Shalini Ramanathan’s Posts

• Home Is Best

  A review of Wangari Maathai's autobiography Unbowed 0

  Posted 3 years ago

  October 2004 was an exciting time to be a tree-hugger in Wangari Maathai's home country of Kenya. When she was announced as winner of that year's Nobel Peace Prize, many of my environmentally inclined friends and colleagues were eager to help her figure out what to do with the giant megaphone she had just been handed. Earnest volunteers with ideas and expectations streamed in and out of the downtown Nairobi office hurriedly established to handle the crush of publicity, clutching notes on what they thought the new Nobel laureate should do.

  She already knew exactly what she wanted to… Read More

• How much more gorgeous do I have to be?

  Kenya's president sells out national parks for politics 1

  Posted 4 years agoIf pieces of land could speak, that's the question the 155 sq. mile Amboseli National Game Reserve in Kenya might be asking itself. The Game Reserve was, until earlier this month, a National Park -- it was run by national authorities. President Kibaki, breaking half a dozen laws and procedures, degazetted Amboseli. He downgraded it to a Game Reserve, and gave control and management of it to the Maasai people who live in the area. The Maasai have no training or background in wilderness management or infrastructure maintenance.

• Bollywood, are you reading this?

  Indian movies need to take up the plastic-bag fight 1

  Posted 4 years, 2 months ago Plastic bags may be banned in the Indian state of Maharashtra due to concerns that by clogging the city's drains they contributed to the floods that swept the coast last month and brought life to a halt in buzzing Bombay. There are protests from the predictable quarters; apparently, 20,000 people in the state are employed to painstakingly manufacture thin bags that are good for carrying one coconut for ten yards before stretching out and leaving you with a bag with a hole in it but no coconut.

• Will Gucci be next? 0

  Posted 4 years, 2 months agoNow that Chanel's off limits.

• The new economic powerhouse 3

  Posted 4 years, 8 months agoThis book review of China, Inc. scares me. While green design and social responsibility have taken firm root in Europe and are penetrating the American consciousness, China, as this book review makes clear, is a ruthless economic machine devoted to one thing only: undercutting everybody else's prices. (I wouldn't want to be the one introducing CSR in sweatshops staffed by desperate ex-peasants churning out plastic bunnies, way cheaper than anyone else can make plastic bunnies.)

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Shalini Ramanathan’s Recent Comments

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  Birds: Stupid but we love them

  You have hit upon a central truth: Birds are perhaps not the brightest of creatures. But they're delightful nonetheless, and, short of difficult-to-implement awareness programs to educate birds on the dangers of turbine blades, the answer is surely to not put turbines in the Pacific flyway or on the Gulf of Mexico migratory pathway.On Wind farm follies posted 3 years, 6 months ago 47 Responses

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  a very good thing

  in east africa, farmers use mobile phones to find out where they can get the best prices for their crops -- this results in more money in farmers' pockets, which is a good thing.

  it's fine (wonderful, even) to be an eccentric without a cell phone in a country with well-developed infrastructure. it's quite another to be without communications capacity in an isolated african village. cell phones are wildly popular here for a reason: they make life easier and sometimes put prosperity within reach.On Africa goes cellular posted 4 years, 2 months ago 9 Responses

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  biofuels

  Apologies for the digression, but I'd like to respond to this line in David's post:

  Once you start growing the biomass for the sole purpose of generating energy, it becomes energy negative. The energy inputs of tilling the ground, planting seeds, fertilizing, harvesting, and processing into fuel consumes more energy than the resulting fuel provides.

  -x-

  It depends on the fuel being displaced by a given biofuel. If a commercially produced biofuel can displace heavy fuel oil or coal, even full-cost accounting of all inputs may show that biofuels are desirable from an environmental and climate mitigation perspective.

  The issue of land use is a further complication in assessing biofuels. But unless you're going to clear virgin rainforest to plant jatropha, it's not a reason to dismiss biofuels as unpromising.

    On Mega-mall in upstate New York could give birth to a clean-energy awakening posted 4 years, 4 months ago 9 Responses

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  it's harder for them than it is for us

  I think progressives need to do a better job of scrutinizing the personal purity of the right wing lot that now rule our fair land. While it's hard to lead an environmentally benign life, it must be even harder to go to prayer meetings every day, regularly break up gay weddings, etc. We should cast the first stone!On There are worse things than hypocrisy posted 4 years, 4 months ago 8 Responses

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  the "C" word

  You can't really talk about the sad state of Indian forests (and their inhabitants, human and non-human) without talking about colonialism. The British colonial government set up a forest management system that focused on timber extraction above all else and that persecuted locals who had previously lived on forest lands. The net result -- even after a half-century of independence -- is that forest policy is a mess and does  not engage local communities.

  A further complexity: Adivasis (the PC word for tribals)  are practically invisible in "mainstream" India, aside from the occasional travel story on how darn picturesque they are. So there is little government support for enlightened management of local resources. And little understanding of how such support might just reduce the appeal of gun-toting Marxist terrorists.   On Market mechanisms are the last best hope for many of the world's most threatened animals. posted 4 years, 4 months ago 3 Responses