Announcements

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Thicket Tales organises An Animated Storytelling session on the book ‘Shero, to the rescue’ written by Ashish Kothari and illustrated by Anusha Menon.

Do join in on 31st May, 11am on Zoom.

For details see the poster.

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Kalpavriksh Kids’ Book Reading Session…

Critters around our home : The book is a peek into the lives of some of the creatures we see in and around our homes. 
Has anyone told you that a gecko can detach its tail? Or that some moths live only for a week or two? 

Find out about these creatures and many more… and also join us for lively chat and discussions with the author of the book Sanjay Sondhi. 
Sanjay Sondhi is a Dehradun-based naturalist and also author of numerous books and technical papers on amphibians and reptiles, birds, butterflies and moths and other Indian wildlife.

Date: 24th May Time: 11.00 AMVenue: zoomLink for the meeting https://us04web.zoom.us/j/3054248797?pwd=WmF5U204WW9temo2Y3ZEczYxQ29Kdz09
Meeting ID: 305 424 8797Password: 9fg3K1
Join our WhatsApp group for updates on more such session . 
https://chat.whatsapp.com/FUXburx4cytFHr6Ho2RM0C

Thursday, May 21.  Post-Everything Worlds:  A Pluriversal Webinar

Thursday, May 21, from 8 to 9:30 a.m. California time,

Zoom link:  https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/2295905339

Pixabay/Alexandra_Koch

Please join us for a plunge into the amazing array of alternative ideas, practices, and experiments from all over the world!

This webinar will include some of the folks associated with the visionary book Pluriverse:  A Post-Development Dictionary, and scholar-activists who are working on the many worlds that are coming forward even as we endure the coronavirus crisis.

It is co-sponsored by the University of California, Santa Barbara Environmental and Climate Justice Hub, the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, and the participants in the class, The World in 2050 2025:  Systemic Alternatives.

Speakers

Federico Demaria is a lecturer in ecological economics and political ecology at the University of Barcelona; as well as a member of Research & Degrowth.  He is a co-author of The case for degrowth, and co-editor of Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era, and Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary.

Ashish Kothari, Founder-member of Indian environmental group Kalpavriksh, taught at the Indian Institute of Public Administration, coordinated India’s National Biodiversity Strategy & Action Plan process, served on Greenpeace International and India Boards, helped initiate the global ICCA Consortium. Participated in people’s movements including Narmada Bachao Andolan; helps coordinate the Vikalp Sangam and Global Tapestry of Alternatives processes and Radical Ecological Democracy network. He has (co)authored or (co)edited many books, including Churning the Earth: Making of Global India (with Aseem Shrivastava) and Alternative Futures: India Unshackled (ed., with KJ Joy).

 Susan Paulson studies and teaches about gender, class, and ethnoracial systems interacting with bodies and environments. She has researched and taught in Latin America for thirty years, fifteen of those living in South America among low-income, low-impact communities. Susan currently serves as Professor at the University of Florida, and is studying changing masculinities among men who perform painful and dangerous labor in extractive industries. Her recent publications include Degrowth: culture, power and change; Pluriversal learning: pathways toward a world of many worlds; and From pandemic to care-full degrowth.

Alberto Acosta es Economista ecuatoriano. Profesor universitario. Fue ministro de Energía y Minas, presidente de la Asamblea Constituyente, candidato a la Presidencia de la República. Miembro del Grupo de Trabajo Alternativas al Desarrollo de la Fundación Rosa Luxemburg. Juez del Tribunal Internacional de los Derechos de la Naturaleza: Compañero de ruta de movimientos sociales.

Giorgos Kallis is an ecological economist from Greece. He is an ICREA Research Professor at ICTA – Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where he teaches political ecology. He is one of the principal advocates of the theory of degrowth.

 Texts for the webinar

Ashish Kothari, Arturo Escobar, Ariel Salleh, Federico Demaria, Alberto Acosta, “Can the coronavirus save the planet?” (March 26, 2020), https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/can-coronavirus-save-planet/

Susan Paulson, Giacomo D’Alisa, Federico Demaria, and Giorgos Kallis with Feminisms and Degrowth Alliance, “From pandemic toward care-full degrowth” (April 30, 2020), Interface: a journal for and about social movements, https://www.interfacejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Paulson-et-al.pdf

Ashish Kothari, Ariel Salleh,Arturo Escobar, Federico Demaria, Alberto Acosta, co-editors.  Pluriverse:  A Post-Development Dictionary (New York:  Columbia University Press, and Delhi:  Tulika Books/AuthorsUpFront, 2019), https://www.radicalecologicaldemocracy.org/pluriverse/

Giorgos Kallis, Susan Paulson, Giacomo D’Alisa, Federico Demaria, “The case for degrowth in a time of pandemic” (May 14, 2020), https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/case-degrowth-time-pandemic/

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Kalpavriksh Children Books are on the Parag- An initiative of Tata Trusts Honour List ! 

We are extending our celebrations with all of you, get the four Kalpavriksh-Parag books on discount ! 
Write to us at [email protected] 

The Poop Book! + People and Wildlife + Critters around our Homes + Saving the Dalia Lama’s Cranes = INR 600/- now at INR 500/- !

Offer valid till 29 February 2020  

For nearly two and a half decades now the Protected Area Update (PAU)
has religiously presented a consolidated account of India’s wildlife and
protected area (PA) network. Published six times a year, it carries in a
tightly edited format, news and information of what is happening in, to
and around these national parks and sanctuaries that have been at the
core of India’s wildlife conservation strategy.
In the second of a series of edited books that synthesis this huge body
of information on geographical lines The State of Wildlife and Protected
Areas in Maharashtra – News and information from the Protected Area
Update 1996–2015 presents a consolidated historical account of
developments in the PA network in Maharashtra over two decades. While
the primary unit still remains the individual protected area, the time
line has changed from two months of one issue to 20 years that this
publication covers.
In following one news item after another about any particular PA we see
what happened month after month, year after year; what developments
recurred at what periodicity; what were the issues that were important
and what was done about them – it’s an important glimpse into the
contemporary history of a place (many places) marked on the map as a
protected area.

Edited by Pankaj Sekhsaria; Published by the Duleep
Matthai Nature Conservation Trust, Kalpavriksh and Rainfed Books;
xii+235pp; 100 line drawings; Price Rs. 400; ISBN: 9788192326931

Book can be currently bought for a 20% discount.

Please write to [email protected] or [email protected] to order

To know more, please click here.

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Back in 2011-2012 I was a columnist for an ezine called Strange Horizons, one of the flagship magazines for thoughtful, atypical science fiction and fantasy.  For a few years previously I had started to worry about climate change, and to learn enough about it to teach it in my classes.  I teach at a small state university near the Boston area, where I am a physics professor.  For several decades I had not worked on anything to do with the environment, except through fiction (including my children’s book Younguncle in the Himalayas, directly inspired by the first big Kalpavriksh Himalayan trip in 1980).  So around 2010, the urgency of the climate crisis called to me to return to the concerns that had animated my life as a teen and young adult growing up in Delhi.  Back then, I had gone on the now legendary Kalpavriksh trip to Tehri-Garhwal (Image to the left: In conversation with Chipko movement activists); I had been among the twelve or so of us young people who sat under a tree in Lodi Gardens and decided we would start an environmental action group; I had even edited the first few newsletters.  But since then, life had pulled me away toward other directions and other shores.  I missed being in India, and I missed the daily interaction with other species.  I remembered the unpolluted Delhi of my teen years, and the bird bath I had built for the feathered denizens of our South Delhi garden.  As the dire warnings about environmental destruction began to sound in my ears again with the climate crisis and biodiversity loss, I felt the old longing to engage with people as I had in the KV days, to dream of and work for a world that was socially just and environmentally healthy.  So in 2011 when I had the chance to write about anything at all for Strange Horizons, it isn’t surprising that environmental concerns came up right away.

As I look back at these pieces in 2019 I reflect on what I didn’t know when I wrote them in 2011 – I didn’t know, for instance, about the crucial role that indigenous people and the rural poor play in taking care of our forests and biodiversity.  I didn’t know that the climate crisis would get this bad.  I didn’t foresee that India would not only continue along the path to destructive development, but would do so on steroids.  But I also didn’t know that there would be so many movements of resistance and positive change, points of light in the darkness as documented in the Vikalp Sangam project.  I didn’t know about the concept of Radical Ecological Democracy that would animate hearts and minds in three continents.  And that Kalpavriksh would thrive to see its 40^th anniversary! 

My relatively short early experience with Kalpavriksh was life-changing.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but now that I’ve marked well over fifty revolutions around the sun, I look back and see the seeds of who I am today taking root in those days of camaraderie, shared visions, vigorous arguments, collective action, and our youthful dream of a green, just, utopic future.  Somehow, despite the terrible times in which we live, I still hold on to that dream.  

Following are links to those pieces:

Vandana Singh, Ph.D. Professor, Department of Physics and Earth Sciences, Framingham State University

Please click on the image to know more.

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To celebrate National Wildlife Week 2019 (October 2nd – 8th), our kids’ books (see flyer) are available at 30% discount for the whole month of October! Please write to [email protected] to place your order!

A book reading session on ‘Saving The Dalai Lama’s Cranes’ and talk about the region of Arunachal Pradesh and its environment by Neeraj Vagholikar for kids of above 10years at Pune International Literary Festival.

Venue: YASHADA Date: 22nd Sept 2019 Time: 5pm to 6pm

A remarkable, non-violent movement took place in 2012-14 near Khag in Kashmir, to conserve Tosamaidan, a lovely, biodiversity-rich Himalayan landscapes of forests, meadows and mountains. The main focus of the movement was to stop an army firing range that had killed several people and livestock, and caused loss of livelihoods, for several decades. Local villagers of about 60 panchayats mobilized under the banner of
Tosamaidan Bachao Front, with help from civil society groups, and convinced the government to not extend its lease. Subsequently, movement members have been planning ecological regenration and alternative livelihood options for the local people, especially youth. In the new situation created by the central government’s proposed abrogation of Kashmir’s special status and downgrading it to a Union Territory, the future
of this unique initiative is uncertain.

An illustrated presentation by Shrishtee Bajpai and Ashish Kothari of Kalpavriksh, who visited Tosamaidan in June this year.

Saturday, 7th September, 11 am
Location: Pagdandi Basement, Shop No.6, Regent Plaza, Baner Pashan Link Road, Behind
Symantec, Baner 411045, Pune,
Entry Free. Seating on first come basis