FEATURED BOOK
ClimateStoryTellers founder Subhankar Banerjee edited the anthology, Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point (New York: Seven Stories Press; hardcover: July 3, 2012; paperback: August 20, 2013).
The book includes writing by several ClimateStoryTellers contributors, including Rosemary Ahtuangaruak, Chie Sakakibara, and Christine Shearer.
Rich in the incredible diversity of animal life, the long human history of its indigenous peoples, and the vast reservoirs of oil, natural gas, and coal, the Arctic is the tipping point, the place where we will see the first glimpses of the future that awaits us, and also where great battles are now being fought that will determine whether our future will be that of survival or destruction, recovery from the brink or departures beyond the point of no return. The thirty–nine voices assembled in Arctic Voices […] attempts to change how we look at a part of our world that we now know so little about and with a new awareness will awaken our moral obligation to help its continued survival against industrial destruction and the greed of a few. After you have read Arctic Voices, Banerjee hopes, “You will begin to think and talk about the Arctic differently than you did before. And perhaps you’ll find an answer to the question, ‘Why should I care about the Arctic?’”—from Arctic Voices back cover.
Arctic Voices is made possible by a generous grant from the Alaska Wilderness League.
By Ian Frazier
The New York Review of Books, Volume 60, Number 4, March 7, 2013
Frazier’s generous essay is a review of Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point.
READ IAN FRAZIER’S ESSAY ONLINE
By Subhankar Banerjee
The New York Review of Books, Vol. 60, No. 10, June 6, 2013
READ SUBHANKAR’S LETTER ONLINE
By Subhankar Banerjee
Seven Stories Press, May 17, 2013
ALTERNET |
COMMON DREAMS |
COUNTER CURRENTS |
SEVEN STORIES
FEATURED CONVERSATIONS
Lannan Foundation lecture series In Pursuit of Cultural Freedom
Lensic Performing Arts Center, Santa Fe, February 20, 2013 (SOLD OUT)
HANSEN LECTURE WITH BANERJEE INTRODUCTION; FOLLOWED BY CONVERSATION—WATCH ONLINE
Democracy Now!, July 20, 2012
BANERJEE CONVERSATION WITH AMY GOODMAN & JUAN GONZALEZ—WATCH ONLINE
SPECIAL SERIES ON SHELL FROM THE ARCHIVE
SELECT STORIES FROM THE ARCHIVE
By Manuela Picq, October 5, 2012
Last week brought good news from the trenches of resistance to extractivist industries as two energy companies were forced to abandon major drilling projects. In the Peruvian Amazon, Talisman Energy officially abandoned oil-drilling plans in Achuar territory. The Canadian company was forced to leave Block 64 because the Achuar people vetoed drilling on their lands. Meanwhile, in the Arctic, Shell Oil announced that it was abandoning drilling operations in the Chukchi Sea.
By Subhankar Banerjee, August 2, 2012
When you go to the mountains, you go to the mountains. When it’s the desert, it’s the desert. When it’s the ocean, though, we generally say that we’re going “to the beach.” Land is our element, not the waters of our world, and that is an unmistakable advantage for any oil company that wants to drill in pristine waters.
By Subhankar Banerjee, June 6, 2012
What do Arctic drilling and drone killing have in common? They are both being decided by Barack Obama without public debate. Also oil is a common ground—drilling will produce it and drones will burn it—to kill people, animals, and habitats. Both issues must be debated publicly. You have read about drone killing, I’ll tell you about Arctic drilling.
By Subhankar Banerjee, August 15, 2011
One of the riskiest and most destructive extreme energy oil exploration projects on the planet is moving toward implementation without scientific understanding or technical preparedness — Shell’s oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean of Alaska.
News Update: An August 28 press release from PEER states, “A top federal Arctic scientist (Dr. Charles Monnett) is returning to work today after six weeks on administrative leave without any charges being leveled against him, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). Meanwhile, the agency which suspended the scientist is itself under investigation for mishandling the matter. ... The leave was ordered by BOEM Director Michael Bromwich who reversed himself after the agency was informed that its top officials, including Bromwich, are now under investigation by Interior’s Scientific Integrity Officer for breaking new departmental scientific integrity rules designed to protect researchers from political interference as alleged in a PEER complaint filed on Dr. Monnett’s behalf.”
By Mariel Nanasi, July 25, 2011
PNM’s San Juan Generating Station. Photograph by Erika Blumenfeld
It’s time we secure a future without coal in New Mexico, across America, and around the world. It won’t be easy. Along the way, we will need a lot of help, creativity and inspiration.
News Update: In a July 28 front–page article “Enviros win voice in carbon battle,” in the Santa Fe New Mexican, the Associated Press writer Susan Montoya Bryan reports, “The New Mexico Supreme Court on Wednesday (July 27) cleared the way for environmental groups to intervene in an ongoing legal battle over whether the state should regulate greenhouse–gas emissions.” You can read the full article here.
By Subhankar Banerjee, June 16, 2011
Often we focus on a single act—more heroic the act is, more attention we pay. We also focus on a single result—more it tends toward either end of a good–bad spectrum, more attention we pay. Along the way, we skip the journey that led to the act or realize that the result is only a small stop on a long journey. Such is the story of young climate justice activist Tim DeChristopher, who is without a doubt a lightning rod of his generation.
News Update: On July 26, 2011 Tim DeChristopher was sentenced to two years in federal prison and removed immediately from court in chains. On April 21, 2013 he was released after serving nearly two years in federal prison. On Earth Day, April 22, 2013 he gave an interview to Democracy Now!. Tim’s story is told beautifully in the award–winning film Bidder 70, directed by Beth and George Gage.
By Subhankar Banerjee, March 7, 2011
India must unconditionally release Binayak Sen immediately and put an end to the great suffering that he and his wife have already endured since May 2007. Binayak Sen deserves a Nobel Peace Prize, not lifetime imprisonment as an enemy of India.
News Update: On April 15, 2011 the Supreme Court of India granted bail to Dr. Binayak Sen and dropped charges of sedition against him.
By Dr. Vandana Shiva, February 23, 2011
Industrial globalised agriculture is heavily implicated in climate change. It contributes to the three major greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide (CO2) from the use of fossil fuels, nitrogen oxide (N2O) from the use of chemical fertilizers and methane (CH4) from factory farming. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change (IPCC), atmospheric concentration of CO2 has increased from a pre–industrial concentration of about 280 parts per million to 379 parts per million in 2005. The global atmospheric concentration of CH4 has increased from pre–industrial concentration of 715 parts per billion to 1774 parts per billion in 2005. The global atmospheric concentration of N2O, largely due to use of chemical fertilizers in agriculture, increased from about 270 parts per billion to 319 parts per billion in 2005.
Industrial agriculture is also more vulnerable to climate change which is intensifying droughts and floods. Monocultures lead to more frequent crop failure when rainfall does not come in time, or is too much or too little. Chemically fertilized soils have no capacity to withstand a drought. And cyclones and hurricanes make a food system dependent on long distance transport highly vulnerable to disruption.
By Christine Shearer, December 1, 2010
In 2008, a small Inupiat village in Alaska sued ExxonMobil and 23 other fossil fuel companies including Peabody Energy and BP for contributing to the destruction of their homeland, and charged a smaller subset with deliberately creating a false debate around climate change science. You might have heard of the lawsuit—Kivalina v. ExxonMobil et al.
By Subhankar Banerjee, November 29, 2010
Is this the time to tinker with trading carbons by taking away the forests from the indigenous inhabitants and then selling the credits to the polluters—or is it possible to develop a common global vision of moving away from fossil fuel altogether and working with forest dwellers on sustainable solutions? It is a moral question that we must answer. And that I’d call trust–and–partnership.
By Rosemary Ahtuangaruak, November 23, 2010
This week families across the country will be celebrating Thanksgiving—sharing food and telling stories. Here is my story about our food and culture that would be destroyed if Shell Oil gets the permit to drill for oil in our homeland—the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.
By Subhankar Banerjee, November 15, 2010
PROTECT: CARIBOU AND SALMON, Gwich'in Human Aerial-Art, Fort Yukon, Alaska, 2010. Courtesy Gwich'in Steering Committee
Soon I’ll will tell you about five Godzilla–scale fossil–digging projects in North America that if approved will set us on a course to repeat our past with grave implications for the future of our planet. You may have already heard about some of these projects individually, but the urgency to stop them collectively is more than ever before.
By Dr. Terry Gosliner, October 16, 2010
For almost three decades I’ve been studying nudibranchs in the tropical Indian and Pacific Oceans. Nudibranchs are beautiful and brightly colored sea slugs that thrive on healthy coral reefs. While that has been exhilarating, it is the changes that I’ve seen on these reefs that make me sit upright in bed in the middle of the night. Climate change is seriously endangering these richest reservoirs of marine biodiversity. Here is my story of some of these alarming changes.
By Subhankar Banerjee, October 4, 2010
I recently urged young people to start a climate revolution in a post titled “Letter to Young Americans.” Here are some of the comments that were posted in the blogosphere1 | 2 in response to that post: “Your letter will be thrown into the marginalized bin and be lost forever. You’re asking for honesty and sincerity in the land of hypocrisy;” and “American college kids (and others their age) have other things on their minds –– like sports, drinking, i–pods, text–messaging, video games, TV, etc;” and “I’m a college freshman, and I, along with most other Americans, disagree with almost every tired idea you bring up in this article;” and “I’m not a ‘young American’, and, I don’t even go to college. But, I’ll go ahead and sink this stinky diatribe to the bottom of the briny depths.”
Not an auspicious beginning for a revolution, wouldn’t you say?
But the post also resulted in several emails in my inbox. Here are three stories from those emails about young people with a different perspective –– a teen rock band called One Eyed Rhyno from Sacramento, California; climate students from the North Cascades Institute in Sedrow–Woolley, Washington; and a bicyclist from the Yukon province in Canada.
By Subhankar Banerjee, August 26, 2010
Imagine you live in New York City, and one fine morning you awake to the realization that 90 percent of all the buildings that were more than five stories tall have been destroyed. You will hardly have the words to talk about this devastation, but I’m sure you will walk around the rubble to make sense of it all.
Something similar has happened in and around Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I currently live. Between 2001 and 2005, aerial surveys were conducted over 6.4 million acres of the state. Some 816,000 affected acres were mapped and it was found that during this short period Ips confusus, a tiny bark beetle, had killed 54.5 million of New Mexico’s state tree, the piñon. In many areas of northern New Mexico, including Santa Fe, Los Alamos, Española, and Taos, 90 percent of mature piñons are now dead.