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indigenous knowledge

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….

Conflict/Dispossession

A season of regret for an aging tribal expert

12th May 2017

From The New York Times: At 82, the anthropologist T. N. Pandit passes his days in the gentle occupations of old age: poetry, a Buddhist study circle, a daily walk in the park. It is rare for anyone to ask him about the years he spent with the hunter gatherer tribes of the Andaman Islands….

Bonnepioche.us

Education/Awareness

Indigenous myths carry warning signals about natural disasters

11th May 2017

Carrie Arnold writes: Humans have always passed down stories through the ages that helped cultures to cope when disaster inevitably struck. In the past decade, geologists have begun to pay attention to how indigenous peoples understood, and prepared for, disaster. These stories, which couched myth in metaphor, could help scientists prepare for cataclysms to come….

CLIMATE CRISIS

Debal Deb: ‘We have more hardy, nutritious grains than GM can offer’

26th April 2017

From India Water Portal: Records show there were 1.10 lakh varieties of rice in India in 1965. After the Green Revolution, which pushed for hybrid varieties, less than 7,000 remain. Debal Deb, who has conserved 1,200 climate-resilient rice varieties, speaks on the need to conserve traditional seeds and why we don’t need genetically modified ones….

A Jarawa tribal receiving handout from tourist - a scene from the Andaman Trunk Road

Scmp.com

Bookshelf

How a statist vision of development has brought Andaman’s tribals close to extinction

21st April 2017

Excerpt from Islands in Flux, by Pankaj Sekhsaria: These communities of thousands of individuals with a living lineage going back thousands of years have been brought to this sorry state in a mere 150 years. It began with the British and their policies, which have been kept up with clinical efficiency by modern, independent India….

ALTERNATIVES

Seeing Wetiko: On capitalism, mind viruses, and antidotes for a world in transition

15th April 2017

From Kosmos Journal: What if we told you that humanity is being driven to the brink of extinction by an illness? That all the poverty, the climate devastation, the perpetual war, and consumption fetishism all around us have roots in a mass psychological infection? What if this infection is not just highly communicable but also self-replicating?…

Villager Agni Devi at a papaya garden that is a part of the Hesatu forest

Chhandosree

ALTERNATIVES

How growing a forest transformed a Jharkhand village

4th April 2017

From VillageSquare.in: The residents of Hesatu village have successfully raised a thriving forest without any intervention from the state or civil society organisations. They have demonstrated how to create a sustainable economy from ecology by raising a forest of over 100,000 trees on what used to be 365 acres of wasteland barely six years ago….

ALTERNATIVES

Learning from the past: A new protocol for agricultural education and research in India

16th March 2017

We scientists, each one of us, should ask ourselves what the agricultural establishment needs to do in order effectively to address our current agricultural crisis. Given our present mechanistic scientific paradigm, we are part of the problem, and thus cannot, be part of its solution. Our first task, therefore, is to change our outlook fundamentally….

Conflict/Dispossession

The best way to protect the world’s forests? Keep people in them

5th January 2017

Gabriel Popkin reports: To preserve a natural landscape, kick people out. This “guns and fences” paradigm of conservation relies on drastically restricting local people’s activities—or even displacing them altogether. Today, it has spread around the world, with disastrous consequences for communities. But in many cases, it may be misguided, argue a growing chorus of experts….

The Alternative

ALTERNATIVES

Tribute: Anupam Mishra, the chronicler of India’s indigenous water wisdom

20th December 2016

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….

Consumerism/Lifestyle

The hipster hunger for superfoods is starving India’s adivasis

17th December 2016

Purabi Bose writes: The downside of turning quinoa, acai berries of Amazon forests, or even moringa (drumstick) into new superfoods is that urban consumers compete with indigenous peoples for food resources. Through our demand for superfoods, we push indigenous populations to eat cheaper, less nutritious, less flavourful, imported staple diets like maize, rice and wheat….

ALTERNATIVES

Bookshelf: Lean Logic – A Dictionary For The Future

3rd December 2016

A masterpiece and a dictionary unlike any other, every entry in David Fleming’s Lean Logic presents the author’s deft, original analysis of how our present market-based economy is destroying the very foundations—ecological, economic, and cultural—on which it depends, and his core focus: a compelling, grounded vision for a cohesive society that might weather the consequences….

ALTERNATIVES

Felix Padel: Adivasi economics and re-awakening the indigenous mind

24th October 2016

Felix Padel writes: An Adivasi economy, in its traditional or pre-globalization form at least, was based in many ways on ecological principles. In the words of a Kond elder in Kandhamal district, Odisha, “Where are the saints in your society? In this village we are all saints. We consume little, share everything, and waste nothing.”…

Culture/Cognition

How modern schooling is aiding the destruction of the biosphere

19th August 2016

Suprabha Seshan writes: Modern education serves a version of Gulag, by forcing our young to suffer unspeakable conditions in their most vulnerable years. It ultimately breaks them, in order to refashion them into a pliable workforce. This psychic predicament goes hand in hand with the destruction of life, with the catastrophic end of the biosphere….

Representative pic

ALTERNATIVES

Bharat Mansata: The rich diversity of forest foods

31st July 2016

Almost two decades back, about two dozen of us pooled resources to buy undulating land, now known as Vanvadi, in the foothills of the Sahyadris; our primary aim – ecological regeneration and local self-reliance. A survey of the botanical wealth of Vanvadi surprised us with 52 plant species of uncultivated forest foods that provide edible….

Representational pic

ALTERNATIVES

The Chizami model of development

24th July 2016

Ananda Banerjee reports: Chizami village, located in Phek district of eastern Nagaland, has 600 households with a population of 3,000. Chizami is considered a model village for the quiet revolution it has led in the past decade in terms of socioeconomic reforms and environment protection. The village council imposes strict fines on those violating norms….

ALTERNATIVES

Indigenous Terra Madre festival – The Shillong Declaration

7th July 2016

The Indigenous Terra Madre festival 2015 at Shillong brought together indigenous peoples from around the world to share knowledge about food, nutrition and biocultural diversity. The Shillong Declaration, asserts that everyone has a right to good, clean and fair food and consequently the responsibility to protect the heritage, tradition and culture that make this possible….

Conserve/Resist

What incentivises local forest conservation efforts?

4th July 2016

This paper by multiple authors – published in the International Journal of the Commons – won the journal’s Ostrom Memorial Award for Most Innovative Paper of the Year. The authors use a unique longitudinal dataset of forest policy in 100 municipalities in Bolivia to examine the relationships between citizen pressures and economic incentives on forest policy….

Development/Growth

A farmer’s message for Narendra Modi

10th June 2016

Kannaiyan writes: In July 2014, in his first public event as a newly-elected prime minister, Modi called for a standing ovation for India’s farmers. He wanted to craft an image of a farmers’ leader. Two years on, I’m sitting in my farm in Gattawady village, Erode, Tamil Nadu, filled with mixed feelings. Here is why….

Conserve/Resist

Video & Report: India’s indigenous people are holding fast to food traditions against all odds

1st February 2016

Bowing To No One, the first film in a series by Sarah Khan, is about Satyavati, an indigenous woman farmer from Central India, who comes from a rich but rapidly eroding agro-ecological knowledge system. Also in this post is a report from Meghalaya’s Terra Madre festival, which brought together around 600 members of international indigenous food-making communities….