can you leave the water in the rivers?

The Booker prize-winning novelist Arundhati Roy (left) concludes her trenchant essay about the crisis in modern India by suggesting the first step towards re-imagining "a world gone terribly wrong" would be to stop the annihilation of those who imagine a life that's outside capitalism and communism. This kind of imagination has:

an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfillment. To gain this philosophical space, it is necessary to concede some physical space for the survival of those who may look like the keepers of our past, but who may really be the guides to our future. To do this, we have to ask our rulers: Can you leave the water in the rivers? The trees in the forest? Can you leave the bauxite in the mountain? If they say cannot, then perhaps they should stop preaching morality to the victims of their wars.

Meanwhile this week's Economist features India's surprising economic miracle. more ...

green moves

Today's Independent reports that Broadway has been transformed as Mayor Bloomberg closes much of the street to traffic.

Other good news (all this in today's NYT): Venetians dump bottled water in favour of tap water, wind farms are good for wild salmon, and there's a big waiting list for the third-generation Prius. more ...

the sea as w.c.

The environmentalist David de Rothschild is sailing a 60ft catamaran made of recycled plastic bottles across the Pacific Ocean. His journey will highlight (a) the amount of plastic in the sea and (b) how plastic can be recycled.

The sea itself has undergone a sea-change in our imaginations. Early in Passage To Juneau, Jonathan Raban distinguishes between the view of the sea in Genesis ('the inchoate abyss from which God had raised man') and the Renaissance image of the sea as 'pure, inviting space', for trade, exploration and conquest.

Later still, the Romantics viewed the sea as the quintessence of the Sublime: 'violent, beautiful, coldly indifferent to mankind'.
Raban argues that in the last 50 years that image has been displaced.

'By the 1960s, people were looking at the sea in a mood of chastened self-recrimination, seeing in it their own greed, improvidence and wastefulness. They had treated the sea as a toilet.' more ...

'the biggest scam in marketing history'

Bottled water: the more you think about it, the more daft it is.

(Ben Jonson would have smiled.) more ...

bottling out

Chris Patten's new book says it would require only $15bn to meet the United Nations Millennium Development goal of halving the number of people who lack access to safe drinking water, compared to 'the approximately $100bn a year spent on bottled water'. more ...

warming, waste ... water

In the last couple of years, the London Review of Books has published two big and important articles on green subjects. The first was John Lanchester's review of the current literature on climate change. The second was Andrew O'Hagan's piece of reportage on waste. In the issue that's just out the LRB publishes a third: James Meek writes a 10,000-word article about last year's flooding at Tewkesbury and the privatisation of water in Britain. more ...