Key issues
Featured articles and ideas on resilience and climate change, with a solutions-based perspective.
Agriculture
Climate-friendly Farming: Mukti Mitchell
Mukti Mitchell explores a new way of looking at farming that recognises good techniques being practiced on any type of farm and gives credit where it’s due. The emerging approach of ‘rich-soil’ farming reveals that correctly managed agriculture can help us to turn back the carbon clock.
Poisoning the Planet: Miguel A Altieri
Changing our purchasing habits to ‘organic’ or ‘fair trade’ is not enough. We must actively seek solidarity with those small farmers who are refusing to co-operate with the agribusiness paradigm.
Biocultural Diversity
Cultural Vitality: Luisa Maffi
Biocultural diversity provides an integrated approach to sustaining both culture and biodiversity – it is also the key to planetary survival. Luisa Maffi presents an overview of the issues, details the rich interaction between local cultures and biodiversity and explains recent developments in human rights law.
Time for Action: Tony Juniper
Tony Juniper outlines a new proposal to protect the rainforests – one that would mobilise funds immediately and provide countries with the financial breathing space they need to embark on lower-carbon and more sustainable development paths.
Climate Change
Adapt and Survive: Stephan Harding
Stephan Harding reviews ‘The Vanishing Face of Gaia’ and gives a succinct overview of Lovelock’s theory of Gaia and his final warning for the planet as global warming impacts on the Earth.
Costing the Earth: Terence Hay-Edie
Terence Hay-Edie looks at the international trading scheme created to protect global forest carbon sinks and the response from Indigenous peoples. The raising temperature of the earth calls for a rethink of collective decisions and responsibilities. “Nobody, Indigenous our non-Indigenous, is exempt from the challenge of responding to this shared and universal problem.”
Economics of Change
Economics of Place: Satish Kumar
The current economic crisis is an opportunity to re-evaluate and design a more holistic economics system based on ecological and ethical values.
Planet Crunch: Andrew Sims
To reinforce social and environmental resilience a massive transformation is needed that compresses global income inequality - raising incomes of the poor and lowering the consumption of the rich.