Exposing Adani’s environmental and labour abuses

by Vaishali Patil

For more than 20 years, I have worked with India’s poorest and most marginalised people, helping women access basic education and defend their rights to land. In that time, I have also provided legal support for communities and biodiversity hotspots threatened by coal.

'IS AUSTRALIA PREPARED TO LET A COMPANY RESPONSIBLE FOR SUCH BLATANT HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES BUILD ONE OF THE WORLD’S LARGEST COALMINES ON YOUR SHORES?'

The strongest lesson I have learnt in my work is that social and economic justice are unattainable without environmental justice, and that one of the biggest barriers to social equality here in India is the coal industry. 

In rural India, we are challenged daily by coal. When people think about coal power stations causing pollution, most think immediately of China. But here in India, pollution causes more than 3000 premature deaths every day – with the pollution spewed out from coal power stations one of the leading causes.

Swaths of premature deaths are just the most obvious symptom of a cancer that is destroying my homeland. From degraded lands to corruption and inequality, the coal industry is squeezing our people dry and reaping all the profits, accentuating inequalities and locking communities into a tragic cycle of poverty.

I’ve come face to face with some of the world’s worst companies, but at the top of that list is mining giant Adani, which wants to develop one of the world’s largest coalmines in Australia. The company says it is to meet a demand from India, but the communities I work with patently do not want Adani and they do not want its coal.

Read The Saturday Paper story - “Exposing Adani’s environmental and labour abuses.”

We Don’t Need a ‘War’ on Climate Change, We Need a Revolution

This year is on track to become the hottest ever recorded, and a growing number

Shoes representing protesters at the climate
talks summit in Paris last year.

of environmentalists are using a particular type of language in response. Some are calling for a huge “mobilization” to “combat” climate change. In an article in the New Republic in August, Bill McKibben, the unofficial spokesperson of the climate movement in the United States, insisted in very literal terms that, we are at war with climate change.
In the United States, we are familiar with war metaphors; and they are often politically useful. We have been through wars on poverty, drugs, cancer and even Christmas. In these cases, metaphors are understood as metaphors, but when McKibben points to territory ceded, space invaded, cultural loss and human suffering, he intends to be taken at face value: “It’s not that global warming is like a world war,” he writes. “It is a world war.”

War rhetoric serves a valuable function. It stresses the seriousness of the harm, its structural nature and the need to struggle against it. Wars require people to sacrifice and to share responsibility for a joint effort larger than individual preferences and comforts. They can also motivate solidarity: The goal of defeating the enemy orients all activity, and whatever may divide or distract us from achieving that goal must be put aside. In the rhetoric-bag of political discourse, “war” is a forceful weapon.

Read The New York Times story - “We Don’t Need a ‘War’ on Climate Change, We Need a Revolution.”

Food scarcity, malnutrition triggered by climate change to kill thousands by 2050

Food scarcity and malnutrition, triggered by climate change, could lead to half a million extra deaths by 2050, grim new research indicates.

The deaths, say researchers in England and the United States, could occur as a result of changes in diets and bodyweight from decreased crop productivity. The researchers found that fewer fruits and vegetables would be available as a result of climatic changes. That decrease will increase rates of heart diseases, strokes and cancer, they found.

Three-quarters of the projected extra deaths will be in China and India.

Unless action is taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, climate change would cut the fruit and vegetables available to people in 2050 by 4 per cent, the calories available by 3 per cent and the red and processed meat by 0.7 per cent, the study found.

Read TheStar.com story - “Climate change could cause 500,000 more deaths in 2050.”