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Conflict/Dispossession

Report: More earth defenders were killed last year than ever before

23rd June 2016

The non-profit Global Witness has documented 185 killings across 16 countries of people defending their land, forests and rivers against destructive industries in 2015. It’s by far the highest annual death toll on record. Communities that take a stand are finding themselves in the firing line of companies’ private security, state forces and contract killers….

Conflict/Dispossession

Draft National Forest Policy sets up another battle over Forest Rights Act

22nd June 2016

Nitin Sethi reports: The government has made public its draft National Forest Policy, to replace the existing one crafted in 1988. Incorporating consequences of climate change but entirely ignoring one of the three forest related laws, the Forest Rights Act, the policy brings new focus to plantations, growing trees outside forest lands and wood industry….

Representational pic

CLIMATE CRISIS

From floods to forest fires: a warming planet – in pictures

16th June 2016

Droughts, floods, forest fires and melting poles – climate change’s impacting Earth like never before. From the Australia to Greenland, photographer Ashley Cooper’s work spans over 30 countries. This selection from his new book shows a changing landscape, scarred by pollution and natural disasters – but there’s hope too, with the rise of renewable energy….

Representational pic

Conflict/Dispossession

Bookshelf: Blood Red River: A Journey Into The Heart Of India’s Development Conflict

14th June 2016

In this excerpt from his new book, published by Hachette India, Rohit Prasad looks at the roles of the different players in the battle between Adivasis, Maoist rebels, corrupt bureaucrats and hungry corporations, concluding that the situation is one of “cooperative plunder”, where two apparently antagonistic forces align for the purpose of siphoning away resources….

ALTERNATIVES

Video: In Defence of Life: Stories of community resistance to mining

3rd June 2016

In Defence of Life follows the struggles and triumphs of four rural communities resisting large-scale mining projects in Colombia, Philippines, South Africa and Romania. Courageous environmental and human rights defenders from these communities describe how they have suffered and why they are standing firm to protect their families, land, water and life from destruction by mining….

Dongria Kondh boy Kalia stands in front of the Niyamgiri hill range

Lewis Davids/Survival

Conflict/Dispossession

For 10 Years, Niyamgiri’s adivasis have resisted a takeover of their land by the government and Vedanta

31st May 2016

Susmita Mukherjee writes: The Supreme Court has scrapped a petition filed, yet again by the Odisha Mining Corporation, challenging the resolutions of the Gram Sabhas of Niyamgiri Hills. For ten years, the Dongaria Kondhs have been looking beyond the education facilities being offered to them by Vedanta and continue their struggle to protect their land….

Conflict/Dispossession

Recent victories by people’s movements show democracy is thriving

23rd May 2016

Ashish Kothari writes: Unlike the representative form that most countries have adopted, a series of recent events point more to a direct form in which people on the ground have the primary power of decision-making. From Chhattisgarh to Odisha, people’s movements against large development projects have brought out the real power of democracy in India….

ALTERNATIVES

Bastar: Conservation in the time of conflict

18th May 2016

Madhu Ramnath reports: Unknown to the rest of the country, a small group of adivasis from the forested villages in central Bastar have been busy doing work that would make conservationists proud. People from Sandh Karmari, Kakalgur, Kangoli and nearby villages have been gathering native seeds and raising them in nurseries in fairly large numbers….

Conflict/Dispossession

P. Sainath: “You are in the midst of a mega water crisis”

16th May 2016

Speaking at a National Consultation on Drought, journalist P. Sainath explains how India’s ‘thirst economy’ makes profits. “If we think we are facing is only a drought, we’re in serious trouble. You’re in the midst of a mega water crisis,” he says, debunking the idea that a good monsoon will solve India’s crippling water crisis….

ALTERNATIVES

The only sustainable growth is de-growth!

12th May 2016

Alberto Acosta writes: Mainstream thinking – embedded within capitalist globalisation – makes us accept the impossibility of imagining an economy that does not promote economic growth, as much as a world without oil, mining and agribusiness is impossible. Within this mainstream thinking, we can find people from every political and ideological stance, from neoliberals to socialists….

Conflict/Dispossession

Anti-mining activist Deba Ranjan Sarangi on the alarming situation in Odisha

4th May 2016

Activist, filmmaker and writer Debaranjan Sarangi, actively involved in the struggle of adivasis in Odisha’s Kashipur to protect their lands from bauxite mining, was arrested on March 18, 2016 on the basis of a 2005 case. In this interview with Countercurrents.org following his release on bail, he describes his experiences and the present situation in Odisha….

Frans Lanting

Conflict/Dispossession

An infrastructure tsunami is being unleashed on the environment in the name of ‘development’

9th April 2016

Bill Laurance writes: Some 25 million km of new paved roads, thousands of dams, and hundreds of thousands of new mining, oil and gas projects, are being planned, roughly 90% of them in developing nations. Their environmental impacts could easily dwarf climate change as thousands of projects penetrate into the world’s last surviving wild areas….

Conflict/Dispossession

How Goa’s mining lobby, government and media ganged up against a young tribal activist

4th April 2016

Nandita Haksar writes: Ravindra Velip, a 27-year-old tribal activist fighting mining in Goa, is facing the combined might of the state government, the mining lobby and a complicit media. A founding member of green activist group Rainbow Warriors, he was arrested and placed in judicial custody. When he was assaulted in jail, it went unreported….

Bookshelf

Book/Video: Thanatia – The destiny of the Earth’s mineral resources

24th March 2016

Is Gaia becoming Thanatia, a resource exhausted planet? For how long can our high-tech society be sustained in the light of declining mineral ore grades, heavy dependence on un-recycled critical metals and accelerated material dispersion? Thanatia presents a cradle-to-cradle view of Earth’s abiotic resources through a novel approach based on the Second Law of Thermodynamics….

Conflict/Dispossession

Video: Rice Bowl to Ashtray – Documentary on industrialisation and displacement in Chhattisgarh

22nd March 2016

Since its formation Chhattisgarh has become the new destination of domestic and foreign investment. Sunil Kumar’s award-winning documentary Daan Se Raakh (Rice Bowl to Ashtray) captures displacement and industrialization in Chhattisgarh. It critically investigates the impact of unbridled industrialization, privatization of water, and acquisition of agricultural land on the life and livelihoods of the rural population….

Development/Growth

On burning ground: The human cost of India’s push to produce more coal

20th March 2016

Fred Pearce reports: As part of India’s modernization program, Prime Minister Narenda Modi has called for doubling the nation’s coal production by 2020. If it moves forward, India seems set to create a mounting tide of victims — from the cycle-wallahs and refugees of Jharia’s coal fires, to the country’s air quality, to the planet’s climate….

Ratan Tata at the Bangalore Aero Show, 2013. The Tata Group is a major player in both mining and defence manufacturing.

Development/Growth

India’s rising Corporate-Military Complex: A critical appraisal

15th March 2016

Rahul Varman writes: Bauxite or iron mines are opened up by grabbing people’s lands and homes against great resistance, and UAVs and other increasingly sophisticated weapons are used to quell this resistance. The corporate sector benefits both from the mining, as well as the demand for weapons, demand which is independent of the vagaries of the market system….

P.Sainath, People's Archive of Rural India

Development/Growth

Special: P. Sainath’s award-winning series on rural India’s ‘Thirst Economy’

11th March 2016

This series on rural India’s water crisis won P. Sainath a World Media Summit award under the category of Exemplary News Professionals in Developing Countries. It zeroes in on the stark contrasts in the consumption and access to water between the rich and poor to illustrate the alarming trend of inequalities in India and abroad….

NEWS ARCHIVE

NEWS UPDATE #86

10th March 2016

Bill McKibben reports: On March 3, across the northern hemisphere, the temperature, for a few hours, crossed a line: it was more than two degrees Celsius above “normal” for the first time in recorded history and likely for the first time in the course of human civilization. Two degrees Celsius is the must-not-cross red line….

Attackers threw a toxic substance on Adivasi leader Soni Sori

Conflict/Dispossession

Chhattisgarh: A ‘War without witnesses’ in the making?

26th February 2016

Sreekumar Kodiyath writes: The final phase of the Sri Lankan Government’s war with the LTTE in 2009 saw a systematic program to make the affair a private one, by expelling reporters and human rights activists from the war zone. Those who stubbornly remained either disappeared or were detained. The army called it a “War without witnesses”….