TRINet Newsletter July 2012
"We tell friends planning to visit us to follow the stench of rotting garbage," says Jeevaratnam (one name), a homemaker in this village 16 km from Kerala state's capital of Thiruvananthapuram.
Foreign land beckons India firms
Indian companies have acquired almost 7.4 million hectares abroad in 129 separate deals between 2000 and 2012.
Rare Dugong population is on decline
Gujarat Ecological Education and Research (GEER) Foundation has suggested that a study should be taken up with the help of deep sea scuba divers to estimate the exact population of Dugong along the India coast.
Prising open official reports
For environmentalists, Dr Madhav Gadgil is no stranger. He retired as founder of the authoritative Centre for Ecological Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore – arguably, the most authentic environmental research body in this country, with the possible exception (in select cases) of the environmental studies department of Jawaharlal Nehru University. He was educated at Harvard as a mathematical biologist, which equips him to pronounce judgement on such issues.
Terrorism’s New Face Could Be Green
The militant green across the globe are getting desperate and crackdowns by law enforcement on their acts of ‘ecotage’ are getting brutal. The battle lines are drawn
The Thing About Trendy Green
10 popular panaceas that promise to revive our ecologically bankrupt planet. But can they ever deliver?
Water crisis has long ceased to be about green cause; it’s about survival
If the United Nations' World Water Development Report 2012 is anything to go by, "India faces an unprecedented crisis in the next two decades", which "threatens the country's food and water security". It is the biggest crisis of our lifetime.
Safeguard or Squander?
Deciding the future of India's fisheries
Why Are Some People Greener Than Others?
Differences in attitudes and cultural values could have far-reaching implications for the development of a sustainable global society, according to an analysis to be published in the International Journal of the Sustainable Economy.
How Cycling Became Chic in Paris
Once upon a time, only a small number of Parisians rode bikes, but the French capital city's Velib bike rental system has shaken up the way locals move from Point A to Point B. Five years after their debut, cycling has become cool in Paris -- and there are fewer cars clogging up the city center.
Rio+20:
Earth Summits Fail Biodiversity in India
The Indian government, with its impressive dossier of legislation on conservation and biodiversity, is at the forefront of negotiations on sustainable development at the Earth Summit, but a closer look at the country’s involvement in a largely failed attempt to safeguard the earth’s fragile ecosystems suggests that the entire global model is deeply flawed.
Rio+20 side events become the main event
Does the summit deserve the scorn and indifference it has received from the media?
Rio+20 Draft Text Is 283 Paragraphs Of Fluff
In 1992, world leaders signed up to something called "sustainability". Few of them were clear about what it meant; I suspect that many of them had no idea. Perhaps as a result, it did not take long for this concept to mutate into something subtly different: "sustainable development". Then it made a short jump to another term: "sustainable growth". And now, in the 2012 Rio+20 text that world leaders are about to adopt, it has subtly mutated once more: into "sustained growth".
Don't pay the polluter
The mood on the eve of the Rio+20 Earth Summit, two decades after the path-breaking conference, could not be more different. In 1992, leaders were hopeful of a brave new world founded on sustainable development, a catchphrase coined by the Brundtland Commission on environment and development some five years earlier. This time, after successive failures on the climate negotiations, beginning with Copenhagen in 2009 and Durban last year, the outcome is likely to be highly unambitious.
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