Earlier this year, Americans learned what it looks like when a food system reliant on industrial agriculture, near monopolies and exploited laborers breaks down. Just two months into the pandemic, the meat industry in the most powerful nation in the world was buckling. In March and April, COVID-19 swept through meatpacking plants, infecting thousands of […]
Lockdown in Ladakh
I returned to my village in Ladakh when the Prime Minister announced the first lockdown in late-March. I ended up spending the whole lockdown period in the village assisting my family with various agricultural and pastoral tasks. This was the first time I had spent so much time in the village since my childhood. This […]
COVID-19: An Opportunity for Localisation
Prior to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was believed that globalisation would lead to development and prosperity. However, the whole scenario has changed now with almost every part of the world under some form of lockdown, which has posed a major challenge to the fulfillment of the demand for various goods and services. […]
Ten reasons to be concerned about 5G
Once cast, 5G’s inescapable net will have consequences on everything from the night sky down to the cells of our bodies. With two legal cases against 5G roll-out getting underway in the UK,[1] here are just ten of many reasons why 5G is such a bad idea – and not one of them has anything […]
We Don’t Farm Because it’s Trendy: Farming is not new to Black people
For more than 150 years, from the rural South to northern cities, Black people have used farming to build self-determined communities and resist oppressive structures that tear them down. Today, agriculture still serves an important role in the lives of Black people, which is why we see urban agriculture projects and programs in Philadelphia, Detroit, […]
Our Robot Overlords
A consequence of the current pandemic is an increase in computer use. Almost everyone’s feeling it: students are doing classes by Zoom, employees are online for team meetings, musicians are performing to their phones, consumers are ordering food, clothes, and a hundred other things to be delivered, television shows recorded in front of live audiences […]
Locking Down Leviathan
The streets of Jayanagar, a residential area in Bengaluru, are strewn with spring flowers. Yellow copper pods, lilac crape myrtles, pink-and-white honges and orange gulmohurs blaze overhead and underfoot; vitality and senescence mirroring each other. The normally hard surfaces – kerb, pavement, road and concrete – are softened by fallen petals and the duff of […]
A wakeup call for local resilience
The lead article in a recent edition of my hometown newspaper highlighted the efforts of a local teen and a sewing business to create 1,000 masks for area hospitals. While this is a wonderful development, it shouldn’t have come to this. The urgent and growing demand for N95 masks and other medical supplies for treating […]
We Will Survive the Coronavirus. Will We Survive Ourselves?
What an astonishing slap in humanity’s face, this coronavirus. But the silver lining is that it is also a rude wake up call. I say ‘silver lining’, for at the centre of this is a massive humanitarian crisis of illnesses and deaths – and for working classes who cannot switch to ‘online’ work, whose workplaces […]
Not Giving up on Happiness: Care of the Self and Well-Being in a Plague Year
The specter of plague haunts our world, and it brings with it not only the ghouls of disease and death but vast economic and social uncertainty of a sort only the most elderly among us remembers (the Great Depression and World War II). My father is 90 and when I called him a child of […]