Between drought and monsoon: the embodied hardship of seasonal work in Maharashtra’s sugar cane plantations

by Irene Leonardelli At the end of a too-long, extremely dry summer, rural women from the drought-prone district of Beed, Maharashtra, finally return home, after six months of seasonal employment in sugar cane plantations. Encountering them allows me to reflect on experiences of drought and monsoon and on the embodied implications of environmental and agrarian …

Book Review: “Total Transition – The human side of the Renewable Energy Revolution”

By Marula Tsagkari The book Total Transition: The Human Side of the Renewable Energy Revolution offers an in-depth look at the social and environmental impacts of the current fossil fuel energy system, and calls for a renewable energy transition, which takes into account the needs of those communities that have been most affected by this …

Protecting nature in an unequal world

By Prakash Kashwan* Democracies can do better than to give into the mirage of "Wilsonian Enclosures", which envision half of the planet or more in nature reserves. The excessive focus on such areas detracts attention from developing alternative conservation strategies. Renowned biologist E.O. Wilson advocates setting aside “half the planet in reserve, or more” exclusively …

The Earth and the people are not inputs to your capitalist system, sorry sir!

An Interview with Vandana Shiva. By Ethemcan Turhan.* There is this fear of intellectual freedom because the old paradigm must be maintained to continue that project of colonising the earth, colonising people’s minds. The minute people are able to think for themselves, that project is over. Vandana Shiva is one of the leading thinkers today …

Can frogs and workers unite? Paul Robbins on conserving biodiversity in the Western Ghats, India

by Gustavo Garcia Lopez In a guest lecture in Barcelona, political ecologist Paul Robbins invites us to reflect on how market forces and labour’s bargaining power influence farmers’ production decisions, which in turn impact biodiversity conservation. Can environmentalists and workers unite? On January 22, Paul Robbins, Director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the …