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indigenous people

Conflict/Dispossession

Three times rise in killings of India’s land, eco-defenders: Modi govt blamed for “stifling opposition” by any means

15th July 2017

From Counterview/Global Witness: A just-released global report has revealed that the number of land and environment defenders killed in India has almost trebled, from 6 in 2015 to 16 in 2016, blaming it on “a disturbing trend” of increasing police brutality, indicating the Modi government’s determination “to stifle opposition to ‘development’ by any means necessary.”…

Conflict/Dispossession

Mining in Gadchiroli – building a castle of injustices

4th July 2017

From Countercurrents.org: This article is about the struggle to save the rich, dense and old growth forests in Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra by the Madia Gond adivasis residing in these forests. Communities like theirs don’t celebrate World Environment Day, but it is in their struggles that the ecological and cultural wellbeing of our country currently rests….

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…

A Baiga woman surveys the land in Amaniya panchayat, Chhattisgarh

Heera Bai

Conflict/Dispossession

Conservation betrayals in Central India

27th June 2017

Heera Bai reports: Across the Tribal Belt of Central India, indigenous communities are constantly being evicted from ancestral lands to make way for development projects, industry, tourism and government-sanctioned conservation initiatives. In the states of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, the Baiga community have faced a legacy of evictions that dates back more than 30 years….

Yale Environment 360

Conflict/Dispossession

Tribute: Bill Kayong, Malaysian activist who fought to protect native forests

21st June 2017

From Yale Environment 360: On this day last year, Bill Kayong, an up-and-coming political activist in Miri, a coastal oil town in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, was shot dead. At the time, Kayong was leading a campaign to protect native forest lands and stop incursions on traditional lands by logging and palm oil companies….

Conserve/Resist

The Bishnois, India’s original environmentalists, who inspired the Chipko movement

28th May 2017

The Bishnois may be considered as India’s first environmentalists. The famous ‘Chipko Movement’ was inspired by the true story of Amrita Devi Bishnoi, who refused to let the king’s men cut trees in her village. Her head was severed. More than 300 people who did the same were killed for trying to protect the trees….

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….

Conflict/Dispossession

Not so cute: World Wildlife Fund declared ‘greenwasher of the year’

7th May 2017

‘Greenwashing’ has been defined as creating “a false or misleading picture of environmental friendliness used to conceal or obscure damaging activities.” Not something you would normally associate with the WWF, whose cute Panda logo has helped make it the face of wildlife conservation globally. But there’s more to the story, as this new report shows….

The Indian Quarterly

Forests/Wildlife

Suprabha Seshan: People of the rain

25th April 2017

From The Indian Quarterly: Strange things happen in this forest. A bug sucks and then pees. Droplets of bright water shoot out of its bum and fall rain-like on the forest floor. I saw it today with my own eyes. Orange and black bug on a Heliconia leaf, shadow-spangled, tumbling in the gusting wind, peeing….

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….

J. Vijaya, India's first female herpetologist, lived alone for many months in a forest cave in Kerala to study cane turtles

Zai Whitaker

Conserve/Resist

Tribute: Viji, the Turtle Girl

18th April 2017

This day thirty years ago, the bodily remains of J. Vijaya, India’s first female herpetologist and turtle field biologist, was found in a forest. She was only 28. The cause of her death remains unknown to this day. A moving tribute to one of the most memorable personalities in Indian wildlife conservation, by Janaki Lenin….

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….

Conflict/Dispossession

Spotlight: Activists fighting to protect nature and livelihoods in India’s scheduled areas

2nd April 2017

Counterview reports: At a time when indigenous communities are losing access to land, and other natural resources, these activists have been relentlessly fighting for social justice, mostly in schedule five areas and other tribal belts. Here are profiles of some of these inspiring grassroots heroes, who were recently felicitated at an event held in Delhi….

Representative pic

Conserve/Resist

Why our approach to World Forests Day is a threat to forests

25th March 2017

Souparna Lahiri writes: How will forests provide for such high energy demands being put on them, especially in the name of renewables? In the Global South, there’s a rise in monoculture tree plantations for biofuels, or wood. Biofuel plantations have already caused the clearing of rainforests and threatened animals and humans that depend on them….

ALTERNATIVES

Court issues ruling in world’s first “Rights of Nature” lawsuit

6th March 2017

Intercontinentalcry.org reports: On January 11, 2017 Ecuador’s Esmeraldas Provincial Court handed down its decision on the world’s first constitutionally-based Rights of Nature lawsuit. Amazingly, this historic demand for justice—which simultaneously begs for a shift in merely human rights-based paradigms—was made by people who literally and figuratively live in Ecuador’s margins: The Canton of San Lorenzo….

Conflict/Dispossession

Tribute: Berta Cáceres, an outspoken voice for nature that was silenced

3rd March 2017

This day a year ago, Honduran indigenous and environmental organizer and Goldman Environmental Prize winner Berta Cáceres was assassinated in her home. She and her associates had faced death threats for standing up to mining and dam projects that threatened to destroy their community. A tribute to her fighting spirit on her first death anniversary….

Conflict/Dispossession

Kaziranga: The park that shoots people to protect rhinos

18th February 2017

In Kaziranga national park, rangers shoot people to protect rhinos. The park features in a new BBC investigation, which highlights some of the conflicts that characterise contemporary conservation, as the need to protect endangered species comes into contact with the lives and rights of people who live in and around the increasingly threatened national parks….