Centipedes’ Global Odyssey
Seshadri K. S. Deccan Herald | September 21, 2024 It was a rainy night in 2015. We were conducting a frog camp in the remote village of Bisle, near Sakleshpur. One of the participants had spotted an arthropod eating a froglet. It was a House Centipede belonging to the order Scutigeromorpha. These predatory arthropods measure […]
Nature’s Artists: The World of Potter Wasps
Femi E Benny Round Glass Sustain | September 20, 2024 There are many types of wasps, each with unique behaviours and appearances. Paper wasps are known for their paper-like nests; spider wasps hunt spiders; and hornets and yellow jackets can be quite intimidating. Then, we have potter wasps, true artists in the insect world, creating […]
Narratives on the Wolf vs Its Life on the Margins
Abi Tamim Vanak Hindustan Times | September 8, 2024 The “big, bad wolf” — or at least a spectre of it — is back. Bahraich, a district in Uttar Pradesh, has witnessed a spate of attacks, purportedly by a pack of wolves, with at least ten persons (mostly children) killed and more than 25 injured. […]
Empower Communities to Fix Forest Governance
Gautam Aredath, Sharachchandra Lele The Hindustan Times | September 5, 2024 The Forest Rights Act 2006 (FRA), by recognising the rights of forest-dwelling communities to both access and manage their customary forests, offers a bottom-up vision of forest governance. Eighteen years on, progress in recognising these rights has no doubt been tardy. Only three states […]
AquaWISE – A Decision Support Tool for Greywater Treatment Solutions
Priyanka Jamwal, Durba Biswas India Water Portal | September 2, 2024 AquaWISE was developed as an evidence-based decision support tool for optimal deployment of Nature-based Solutions (NbS) for greywater treatment in schools. The tool can minimise or eradicate the need for costly and time-consuming baseline data collection while also generating school-specific wastewater treatment NbS. AquaWISE […]
Reframing our Perception of Insects Moving Beyond “Creepy Crawlies”
Femi E Benny, Amritha Jaiprekash kurup Kerala Calling | August 17, 2024 Growing up in a small village in Kerala, we were closely connected to nature and taught to appreciate all living things, including insects. However, not all insects were treated equally. A vivid memory is the appearance of alates (winged termite swarms) at the […]
Why Mumbai Needs to Worry About Water?
Sachin Tiwale Loksatta | August 16, 2024 Long before the good news that the dams supplying water to Mumbai are more than 98 per cent full, while these dams are emptying like Salabad, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation has decided to speed up the construction of two projects, the much awaited Gargai Dam and Sea Water […]
Howling for change: How the plight of Indian grey wolves challenges conservation norms
Iravatee Majgaonkar, Abi Tamim Vanak Frontline | August 13, 2024 Urban Indians are mostly unaware that India has a population of gray wolves, a threatened species in threatened ecosystems. Some 10 per cent of India’s landmass is covered by ecosystems known as Open Natural Ecosystems (ONEs), habitats to species such as wolves, with a dry […]
14 Years After the Dilution of the Gadgil Report, Devastation Continues in the Western Ghats
Siddhartha Krishnan Scroll | August 9, 2024 The world is facing a climate emergency, and on July 31, the people of the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve woke up to the stark reality that they may be inhabiting a dangerously vulnerable landscape. Maladaptation – development that is blind to climate change – is converging with heavy monsoonal […]
Learning to ‘see’: Lessons from scholar James C Scott (1936-2024)
Siddhartha Krishnan Scroll | July 31, 2024 Political science iconoclast James C Scott, who died on June 19 at 87, helped us understand subaltern silence or the ostensible passivity of the powerless. Peasant rebellions are evidence of class conflict. But Scott emphasised that the absence of protest does not mean the acceptance of oppression. There […]
