Home

green politics

ALTERNATIVES

Indian environmental movements: Why they failed or succeeded, and the challenges ahead

24th February 2019

Many of these battles were fought not because people understood how these projects affected the environment but because they saw the loss of their land and livelihoods as the loss of security and dignity. As a woman adivasi farmer succinctly put it, “I wish to be a farmer, and not a housemaid in someone’s home.”…

ALTERNATIVES

Why Ecosocialism: For a Red-Green future

27th January 2019

Michael Löwy writes: Capitalism, driven by the maximization of profit, is incompatible with a just and sustainable future. Ecosocialism offers a radical alternative that puts social and ecological well-being first. Attuned to the links between the exploitation of labor and the exploitation of the environment, ecosocialism stands against both reformist “market ecology” and “productivist socialism.”…

ALTERNATIVES

Seeing Wetiko: An interview with Alnoor Ladha

18th January 2019

From Gaia Foundation: Alnoor Ladha, a founding member of the activist platform The Rules, which tries to “connect the dots between the various issues that are happening in the world to reveal the underlying antagonist: the economic operating system itself.” Here, he speaks on culture, technology and the cannibalistic economic system consuming life on Earth….

ALTERNATIVES

What It Will Take: Rejecting Dead-Ends and False Friends in the Fight for the Earth

3rd January 2019

Carol Dansereau writes: Is there a place for incremental reforms in our struggle to save humanity? Yes. But support for such reforms must be carried out in the context of our larger goal: securing and using real power through democratically managed public-ownership and guaranteed economic rights. Everything we do needs to feed into that goal….

ALTERNATIVES

After Sri Lanka passed bans on lethal varieties of pesticide, suicides fell by half

21st December 2018

From Vox.com: Sri Lanka is perhaps the most famous case of suicides falling after a selective pesticide ban. One study estimated that the suicide rate in the country fell by half after it banned certain pesticides in 1995. According to the World Health Organization, at least 110,000 people commit suicide by consuming pesticides each year….

ALTERNATIVES

The Yellow Vests: Is Europe seeing the world’s first climate riot?

17th December 2018

What started as an online protest movement against the hike in fuel taxes, France’s ‘Yellow Vest’ movement has led to the worst riots witnessed by the country in half a century. With six dead, 12,000 arrested, and the unrest spreading to the rest of Europe, it may be the world’s first ‘climate riot’ of consequence….

ALTERNATIVES

The Sunrise Movement and the ‘Green New Deal’: Climate hope from Trump’s America?

15th December 2018

Naomi Klein writes on the game-changing proposal for a ‘Green New Deal’ mooted by popular U.S. politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Also, an inside view of the youth climate movement unexpectedly making waves in Trump’s America, and an interview with co-founder Varshni Prakash. Also included is a critical take on the Green New Deal by Don Fitz….

Conserve/Resist

Spotlight: Manifesto of Indian Farmers

13th December 2018

This manifesto was adopted by an assembly representing the farmers of India on the occasion of the historic Kisan Mukti March organised by AIKS at Delhi, on 30 November 2018. Over the past 25 years, more than 3,00,000 of India’s debt-ridden farmers have committed suicide, a crisis which successive governments have done little to address….

Conserve/Resist

Read: A PIL to protect India’s vital, life-supporting natural resources

9th December 2018

The full text of a Public Interest Litigation initiated before the Supreme Court of India, by Akhilesh Chipli and Shankar Sharma, requesting the court to draw firm legal limits on India’s suicidally destructive economic growth during the last three decades, which has led to rapidly deteriorating ecological conditions (air, water, soil, climate) in the country….

CLIMATE CRISIS

‘It is time to rebel’: Meet Greta Thunberg, 15-year-old climate firebrand

19th November 2018

This September, Greta Thunberg went on strike and sat on the steps of Sweden’s parliament building in Stockholm. Her demand? That the government take radical action on climate change. Since then, this autistic 15-year-old has become the face of climate resistance in Europe. Her motto? “We can’t save the world by playing by the rules.”…

CLIMATE CRISIS

Extinction Rebellion: The green movement making waves in the UK

28th October 2018

A new group called Extinction Rebellion, has called for mass civil disobedience in the UK starting next month and promises it has hundreds of people – from teenagers to pensioners – ready to get arrested in an effort to draw attention to the unfolding climate emergency. The group is backed by almost 100 senior academics….

Bookshelf

Charles Eisenstein: Initiation into a living planet

14th October 2018

Most people have passed through some kind of initiation; a crisis that defies what you knew and what you were. Societies can also pass through a similar initiation. That is what climate change poses to the present global civilization. A key element of this transformation is from a geomechanical worldview to a Living Planet worldview….

Representative pic

ALTERNATIVES

Wary of real estate boom, a Goa village revives farming after 30 years

24th September 2018

From The Indian Express: The residents of St. Estevam say they took to farming more due to fear of gated communities encroaching upon farmland. Nine months after the idea was mooted at the community level, this pilot project is now being tracked by the state government, which plans to take this experiment to every village….

Tagore in an open-air classroom at Shantiniketan, the university he founded

ALTERNATIVES

Re-reading Tagore in the age of development gone mad

20th September 2018

Aseem Shrivastava writes: Tagore’s play Mukta-Dhara foretells the manner in which people across the country have been losing their freedom— those uprooted by development quite obviously so, those ‘benefitting’ from it (mostly living in cities) more subtly and invisibly. This is the ecologically fatal price of ‘progress’, which Rabindranath anticipated in much of his work….

Consumerism/Lifestyle

Raj Patel: Capitalism made simple, or world history in 7 cheap things

12th September 2018

Nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives: the seven things that have made our world and will shape its future. Award-winning writer and activist Raj Patel makes the case that in making these things cheap, modern commerce has governed, transformed and devastated the earth. Also included, an interview with Patel and co-author Jason Moore….

ALTERNATIVES

Memory, fire and hope: Five lessons from Standing Rock

4th September 2018

From Common Dreams: The forced eviction of the Standing Rock protestors is simply the latest chapter in a violent, 500-year-old history of colonisation against the First Nations. It’s also the latest chapter in the battle between an extractive capitalist model and the possibility of a post-capitalist world. For now, let’s remember this movement’s enduring lessons….

Conflict/Dispossession

The defenders: Nine activists defending the Earth from violent assault

23rd August 2018

Individually, they are stories of courage and tragedy. Together, they tell a tale of a natural world under ever more violent assault. A series of portraits of people who are risking their lives to defend the land and environment today, from India to South Africa. Also read: ‘Why 2017 Was the Deadliest Year for Environmental Activists’…

The Economist

Bookshelf

Bookshelf: Caste and Nature: Dalits and Indian Environmental Politics

21st August 2018

Rarely do Indian environmental discourses examine nature through the lens of caste. Mukul Sharma shows how the two phenomena are intimately connected, and compares Dalit meanings of environment to Neo-brahminism and mainstream environmental thought. Here, he argues that the Ambedkarite vision is relevant for environmental sustainability, and it is Indian environmentalists who have marginalised Ambedkar….

Steve Cutts

Consumerism/Lifestyle

The social ideology of the motorcar

19th August 2018

“The worst thing about cars is that they are like castles or villas by the sea: luxury goods invented for the exclusive pleasure of a very rich minority, and which in conception and nature were never intended for the people”. So starts Andre Gorz’s justly famous 1973 essay which remains as relevant today as ever….

ALTERNATIVES

How the Great Transition was made: A brief history dated 2050

5th August 2018

“The core issues would’ve gone on being ignored until the system broke down irretrievably. It should’ve been obvious that there had to be a shift to radical localism and simpler ways, but as long as rich world supermarket shelves remained well-stocked no one would take calls for downshifting seriously.” A futuristic vision from Ted Trainer….