“Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money.” – Cree Saying. This quote, possibly the biggest cliché in the environmental literature, inspired Jared Diamond’s seminal work “Collapse“. But humans seem to succumb to boredom fairly quickly, so [...]
Category Archives: food
The problem with world fisheries is nobody sticks up for the fish
April 16, 2009 – 8:18 pm
“The problem with world fisheries is nobody sticks up for the fish.” Charles Clover, The End of the Line. While Somali pirates are taking hostages, killing and getting killed by the French navy, French trawlermen are blockading Calais, Boulogne and Dunkirk. The Somalis claim they have taken to robbery and kidnapping because their traditional fishing livelihoods have [...]
Call me Ishmael, but I'm pleased that the Japanese whaling fleet missed its quota
April 15, 2009 – 10:49 am
I’m no Cousteau, as you will plainly see from this article, but it has come to my attention that several species of the world’s fish stocks are running close to extinction. The success of the whaling moratorium serve as an example that positive action can lead to permanent results. By John J Kelly Over Easter [...]
Adaptation, not mitigation, is the fairest way to address climate change effects
March 31, 2009 – 2:33 pm
The poor must use every form of leverage they can find to get the support they need to survive climate change. Control of land is key. By Daniel Taghioff, India. Foolish people have argued that there is a choice between preventing the worst effects of climate change and adapting to unavoidable changes, despite compelling evidence, such [...]
Oil on troubled waters
February 5, 2009 – 8:25 pm
We need to double food production, but we’re running out of oil and water. Obviously the market will sort this one out… By Daniel Taghioff, India When the Food and Agricultural Organisation says that another 40 million were pushed into hunger in 2008, what images spring into your mind? Is it possible to imagine that [...]
This is not a detour on the road to Shangri-la. It's the path to perdition.
January 30, 2009 – 10:33 pm
Sally Buchanan made an important point about the inflation/deflation question in her comment below. We may require a re-alignment of our entire value system. The much-misued Utilitarian term ‘greatest good for the greatest possible number’ might depend on thinking about what we do and how we do it based upon what we, and the planet, [...]
So, where are the poor in the Brave New World?
January 13, 2009 – 3:03 pm
Authors and filmmakers can answer this question but policy makers and pundits seem not to have a clue. Perhaps it’s because they see them as statistics, not people. By Daniel Taghioff, India. Aravind Adiga’s Booker winner White Tiger and Danny Boyle’s Golden-Globe-harvesting film Slumdog Millionaire (based on Indian Diplomat Vikas Swarup’s novel Q and A) [...]
Ignoring India's poverty is a recipe for nuclear Armageddon
December 19, 2008 – 3:14 pm
Thank God for George Bush. He laughs in the face of fear as he gives more nukes to the country with the most hungry people in it. And the funny bit is that despite parts of the American Christian right actually jockeying for Armegeddon, he probably achieved all this by mistake, and in the process he [...]
The Daily Mail finds an immigrant who wants to ban immigration
December 1, 2008 – 12:55 pm
. . . and his name is Sir Gulam Noon, who became a self-made multi-millionaire by popularising Indian ready meals and allegedly donating £250,000 to New Labour in the mistaken and unfounded misunderstanding that this would earn him a peerage. Sir G, a genuinely impressive self-made monument to bootstrap free enterprise, says that Britain is [...]