farming Archives - Ecologise

Education/Awareness

Interview: DJ Bagyaraj – India’s only contributor to the Global Soil Biodiversity Atlas

8th July 2016

Chethan Kumar reports: The recently Global Soil Biodiversity Atlas, is a first-of-its-kind attempt to present the latest research and raise awareness on the role of soil organisms. Bangalore-based scientist D.J. Bagyaraj, the only Indian contributor to the Atlas, talks about the vital role of soil biodiversity for sustainable food production and prevention of land degradation….

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Consumerism/Lifestyle

CRISPR is coming, with big implications for food, farmers, consumers and nature

13th March 2016

Maywa Montenegro reports: Very few technologies merit the epithet “game changer” — but a new genetic engineering tool known as CRISPR-Cas9 is one of them. Since we first developed the ability to alter genetic material, efforts to do so have required months or even years of molecular tinkering. With CRISPR, precision and speed have soared….

ECOCIDE/EXTINCTION

Only 60 years of farming left if soil degradation continues

16th December 2015

Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years, and if current rates of degradation continue all of the world’s top soil could be gone within 60 years, a senior UN official said Chris Arsenault, Reuters ROME (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years, and if current rates of degradation…

ECOCIDE/EXTINCTION

George Monbiot: Soil – the crisis to beat them all?

2nd April 2015

War, pestilence, even climate change, are trifles by comparison. Destroy the soil and we all starve. George Monbiot Imagine a wonderful world, a planet on which there was no threat of climate breakdown, no loss of freshwater, no antibiotic resistance, no obesity crisis, no terrorism, no war. Surely, then, we would be out of major…

CLIMATE CRISIS

News update

14th March 2015

Can Solar be the Backbone of India’s Energy System by 2035? Tobias Engelmeier, The Energy Collective Around 70% of India’s power comes from coal, less than 1% from solar. Will that change in the next 20 years? Can solar become the new backbone of the Indian energy system? I think there is a good possibility…

Sustainability

Report: The Future of Food and Farming

15th December 2014

This report by the UK Government’s Foresight project looks at the increasing pressures on the global food system between now and 2050. Titled The Future of Food and Farming, it highlights the decisions that policy makers need to take today, and in the years ahead, to ensure that a global population rising to 9 billion or…

ALTERNATIVES

Thrissur Declaration: Alternative technologies and organisational forms for social transformation

20th October 2014

Excerpted from the Thrissur Declaration, of 16 October 2014: We are in an era of systemic crisis – of economy, food, energy, climate and livelihoods. In India this is characterised by a deep agrarian crisis, declining social indicators, unemployment and underemployment, environmental degradation, lack of access to basic services and distress migration especially in rural…