Pierre Calame
The European Union has shown growing signs of frailty in the last couple of years. Opinion polls all over the continent reveal an increasing dissatisfaction with European policies and a lack of confidence in both national and European …
Maurício Andrés Ribeiro
Brazil has historically been blessed with an abundant supply of water. Droughts and water scarcity were typically confined only to the northeastern parts of the country. Since 2012, however, the water crisis has hit vast regions in …
By Neema Pathak Broome and Ashish Kothari
A decade ago, Ecuador became the first country in the world to formally include rights of nature into its constitution. Soon after, along with Bolivia, it also declared itself to be “plurinational”, an …
Neema Pathak-Broome and Yagyashree Kumar
The Yawal Wildlife Sanctuary, in Jalgaon district of Maharashtra state in central India, was on the brink of an ecological and social collapse around the turn of the century. Extensive timber smuggling and encroachment of …
By Arturo Escobar
As the world confronts an increasingly uncertain ecological future and the accompanying oppressive economic inequality, this is a good moment to take stock of what has happened with the radical critiques of development of the 1990s, and …
By Gustavo Esteva
It is possible to say that underdevelopment afflicted me when I was 13 years old. On January 20, 1949 I became underdeveloped along with two billion other people of the non-western world, the former colonies, when president …
A dialogue between Ariel Salleh, Arturo Escobar, Alberto Acosta and Federico Demaria, moderated by Ashish Kothari
Ashish – How would we describe the world we live in and what are its dominant trends?
Ariel – In …
The contemporary international political economy is marked by a great contradiction. On a planet characterized by finite resources, the economy is predicated upon an absurd and irrational logic of infinite expansion and accumulation. With its fossil fuel …
By Aseem Shrivastava
Can we be human in the absence of nature, asked Rabindranath Tagore?
To Civilization
Give back the wilderness, take away the city
Embrace if you will your steel, brick and stonewalls
O newfangled civilization! Cruel …
By Christos Zografos
“My friend, it’s worth existing for a dream, even if its fire ends up burning you” (1980s Greek song)
Nearly a century-and-a-half ago, in May 1871, one of the most impacting attempts to realise direct popular self-rule …
By Zeina Fakhriddin
Ever since the creation of an Israeli state in 1948, Palestine has been a victim of an ongoing process of colonization with discriminatory policies and laws that facilitate the exploitation of indigenous Palestinian communities and their natural …
The IUCN’s Indigenous and Community Conserved Area’s (ICCA) initiative has a new feather in its cap, and that too of the magnificent Philippine Eagle, no less. Symbolically speaking, that is! The ICCA with its local partners in the Mindanao …