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industrial civilisation

ALTERNATIVES

Sulak Sivaraksa on the structural violence of the global economy

13th November 2017

Sulak Sivaraksa, the 85-year-old Thai Buddhist monk, thinker and peace activist, is currently facing the prospect of a fifteen-year jail sentence, for criticising his country’s royal family and military junta. Here, he speaks on the global economy’s built-in inequities and biases. Also included is ‘Heavenly Messengers,’ an excerpt from his book, ‘The Wisdom of Sustainability.’…

ALTERNATIVES

Noam Chomsky: Indigenous people are our only hope for survival

4th November 2017

According to the legendary scholar Noam Chomsky, the world is “facing potential environmental catastrophe and not in the distant future,” and the only communities standing between humankind and catastrophe is the world’s Indigenous people. Here we present a selection of articles & essays on indigenous people and their fight to defend nature from ‘civilised’ humans….

Mural by Bhagwati Prasad at the Majdoor Library, Faridabad

Conserve/Resist

Listen, the revolution blooms in silence

19th October 2017

From Faridabad Majdoor Samachar: “On the train, a person was calling out loudly: From tomorrow, all over India, everyone’s salary will be 18,000 rupees. Equal. No one will be thief, and no one king. Long live the government.” A timely and evocative missive from a monthly workers’ newspaper distributed widely in the industrial belt around Delhi….

Culture/Cognition

Blade Runner 2049 gets it wrong: Technology cannot defeat nature and still exist

18th October 2017

James Kunstler writes: I watched Blade Runner 2049, the latest from Hollywood’s dream-shop. It was an excellent illustration of the over-investments in technology with diminishing returns that are dragging us into collapse and of the attendant techno-narcissism that afflicts the supposedly thinking class in this society, who absolutely don’t get what this collapse is about….

Consumerism/Lifestyle

The high cost of an easy-care, low-maintenance world

7th October 2017

Kurt Cobb writes: We’ve created a world of low-maintenance objects which are low-maintenance merely because they are disposable… Philosophers bemoan our love of material things. But I believe that we modern, industrialized people don’t actually love material things. We wouldn’t treat material things the way we do if we truly loved and cared for them….

Kansascity.com

CLIMATE CRISIS

Puerto Rico: When the electricity stops

2nd October 2017

Hurricane Maria, which has devastated Puerto Rico, has left 97% the island’s population without power. Electricity is the essential pillar upon which the operations of all modern industrial societies depend. When electricity stops, pretty much everything else stops, as Puerto Rico demonstrates. Given an increasingly unstable climate, it’s a warning for everyone, writes Kurt Cobb….

Eco-theologian Thomas Berry on nature and humans

ALTERNATIVES

Earth Jurisprudence: Learning from nature’s laws and lore

15th September 2017

From The Ecologist: It’s the very conception of law that needs to change, and thereby our relationship with Nature. Once we recognise that we are born into a lawful and ordered universe and that our wellbeing is derived from complying with these laws, this understanding should permeate the transformation of all the other modern institutions….

Culture/Cognition

Carbon: A Hindi short film set in 2067

3rd September 2017

The short film Carbon focuses on global warming and takes a look at what the future could hold for us if we don’t act today. The Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Prachi Desai and Jackky Bhagnani starrer deals with serious environmental issues like Global Warming & pollution and their impact on our world. Watch the full movie here….

The 2008 movie 'Wall-E' features a small waste-collecting robot as its protagonist

Consumerism/Lifestyle

Humans are creating a new geological layer of techno-fossils

19th August 2017

From Slate.com: Industrial civilisation’s impact is so massive that it goes way beyond climate change. Earth scientists now suggest that it is creating a distinct geological layer made of ‘technofossils’. The scale of our stuff is so gargantuan, that it is throwing off the quite robust balance of our natural systems—that’s how powerful it is….

ALTERNATIVES

Satya Sagar: What on earth is a human being?

16th July 2017

Satya Sagar writes: It’s time to step back, reflect and ask again and again the questions: who or what exactly are human beings, how we should live in this world and where we should go? For this time the very survival of the human species may lie in getting the answers right with great honesty….

ALTERNATIVES

Can we live without progress?

1st July 2017

Kurt Cobb writes: The idea of progress is embedded in the socio-economic system, and we cannot attack carbon emissions without attacking the idea of progress itself. If the progress we’ve made since the beginning of industrial civilization only leads to a complete reversal of all our supposed gains, can we really call what’s happening progress?…

ALTERNATIVES

Felix Padel: Adivasi economics may be the only hope for India’s future

28th June 2017

India’s Tribal communities are under extreme pressure, right from big dams and mines to violent insurgencies and militarisation engulfing their lands. In 25 years, will these communities cease to exist? Or, will they represent thriving, revitalised models of egalitarian sustainability that the rest of the world has come to recognise and is learning from? Felix…

CLIMATE CRISIS

The shocking connection between doomsday maps and billionaire land acquisitions

16th June 2017

From Forbes Magazine: With all of the knowledge of future mapping, do the world’s financial leaders know something we don’t? Consider how many of the richest families have been grabbing up massive amounts of farmland around the world. All property far away from coastal areas and in locations conducive to self-survival, farming and coal mining….

From Canadian photographer Gregory Colbert's 'Ashes and Snow' series

ALTERNATIVES

Exclusive essay: Towards an Ethics of Permanence

10th May 2017

On the occasion of Buddha Poornima, Ecologise presents an exclusive essay co-authored by Nyla Coelho & M.G. Jackson, calling for a fundamental transformation of our perceptions of reality, and a befitting code of conduct to govern our relations with one another and with every other entity on earth; a planetary imperative in need of assertion….

Brayan Caicedo

ALTERNATIVES

Sunita Narain: The future is in our hands

3rd May 2017

We must rethink the question of states, market and society. We have dismembered the state; grown the market and believed that we’ve empowered society. Slowly, the circle closed— state, market and aspiring, consuming society merged. They became one. Anyone outside this circle stopped getting counted. This cannot work. This is our future’s most important agenda….

Gopal Aggarwal/Wikimedia Commons

Development/Growth

Innovation is overrated; it’s maintenance that matters more

19th April 2017

Andrew Russell writes: The most undervalued forms of technological labour are also the most ordinary: those who repair and maintain technologies that already exist. This shift in emphasis involves focusing on the constant processes of entropy and un-doing– and the work we do to slow or halt them, rather than on introduction of novel things….

ALTERNATIVES

Seeing Wetiko: On capitalism, mind viruses, and antidotes for a world in transition

15th April 2017

From Kosmos Journal: What if we told you that humanity is being driven to the brink of extinction by an illness? That all the poverty, the climate devastation, the perpetual war, and consumption fetishism all around us have roots in a mass psychological infection? What if this infection is not just highly communicable but also self-replicating?…

ALTERNATIVES

Why we need ‘technologies of reunion’

9th April 2017

Charles Eisenstein writes: We need a parallel system of technology development that can guide society as conventional systems unravel and conventional technologies fail to adequately address our problems. Imagine a worldwide archipelago of land-based institutions of learning, sanctuaries of alternative technologies of earth, mind, matter, and body that are marginal or absent within conventional universities….

ALTERNATIVES

M.G. Jackson: A new worldview for our times

19th February 2017

The worldview that informs contemporary global culture was conceived during the European ‘Enlightenment’ of the 17th century. Its shortcomings have become increasingly evident today, and they are beginning to be seen as the root cause of the many seemingly intractable global problems that confront us today. This essay presents an overview of an alternative worldview….

Conflict/Dispossession

Some of the world’s wealthiest are preparing for the crackup of civilisation

6th February 2017

The New Yorker reports: Survivalism, the practice of preparing for the collapse of civilization, tends to evoke a certain picture: eg. the religious doomsayer. But in recent years survivalism has expanded to more affluent quarters, taking root in Silicon Valley and New York City, among technology executives, hedge-fund managers, and others in their economic cohort….