaching and death at Lizard Island on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef
XL Catlin Seaview Survey via Associated Press
CLIMATE CRISIS
“The Great Barrier Reef of Australia passed away in 2016 after a long illness. It was 25 million years old.” So begins Rowan Jacobsen’s moving obituary for the world’s largest living structure. With 2,900 individual reefs and 1,050 islands, it’s larger than the United Kingdom, and it contained more biodiversity than all of Europe combined….
Read More about Obituary: The Great Barrier Reef (25 Million BC-2016)
ALTERNATIVES
To fight climate change, a war-like mobilization a la McKibben is not necessary. Actually we are not at war at all. If we are, then it is we who are the aggressors, we are the enemy of nature. Then the first task for the transition is to end our aggression. We need only to withdraw….
Read More about Saving the planet, American style: A critical review, and some thoughts and ideas
ALTERNATIVES
Giorgos Kallis writes: Degrowth is a frontal attack on the ideology of economic growth. No Left party might dare to openly question growth, but I find it hard to see how in the long-term they can avoid it. Growth is not only ecologically unsustainable but, as economists like Piketty admit, increasingly unlikely, especially for advanced economies….
Read More about Why the Left should embrace degrowth
ALTERNATIVES
Jason Hickel writes: The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals recognise the inherent tension between economic development and the planet’s ecology. It signals awareness that something about our economic system has gone terribly awry–that we cannot continue chewing through the living planet without gravely endangering our security and prosperity, and indeed the future viability of our species….
Read More about Time for degrowth: to save the planet, we must shrink the economy
CLIMATE CRISIS
The Guardian reports: The oceans have already sucked up an enormous amount of heat due to escalating greenhouse gas emissions, affecting marine species from microbes to whales, according to a report involving the work of 80 scientists from a dozen countries. The profound changes underway in the oceans are starting to impact people, it states….
Read More about Report: Soaring ocean temperature is ‘greatest hidden challenge of our generation’
