Nature, Indigenous Rights, and Industry: On the Relocation of Indonesia’s Capital to East Borneo By Fany Hakim In January 2022, I was assigned to host the Thursday Online Forum (Forum Kamisan Daring) event held by the Intersectoral Collaboration for Indigenous Religion (ICIR) Rumah Bersama in Indonesia. ICIR is a network Read more
The Impossibility of Consent and Other Problems on Mauna Kea By Greg Johnson This post pertains to the Thirty Meter Telescope project on Mauna Kea (Hawai`i), which the author has written about on this forum previously. For important background and analysis of the dispute, see this forum in Radical History Read more
On Environmental Grief By Kocku von Stuckrad Last week, yet another devastating report about the ecological state of the planet was published: WWF and Zoological Society of London’s biennial Living Planet Report. It confirms (again) that the abundance of birds, fish, amphibians, and reptiles is in freefall, plummeting by 69% Read more
The New Arms Race and the Approaching Climate Havoc: A Tipping Point for Humanity By Fabian Scheidler A few days after the Russian attack on Ukraine, a new report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was released, making it unmistakably clear that the Earth is on the Read more
Reaching for the Stars: Notes from the Magic-Detection Project By Teya Brooks Pribac Driving from Sydney, Australia, to the desert town of Broken Hill, a thousand kilometers to the west, whether by the southern or the northern route, the numerous signposts on the way may create the impression that all Read more
The Role of Indigenous Women in Ecological Activism: Deforestation in North Sumatra By Bibi Suprianto The deforestation of indigenous peoples’ land in North Sumatra is a long, ongoing problem. One such community is the indigenous people of Pandumaan Sipituhuta. The homeland of this community is in Tano Batak, Humbang Hasundatan Read more
Globalization and Buddhism in Indonesia: Building Myanmar’s Shwedagon Pagoda By Yulianti According to the 2021 data of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, there are approximately 2,033,608 Indonesians practicing Buddhism which is equal to 0.74% of the total population. About 237.53 million people or 86.9% of the population practices Islam, and Read more
Decolonizing for the Planetary Community: Many Worlds, One Planet By Whitney A. Bauman Sylvia Wynter has argued, I think successfully, that the idea of the human and subsequently what the “Humanities” are, grew out of a colonial context. The human was made in the image of the European, western, white Read more
Aborting Rights By Catherine Keller In my May 2022 blog for Counterpoint, I was reflecting on how collective crises like the war in Ukraine, a global pandemic, and (often racialized) threats to democracy inescapably distract from the mounting, world-encompassing catastrophe of climate change. All these matters rightly demand and dangerously Read more
Which Comes First? Trust or Truth? By John Thatamanil Trust in our institutions is crumbling—churches, governments, science, higher education, etc. The list could go on indefinitely. This is a problem in my home country, the United States—so I’ll focus on this example, but it is a worldwide issue. A recent Read more