Two seminal books, John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York’s The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth and John Bellamy Foster’s The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet suggest that the rift between humanity and nature must be analysed in its intertwining with other kinds of alienation, …
Eleven years ago, Pathampara, a 90-minute drive from Kannur, made headlines when it stopped petitioning the government for electricity and instead began generating its own power from a very small facility using the flow of a local stream to run a turbine. Pathampara's achievement has been replicated in the Narmada …
Green buildings eat, drink and spend less. Societies that worry about their resources encourage their architects and construction companies to be conservationist. The Indian Green Buildings Congress (IGBC) has been trying to encourage a change in priorities. It faces the challenge of sensitising builders even as the backlog in infrastructure …
Rising input prices have almost sounded the death knell for the farmer. Is there a way out? A special report published in Down To Earth. For most Indians, Mahendra Singh Tikait is the man who brought Delhi to its knees in 1988 with a rally that brought the national capital …
Gandhi has legions of admirers, but he has also been the target of severe, even virulent, criticism from numerous perspectives. Though Gandhi still commands veneration from many, he is also someone everyone loves to hate. Some critics fault him for particular positions, such as his support of the Khilafat movement, …
Kuthambakkam village is 40 km from Chennai. The village was once infamous for riots, poor sanitary conditions, illicit liquor brewing, unemployment, poverty and violence against women but all this changed when development was accorded priority. This change was brought about with the efforts of Elango Rangaswamy.
>> US District Court Judge Louis Stanton has ordered Google to give entertainment giant Viacom details of video-watching habits of visitors to its popular video-sharing website YouTube. For Viacom, the data is potential evidence for a billion-dollar copyright suit against Google. >> Beware celebrities who encouraging the
Khana, a woman seer and a composer of nature verses lived between 800 and 1200 AD. Her contribution to traditional agriculture of Bengal, India is amazing. Her verses were the most important guidelines for traditional agriculture and in villages, farmers are still following several verses along with present-day modern agricultural …
ravi aggarwal, director of ngo Toxic Links, has recently been conferred the who/ifcs (Chemical Safety) Special Recognition Award. He talks to arnab pratim dutta on different aspects of chemical regulation india: There is a hazardous waste law and a hazardous chemical law. But these don
The two men profiled here were killed because they worked to take the government rural employment scheme to people for whom it is meant A crusader who fought corruption and took up cudgels against usury and illicit liquor, Orissa
A palm-sized cd has become the prized possession of Jagdish Mehta, the father of social activist Lalit Mehta, who was brutally murdered in Kandra jungles of Palamu district in Jharkhand on May 14. His eyes gleam as he holds the cd in his hands. It contains a record of a …
Brazil's environment minister, Marina Silva, quit her post on April 13 in despair over the obstacles she faced in reining in destruction of the Amazon rainforest. In the resignation, Silva said she stepped down because of the difficulty she had been having for some time in carrying out the national …
PRADIP SAHA talks to DILIP CHERIAN, founder and consulting partner of image management firm Perfect Relations, about the clash between public relations and public interest There is a political process to public policy. Does corporate lobbying go against that democratic norm? There is always the juxtaposition of parties within the …
To help understand different viewpoints on the effectiveness of EM (Effective Micro-organism), LEISA asked two professionals for their opinion. Dr. Narayana Reddy is a prize-winning organic farmer (who made the transition from conventional agriculture in 1980), writer and trainer from Bangalore, India. Dr. Ken Giller is professor of Plant Production …
coastal campaign: The National Fishworker's Forum began a two-month campaign in Gujarat to draw public attention to the centre's move to dilute Coastal Regulation Zone Notification, 1991, and frame new law for coastal zone management. Members allege such measures would lead to "the sale of India's 7,500 km coastline and …
