Feature Article

On July 9, activist Mark Lynas’ book The God Species inexplicably went off Amazon’s list.

Balls of ground chickpeas tossed into vats of sizzling oil and served with pickles and salads inside a pitta bread is a standard fast food across much of West Asia.

South Africa’s advertising watchdog ordered oil giant Shell on July 13 to withdraw its claims in newspapers about its use of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to explore gas in the Karoo, a semi-desert wilderness.

If you believe that progress of human civilisation depends on individual expression of new ideas, especially unpopular ideas, then the principle of freedom of speech is the most important value society can uphold.

The world now produces nearly two billion kg of farmed salmon annually, in countries as distant as Norway, Chile and Canada.

At one point in this book under review Australian naturalist Tim Flannery describes how the Greater African Honeyguide uses a distinctive call to lure people to beehives, which then become a shared food source.

In 2008, I shifted from Pune to the green environs of Dehradun to follow my heart. Writing, photography and nature conservation projects followed, making life really interesting. One of the conservation projects I took up involved studying the conflict between monkeys and farmers in Uttarakhand. In many areas of the Himalayan foothills monkeys raided crops with impunity and ate everything in sight—grain, seeds, young shoots, fruit, leaves. In many places the damage to crops was in excess of 70 per cent, leading farmers to give up farming.

The recent Supreme Court judgement holding the appointment of Salwa Judum cadres in Chhattisgarh a violation of Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution comes as a political embarrassment for the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), which has consistently tried to upscale local resistance (read Salwa Judum) to the Maoist struggle with special funds being provided to states for the purpose. The judgement couples both the Central and state governments together in a severe and uncompromising critique of their policies. It raises concerns over MHA’s tendency to take a law and order and national security approach to complex social scenarios.

The recent Group of Seven (G-7) summit clearly indicated what the outcome of the Rio conference is likely to be. There was no significant mention of any environmental issues nor was the subject of environmental aid debated at the summit.