Earth: Land, Lifeforms, Livelihoods
Understanding Environmental Crisis
A series of 5 seminar talks by Felix Padel at CWEH, University of Sussex, January-April 2020, conceived as a collaborative effort, with participants encouraged to bring examples from their own work and experience.
From forest fires to megadams, ecosystems are getting devastated. In India, conservationists are pitted against Adivasi land rights, a telling example to many of environmental racism, compounding the massacre of trees by corporate entities. Privatisation of common land undermines indigenous holding patterns and promotes corrupt money, while ‘compensatory afforestation’ threatens further displacement. The soil humus constantly renewed by earthworms is replaced by chemical agriculture – the ‘dead earth’ that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) warned of. The talk will look at the Cochabamba Declaration on the Rights of Nature, Mother Earth, unpick our industrial economy lifestyle dependent on vast mining enterprises whose impacts most of us remain barely aware of, devouring huge fertile regions with monstrous craters and complete disruption of livelihoods.
Also ...
In North-west Odisha, India, handloom weaving craftsman keep their art alive and develop land inspired iconography, explored and carried forward for a sustainable local livelihood, away from extractivist development.
Designer Gunjan Jain will present her work there.
And ...
Book launch: Geography in Britain after World War II - Nature, Climate, and the Etchings of Time.
Editors: Max Martin, Vinita Damodaran, Rohan D'Souza (2019) Palgrave Macmillan
CWEH Director Vinita Damodaran will launch the new book.
Details of all of the talks in this series:
Understanding Environmental Crisis [PDF 191.18KB]