“Women and girls bear the primary responsibility for fetching firewood, cooking and other domestic work, making them disproportionately affected by energy poverty across developing countries. According to Solar Sister, a women’s enterprise working to eradicate energy poverty, up to 780 million women and children are breathing in toxic fumes and risking their health and lives every day because their sole source of lighting is the kerosene lamp. Energy poverty, while affecting everyone, has a female face, and addressing this issue in developing countries is essential not only for the environment and sustainable future, but also for gender equality, women’s empowerment and the health of women and girls.”
Category Archives: Link
intangibles: Chengdu 2013
“…acknowledge the central role that knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe play in maintaining sustainable ecosystems and biodiversity and in helping communities to ensure food security and health; and encourage establishing sound and effective safeguarding mechanisms […] addressing appropriately the relationship between transmission and innovation and between safeguarding and commercial use.”
‘pastures of heaven’: the fate of the Altai
On a warm summer’s day twenty-four centuries ago, a noblewoman of the

nomadic Pazyryk tribe was buried in a large ancient burial tomb, or kurgan, on the Ukok Plateau — now a region of the Russian Altai that borders China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan. Mummified with herbs, bark and marten fur, she was placed in an oversized sarcophagus hewn from a single larch log. [….]
Altai people feel that to restore the order of things, the Princess Kadyn must be returned to her rightful place on the Ukok Plateau…. [A] UNESCO-Ghent team quickly sketched out what they fear is in store for the Altai’s frozen tombs.
via Maria and the Ukok Princess: Climate change and the fate of the Altai – OurWorld 2.0 | OurWorld 2.0.
terrain: ‘opaque zones of Empire’
“In what follows, I examine terrain as a conceptual (rather than descriptive) category in relation to violence, vision, and ontologies of multiplicity.”
Gastón Gordillo via Space and Politics.
indigenous studies
research on and by First Peoples
http://www.firstpeoplesnewdirections.org/index.php
a multi-year publishing collaboration among five university presses
honey bee collapse
Apis mellifera—the honey bee, native to Europe, Africa and Western Asia—is disappearing around the world. Signs of decline also appear now in the eastern honey bee, Apis cerana.
We know what is killing the bees. Worldwide Bee Colony Collapse is not as big a mystery as the chemical companies claim. […] The causes of collapse merge and synthesize, but we know that humanity is the perpetrator, and that the most prominent causes appear to be pesticides and habitat loss.
via Worldwide Honey Bee Collapse: A Lesson in Ecology | NationofChange.
with or without us
link through below to video of a lecture by Brazilian anthropologist and Amazon specialist Eduardo Viveriros de Castro situating discourses on the anthropocene against the background of eschatological imagination and myth — part of the UC Davis Sawyer Seminar series
‘numerous inaccuracies’
Office of the Director of National Intelligence
DNI Statement on Activities Authorized Under Section 702 of FISA
everywhere is Taksim
Jadaliyya, June 1, 2013 – Everywhere is Taksim, Resistance Everywhere
El Niño and war
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110824/full/news.2011.501/box/1.html
from the article: Climate cycles drive civil war
nature, 24 August, 2011