Home

ideas & ideology

Frida Kahlo

ALTERNATIVES

Fight back: An ecopsychological understanding of depression

6th July 2017

Will Falk writes: I’m an environmental activist. I have depression. To be an activist with depression places me squarely in an irreconcilable dilemma: The destruction of the natural world creates stress which exacerbates depression. However, acting to stop the destruction of the natural world exposes me to a lot of stress which, again, exacerbates depression….

Education/Awareness

Thomas Robert Malthus, we need your voice today!

5th July 2017

John Scales Avery writes in Countercurrents.org: Malthus’ “Essay on The Principle of Population” was one of the first systematic studies of the problem of population in relation to resources. He was the first to stress the fact that, in general, powerful checks operate continuously to keep human populations from increasing beyond their available food supply….

CLIMATE CRISIS

Capitalism and the destruction of life on earth: Six theses on saving the humans

30th June 2017

As global capitalist economic growth accelerates planetary ecological collapse, Richard Smith argues that – impossible as it may seem at present – only the most radical solution -the overthrow of global capitalism, the construction of a mostly publicly-owned and mostly planned eco-socialist economy is the only alternative to the collapse of civilization and ecological suicide….

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…

Consumerism/Lifestyle

Spearfishing champ, chef and artist Kimi Werner on living in nature

In this wonderful TEDx talk, Kimi Werner, a free diver and fish hunter, uses her life’s story to illustrate a key lesson she learnt – that of slowing down when everything tells you to speed up. What really shines through is how her childhood memories of living in nature shaped her experiences later in life….

ALTERNATIVES

Vinchurni: A story of rejuvenated land, water and wilderness

21st June 2017

From Vikalp Sangam: Located in the village Vinchurni, in Maharashtra’s Satara district, the 100-acre Maganlal Gandhi Smrutivan was originally a rocky grassland, that has since been transformed into a fertile estate that now teems with various interdependent lives. Behind this makeover is the 89-year-old former ‘Bhoodan’ activist Babulal Gandhi, aka Babu Kaka, and his family….

Bookshelf

‘A reckoning for our species’: the philosopher prophet of the Anthropocene

17th June 2017

From The Guardian: The chief reason that we’re waking up to our entanglement with the world we’ve been destroying, Timothy Morton says, is our encounter with the reality of hyperobjects –the term he coined to describe things such as ecosystems and black holes, which are “massively distributed in time and space” compared to individual humans….

Stephanie McMillan

ALTERNATIVES

Environmentalism used to be about defending the wild – not any more

13th June 2017

From The Guardian: According to Paul Kingsnorth, environmentalism’s increasingly urban mindset means that instead of defending wild places we now spend our time arguing how to best domesticate these wild places –deserts, oceans, mountains– to generate the “green” energy needed to fuel things that, until recently, we couldn’t even imagine, let alone claim to need….

James Fryer/ Gear Patrol

Consumerism/Lifestyle

World Environment Day is now little more than a greenwashing opportunity

11th June 2017

Nitin Sethi writes: Whatever a government might do to run the economic engine of the country or its politics, it has to continuously claim that it is a win-win for both the environment and development. It will talk about its moves to set up zero-effect and zero-defect industries. We all know such an idea does not exist….

Climate Justice Action Network

ALTERNATIVES

What is Eco-Socialism? Who is an Eco-Socialist?

The determinant element in the concept of eco-socialism is the prefix eco. And that means the rejection of industrialism. A good socialist only needs to rejects capitalism. But to be an eco-socialist one must also reject industrialism as a future perspective for mankind, and agree to a program of de-industrialization (now often clumsily called de-growth)….

Joel Sternfeld

ALTERNATIVES

Paul Kingsnorth: The Axis and the Sycamore

8th June 2017

The Axial Age, which refers to the historical period between the eighth and third centuries BC, was a period of profound transformations, which created “the foundations upon which humanity still subsists today,” a period of collapse from which emerged new ways of seeing and being… We may be living through a second Axial Age now……

Paresh Nath/The Khaleej Times

Conserve/Resist

Why the fight for environmental justice is also a fight for social justice

6th June 2017

Nityanand Jayaraman writes: June 5 was World Environment Day. Over the last few days, this author, an environmental activist, has been asked by many people to lay out things that people can do without really straining their daily schedules. These simple things may not exist anymore. Instead, here are six things for everyone to consider….

Atulya Bingham at the mud home she built in Turkey

ALTERNATIVES

A relation of love with the land

30th May 2017

If I were into species research, I would declare the discovery of Atulya Bingham as that rare new species that the world desperately needs. If I were a birder she’d be that exotic bird whose sight delights one every time. She is rare because she writes about nature in a way no one else does….

Siddharth at his thatched-roof home at Netrampakkam

Shriya Mohan

ALTERNATIVES

Point of no return: How a bunch of city-dwellers got back to the basics

22nd May 2017

From The Hindu: Ten years ago Siddharth, an IIT-IIM alumnus based in Chennai, put the brakes on his corporate career, that of vice-president for a technology R&D firm. He was 35 when he picked up a shovel to become an organic farmer instead. Not a landlord who employs labour but, quite literally, a subsistence farmer….

From Canadian photographer Gregory Colbert's 'Ashes and Snow' series

ALTERNATIVES

Exclusive essay: Towards an Ethics of Permanence

10th May 2017

On the occasion of Buddha Poornima, Ecologise presents an exclusive essay co-authored by Nyla Coelho & M.G. Jackson, calling for a fundamental transformation of our perceptions of reality, and a befitting code of conduct to govern our relations with one another and with every other entity on earth; a planetary imperative in need of assertion….

ALTERNATIVES

Avijit Pathak: I’m not a Marxist, but I’m grateful for Marx

9th May 2017

Karl Marx was possibly the founder of the most appealing secular religion in modern times. On his birth anniversary I hear a call from within; I feel like paying homage to the prophet of modern times. Though I’m not a Marxist, the oceanic currents in his thinking continue to fascinate students and wanderers like me….

Brayan Caicedo

ALTERNATIVES

Sunita Narain: The future is in our hands

3rd May 2017

We must rethink the question of states, market and society. We have dismembered the state; grown the market and believed that we’ve empowered society. Slowly, the circle closed— state, market and aspiring, consuming society merged. They became one. Anyone outside this circle stopped getting counted. This cannot work. This is our future’s most important agenda….

A porter in the Himalayas

Kiril Rusev/Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Conserve/Resist

Spotlight: The invisible conservation workers

2nd May 2017

From The Wire: Compared to farm, fishery and factory work, Himalayan porterage is rarely the subject of labour scholarship. For that matter, the forest protection and conservation labour of Adivasis and Dalits too rarely occupies the labour scholar’s interest… The biologically and culturally diverse eastern Himalayas are an apt geography to locate this labour-conservation conundrum….

Paresh Nath/The Khaleej Times

Culture/Cognition

Earth Day and the phantoms of a pathological culture

Kenn Orphan writes: Earth Day has morphed into an opportunity for corporations and politicians to tout empty gestures at “saving the planet” while they mercilessly plunder it. It neutralises public outrage at the world’s dire state and spreads an all-pervasive “feel goodism” to a situation that’s truly existential, for countless other species, and our own….

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….