The Punjabi farmer has found it hard to escape the whirlpool of an ecologically unviable cropping pattern and its commercial entrapments created by the history of its past six decades. Despite Punjab’s meagre size, the region has remained an important constituent in the self-imagination of the Indian nation. The imprints of Punjab’s agrarian economy and… Read More Surinder S. Jodhka: Changing Modes of Agriculture in Punjab
Oil companies knew 50 years ago the huge damage they were doing. Their motive to ignore it is the same now as it was then. Capitalism is on a collision course with human life and the future of our planet. Each year, air pollution takes more lives than smoking: the last estimate suggests 8.8m deaths across the… Read More Owen Jones: The planet cannot survive our remorseless pursuit of profit
Swan’s book is staggering in its findings. “In some parts of the world, the average twentysomething woman today is less fertile than her grandmother was at 35,” Swan writes. In addition to that, Swan finds that, on average, a man today will have half of the sperm his grandfather had. “The current state of reproductive… Read More Erin Brockovich – Plummeting sperm counts, shrinking penises: toxic chemicals threaten humanity
Staring at the Nanda Devi peak on a warm winter morning, Lal Singh, a magnificent 93, could never have imagined the change his region has undergone in the last two decades. He points towards the Kumaon Himalayas and says, “I’ve never seen these mountains naked in bare rock at this time of the year. Until… Read More Muddam Vijay Dixit Reddy: Mukteshwar in an ecological flux
The Energy Charter Treaty allows fossil fuel companies to sue governments for taking action on climate change. It must be stopped before it’s too late. On 4 February the German energy giant RWE announced it was suing the government of the Netherlands. The crime? Proposing to phase out coal from the country’s electricity mix. The company,… Read More This obscure energy treaty is the greatest threat to the planet you’ve never heard of
Jill Morrison has seen how the bust of oil and gas production can permanently scar a landscape. Near her land in north-east Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, where drilling started in 1889, more than 2,000 abandoned wells are seeping brine into the groundwater and leaking potent greenhouse gasses. The problem is getting worse. As the oil… Read More Heather Hansman: Who will clean up the 'billion-dollar mess' of abandoned US oilwells?
Polar bears and narwhals are using up to four times as much energy to survive because of major ice loss in the Arctic, according to scientists. Once perfectly evolved for polar life, apex predators are struggling as their habitats shrink and unique adaptations become less suited to an increasingly ice-free Arctic, researchers say. The mammals are… Read More Arctic ice loss forces polar bears to use four times as much energy to survive – study
NB: It comes as a relief for many Indians, not just that this innocent young woman has been granted bail, but that the judicial conscience is still alive, as evident in the appropriate remarks by this Additional Sessions Judge. What remains of deep concern is why and how our police has been allowed to get… Read More ‘Citizens can’t be jailed for disagreeing with state policies’: Top quotes from Disha Ravi’s bail order / Rajmohan Gandhi: Just Who Is Spoiling India's Image? A View From The US
NB: Contemporary conservative thought has a tendency to equate all social control, or even the hint of such control, as ‘communism’. Hence the antipathy toward activists such as Greta Thunberg, who simply asked for urgent measures to control damage to the environment. Note this paragraph from the article below: “The fight against climate change in… Read More Roger Sollenberger: What caused the Texas disaster? Decades of Republican deregulation: "Laissez-faire run amok"
A strange fact has baffled naturalists recently. Rhododendrons and Himalayan daisies have been flowering in Ramgarh in the freezing winter of January, normally a snow-bound month of the Himalayan calendar. It has been one of the warmest winters in Uttarakhand. Ramgarh (at 2,100 metres) received half-a-dozen snowfalls during the winter of 2019-20. This season (and… Read More Aseem Shrivastava: An Age gone blind // Mallika Bhanot – Char Dham Pariyojana: A High Risk Engineering Exercise
