Posts Tagged ‘culture’
If All Life Mattered, What Would Decision-Making Look Like?
In April 2013, the Supreme Court of India delivered a historic judgement recognizing the cultural, religious and spiritual rights of the Dongria Kondh Adivasis, an Indigenous community residing in the Niyamgiri Hills of Odisha state in eastern India. The community fighting against bauxite mining in their sacred landscape had articulated that “our way of life…
Read MoreActive Networks for a Rapid Global-to-Local Transition
It’s too easy to get depressed by the daily news cycle of wars and the threat of A.I., and to assume that nothing at all is going on to take the world in a more life-affirming direction. The truth is, there are thousands of grassroots projects on every continent challenging the bigger-is-better, high-tech trajectory of…
Read MoreLocal Food for Rapid Transition
As a nature-loving child growing up in the 2000s, I was debilitated and depressed by the idea that we could either save species and ecosystems, or provide a reasonable quality of life to human beings. Everything I was implicitly taught about ‘development’ and ‘progress’, at school and in the media, pointed to one seemingly inexorable…
Read MoreRemembering Pracha Hutanuwatr and Maria Mies
Sadly, two of my dear colleagues and soulmates ¬ Pracha Hutanuwatr and Maria Mies – passed away recently. I first met Pracha when he visited us in Ladakh in the mid-1980s. We immediately recognized that we were kindred spirits, and he invited me to Thailand and introduced me to his mentor, Sulak Sivaraksa. Deeply spiritual but…
Read MoreRevitalizing Indigenous Ecosystems
Oaxaca, one of the most biodiverse and culturally rich states in Mexico has, over the last two decades, rapidly exploded into a booming tourist destination. Visitors find themselves lost in the beauty of its diverse cultures, artisan crafts, vibrant cuisine, and its most famous beverage – mezcal. Tequila and mezcal have witnessed a remarkable surge…
Read More‘Rude music’, empathy, and the case for localism
The publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859 rattled the foundations of religious belief in every corner of the book-reading world. We know a good bit about the debates that ensued because they still flare up wherever there are people who insist on the literal truth of the origins myth found in the…
Read MoreListening to the Forest
To start with a few words about myself, I am a conservationist serving the rainforests of the Western Ghats in India. It has been my lifelong inquiry to look at how a biome can recover from assault – from colonial-neocolonial-capitalistic-civilizational assault. I know, and the biome knows, that it can heal from most travesties and…
Read MoreLocalization and Buen Vivir
Today, there exists what in my estimation is an unprecedented moment for altering the course of human history. The hopes and dreams for a more equitable, peaceful, just and livable world now have an opening for their realization as never before, which has come about due to the impacts on society from accelerating climate fluctuations…
Read MoreFood sovereignty on the Navajo Nation
Graham Biyáál will never forget the taste of his mother’s traditional blue corn mush. An earthy, hearty dish made with ground-up blue cornmeal, water and juniper ash, its recipe has been passed down for generations, from his great-grandmother to his grandmother to his mother, and now at last to his own bowl and spoon. Biyáál…
Read MorePandemic Blues
The Covid-19 pandemic, lethal as it is, is instrumental to capital’s assault on the living world. Looming through the terrors unleashed by free-flying strands of DNA are gargantuan infrastructural projects, including medical, green and digital. These are intent on destroying the web of life. Out of this extermination project, will spew more illnesses, disorders, infections,…
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