August 12, 2024
Online at 7:30am EDT
With Ashish Kothari (Environmental Activist)
The world faces multiple intersecting crises, including biodiversity loss and climate change, socio-economic inequities, conflicts, human rights violations, and authoritarianism. The necessity to find solutions is urgent. But it is also clear that these do not lie within the same paradigms that have created them, including in the currently dominant model of economic development, or in the structures of patriarchy, statism, capitalism, racism, colonialism and anthropocentrism that underlie it. Are there practices, concepts and frameworks that are pathways to a just and equitable future? If yes, what needs to be done to make the transition
towards such a future? This presentation will look at a Pluriverse of such alternatives, focusing on India but also including some from elsewhere. These include practical, grassroots initiatives as also concepts and worldviews that are based on respect for other people and the rest of nature, solidarity, collective spirit and action, rights and responsibilities, autonomy and freedom, gender/sexual justice, and other such values that are a direct contrast to the individualistic, selfish, commodified mindset of today’s dominant system. A framework of radical transformation emerging in India called Eco- swaraj, or Radical Ecological Democracy, will be presented in detail.
This event is part of the monthly online lecture series titled 'Decolonial and Postcolonial Ecologies: Critical Voices from India' (co-organized with Puja Ghosh and Michael Stadler).
The recordings of earlier talks are available here.