Consumerism/Lifestyle
We’re all on track to use at least 29 phones in our lifetimes. This rapid turnover of devices leads to record profits for smartphone manufacturers year after year. It also leads to many damaging impacts on people and our planet. Greenpeace USA’s new report, ‘From Smart to Senseless’, explores the high cost of smartphone use….
Read More about Study: What 10 years of smartphone use means for the planet
Danomyte/Shutterstock
Bookshelf
From Quartz.com: The Luddites were the bands of English workers who destroyed machinery, especially in cotton mills, which they believed was threatening their jobs. As machine learning and robotics consume manufacturing and white-collar jobs alike, New York Times journalist Clive Thompson revisits the Luddite’s history to see what the 200-year-old workers’ rebellion can teach us….
Read More about Luddites have been getting a bad rap for 200 years. Turns out, they were right
Conflict/Dispossession
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….
Read More about A season of regret for an aging tribal expert
Bonnepioche.us
Education/Awareness
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….
Read More about Indigenous myths carry warning signals about natural disasters
A porter in the Himalayas
Kiril Rusev/Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Conserve/Resist
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….
Read More about Spotlight: The invisible conservation workersDigests/Specials
Michael Snyder writes: What in the world are we going to do with billions of human workers around the globe that are no longer needed when technology takes virtually all of our jobs? Some have suggested that society will evolve into a socialist utopia; others see a dystopian future with greater inequality than ever before….
Read More about Here come the robots – And they’re going to take our jobsCLIMATE CRISIS
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….
Read More about Debal Deb: ‘We have more hardy, nutritious grains than GM can offer’CLIMATE CRISIS
From The Daily Conversation: This video shows the top 10 countries threatened by the 6 meter sea level rise we are almost guaranteed to see in the not-too-distant future, according to the projected pace of global warming and ice melt in Greenland and Antarctica. India is No. 3 on the list, and China No. 1….
Read More about Watch: The top 10 countries in danger from future sea level rise
Consumerism/Lifestyle
A new modeling study published in The Lancet suggests that India’s agricultural need for water can be met if Indians introduce minor diet changes. Research team leader Alan Dangour tells Down to Earth that “dietary change is a potential way to improve resilience of the Indian food system in the face of future groundwater decline.”…
Read More about Study: A minor change in your diet can reduce water use for agricultureCLIMATE CRISIS
Carbon Brief reports: Four years of current emissions would be enough to blow what’s left of the carbon budget for a good chance of keeping global temperature rise to 1.5C. That’s the conclusion of this analysis, which brings the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s carbon budgets up to date to include global emissions in 2016….
Read More about Analysis: Just four years left of the 1.5C carbon budget
Conflict/Dispossession
People living in villages, who are migrating in large numbers to cities, could be victims of our economic development or perhaps the dismal income growth of farm households is semi-deliberate to keep labour costs low… Are our rural brothers victims or collateral damage of economic development, of a deliberate though unstated strategy, asks Sanjiv Phansalkar….
Read More about Are farmers ‘collateral damage’ of India’s economic growth?
P. Sainath/People's Archive of Rural India
Education/Awareness
Hari Pulakkat writes: The country’s water data has been largely hidden from public view, and what was available was poor or untrustworthy. This brings up a question rarely asked by policymakers. If scientists find it difficult to analyse the country’s water resources at the moment, how valid are the reports that forecast India’s water future?…
Read More about The precarious situation of India’s water problem
Volunteers taking readings to map the shoreline
Vivek Coelho
CLIMATE CRISIS
India Climate Dialogue reports: A community-managed shoreline monitoring project in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry is tracking changes to beaches to safeguard an ecosystem that is vital for the livelihoods of fishing communities. “A Tide Turns” is a community science initiative that has helped turn more than 120 people from local fishing communities into climate scientists….
Read More about Fishers turn climate scientists to save beachesConserve/Resist
From Yale Environment 360: Ecologist Suzanne Simard, now at the University of British Columbia, has pioneered research into how trees communicate. She has shown how trees use a network of soil fungi to convey their needs and aid neighboring plants. Now she’s warning that threats like clear-cutting and climate change could disrupt these critical networks….
Read More about Suzanne Simard on the networked beauty of forests
Illustration by Jasper Rietman
Bookshelf
Florence Williams writes: Unfortunately for city dwellers, the closer we live to roads, the higher our risk of autism, stroke and cognitive decline in ageing, although the exact reasons haven’t been teased out. Scientists suspect it has something to do with fine particles causing tissue inflammation and altering gene expression in the brain’s immune cells….
Read More about Warning: living in a city could seriously damage your health
Consumerism/Lifestyle
CBC News reports: A new report has calculated the total mass of all manmade things-from buildings to cars and computers- to be an astounding 30 trillion tons, seven times more than the total amount of living matter on Earth. It shows the sheer magnitude of the human impact on our planet, which is still growing….
Read More about Earth’s ‘technosphere’ now weighs 30 trillion tons, research finds
CLIMATE CRISIS
Down to Earth reports: With his executive order, which lifts the ban on coal production and lifts restrictions on production of oil, natural gas, ‘clean coal’ and shale energy, U.S. President Donald Trump has literally started the process of dismantling the Paris Climate Agreement— the landmark international pact adopted in 2015 to fight climate change….
Read More about A black day for the planet: Trump sounds death knell for Paris pact
Representative pic
CLIMATE CRISIS
From The Guardian: The research centres we assume to be objective, are connected with the very industry the public believes they are objectively studying. To call this conflict of interest is an understatement: many of them exist as they do only because of the fossil fuel industry. They are industry projects polished with academic credibility….
Read More about The fossil fuel industry’s invisible colonisation of academia
Countercurrents.org
ALTERNATIVES
From Countercurrents.org: Human cultural evolution can be regarded as an enormous success in many respects. However, thoughtful observers agree that civilization is entering a period of crisis. As all curves move exponentially upward: population, production, consumption, etc, one can observe signs of increasing environmental stress, while the existence of nuclear weapons threaten civilization with destruction….
Read More about Information theory pioneer John Scales Avery on the planet’s converging crises
ALTERNATIVES
John Bellamy Foster writes in the foreword: It’s capitalism and the alienated global environment it has produced that constitutes our “burning house” today. Mainstream environmentalists have generally chosen to do little more than contemplate it, while flames lick the roof and the entire structure threatens to collapse around them. The point, rather, is to change it….
Read More about Bookshelf: Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System
