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ideas & ideology

ALTERNATIVES

Is there a way out? Announcing the new Radical Ecological Democracy website

3rd October 2017

Ashish Kothari & Pallav Das write: Genuine alternatives to the destructive juggernaut of corporate and finance capital are emerging as much from contemporary progressive resistance as from the wisdom of indigenous peoples’ and other traditional community world-views. “Radical Ecological Democracy” (RED) is one such emerging paradigm based on which we can fashion a meaningful future….

ALTERNATIVES

Resolutions of the National Convention of Green Socialists, Karnataka

2nd October 2017

The National Convention of Green Socialists was held at Tumakuru, Karnataka on 24 Sep 2017, as part of the ongoing ‘Tax Denial Satyagraha’ against the imposition of G.S.T. on handmade products. Among other things, the protesters demanded zero-tax on natural products, grown through natural farming, such as natural foods, etc, treating them as handmade products….

Culture/Cognition

Why political correctness fails – Why what we know ‘for sure’ is wrong

29th September 2017

Gail Tverberg writes: The Politically Correct (PC) worldview has been called the “religion of success”. In this post, I explain why many popular (or politically correct) understandings are just plain wrong. I cover many controversial topics, including environmentalism, peer-reviewed literature, climate change models, and yes, religion. I expect that the analysis will surprise almost everyone….

ALTERNATIVES

Totnes: The world’s most forward-thinking eco settlement?

25th September 2017

From The Guardian: Totnes has been called ‘Britain’s town of the future’. This month, the small town which kick-started a worldwide movement of sustainable urban living, completes 11 years of being a Transition Town. As fossil-fuel reserves dwindle and the economy contracts, will resident-led Transition Towns prove to be a viable model for the future?…

Eco-theologian Thomas Berry on nature and humans

ALTERNATIVES

Earth Jurisprudence: Learning from nature’s laws and lore

15th September 2017

From The Ecologist: It’s the very conception of law that needs to change, and thereby our relationship with Nature. Once we recognise that we are born into a lawful and ordered universe and that our wellbeing is derived from complying with these laws, this understanding should permeate the transformation of all the other modern institutions….

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….

ALTERNATIVES

Aseem Shrivastava: Who killed Swaraj?

5th September 2017

Nehru’s grand illusion was to imagine that the ‘good’ in the modern world could be somehow magically preserved while allowing the ‘evil seed’ (gluttony of power?) to flourish into a ravishing rainforest of destructive avarice, an inevitability our times are having to face, as barbarism knocks on every door. Gandhi’s fears are globally vindicated today….

Bookshelf

Bookshelf: Why dystopia is for losers

30th August 2017

From International Socialist Review: Catastrophism explores the politics of apocalypse —on the left and right, in the environmental movement, and from capital and the state —and examines why the lens of catastrophe can distort our understanding of the dynamics at the heart of these numerous disasters —and fatally impede our ability to transform the world….

ALTERNATIVES

Why climate change isn’t our biggest environmental problem, and why technology won’t save us

25th August 2017

Richard Heinberg writes: Over the past century-and-a-half, fossil fuels enabled the rapid growth of resource extraction, manufacturing, and consumption; and these in turn led to population increase, pollution, and loss of natural habitat and hence biodiversity. Our core ecological problem is not climate change. It is overshoot, of which global warming is only a symptom….

Paintings by Meenakshi Subramaniam

Culture/Cognition

Suprabha Seshan: The music of everything

15th August 2017

I’m no elephant whisperer, nor do I claim to have complex exchanges with them by moonlight, but the reverse is true: when they come by, I’m whispered out of my den by their calls and cries, by their trumpets, rumbles and whooshing sighs. When elephants arrive in the valley, I scoot out of my sheets….

ALTERNATIVES

Jason Hickel on BBC: Our addiction to economic growth is killing us

14th August 2017

From BBC: A recent episode of Newsnight, BBC’s programme on ideas, had a surprising guest: Anthropologist Jason Hickel, who went on to make a case against the lethal addiction to economic growth and in its place proposed “planned de-growth”. Hickel is the author of The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions….

ALTERNATIVES

Richard Heinberg: Ecological collapse? There’s no app for that

10th August 2017

Even when we question the personal impacts of modern technology, how many of us consider how our dependence on technology might be harming us? Or question the belief that technological advances will save us from our most pressing environmental and societal challenges? Richard Heinberg tackles this thorny issue in this brilliant essay and animation feature….

Culture/Cognition

Art Eco 1: The ethereal beauty of ‘Bioluminescent Forest’

7th August 2017

Nature has always inspired art, but in our own age of ecological crisis, it’s taking on a special significance for many contemporary artists. This series looks at path-breaking artists and works that reflect this growing awareness. Here, watch artist-filmmakers Friedrich van Schoor and Tarek Mawad turn trees, mushrooms, and even toads into pulsing, projection-mapped creatures….

CLIMATE CRISIS

Can you feel capitalism dying?

4th August 2017

Joe Brewer writes: There is a reason only 5 men have the same aggregate wealth as half the human population. And that the Earth’s climate is ramping up for a phase transition that threatens our entire civilization. It’s because the 500 year old Global Architecture of Wealth Extraction is designed to produce exactly these outcomes….

ALTERNATIVES

Light, bright or dark – what shade of green are you?

31st July 2017

Kari McGregor writes: The green movement is no longer unified, if it ever really was. Bright Green, Lite Green, Bright Green and Dark Green tribes form around divergent worldviews, theories of change, an accepted range of tactics. Each tribe vies for attention to its message in a world of time-constrained news cycles and manufactured consumerism….

ALTERNATIVES

Tribute: Murray Bookchin and the ecology of freedom

30th July 2017

Here’s a thinker, who in the 1960s, declared climate change as a defining problem of the age. Who accused his fellow environmentalists of advocating mere “technical fixes” of capitalism, instead of addressing root causes. But today, his ideas are enjoying an unexpected revival. Damian White pays tribute to Murray Bookchin, who died on this day in 2006….

Education/Awareness

The domestication of humankind

27th July 2017

From Pragati: Why did humans abandon hunting and gathering for sedentary communities dependent on livestock and cereal grains, governed by precursors of today’s states? Anirudh Kanisetti reviews James Scott’s lucid Against The Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, which provides surprising new evidence that refutes mainstream narratives of how civilization came into being….

ALTERNATIVES

Layla and the owl’s eyes: Ecopsychology and being human

24th July 2017

Will Falk writes: Just like an owl on a chain is no longer an owl, and an elephant in a zoo is no longer an elephant, humans cut off from the nature are no longer human. We are animals and animals are an ongoing process of relationships. When those relationships become impossible, we lose ourselves….

ALTERNATIVES

Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals

20th July 2017

Martin Lukacs writes in The Guardian: Capitalism thrives on people believing that being afflicted by the structural problems of an exploitative system –poverty, joblessness, poor health, lack of fulfillment –is a personal deficiency. Neoliberalism has taken this internalised self-blame and turbocharged it. So, you are now also responsible for bearing the burden of potential ecological collapse!…

ALTERNATIVES

Satya Sagar: What on earth is a human being?

16th July 2017

Satya Sagar writes: It’s time to step back, reflect and ask again and again the questions: who or what exactly are human beings, how we should live in this world and where we should go? For this time the very survival of the human species may lie in getting the answers right with great honesty….