Analyze

From Tu (2020): "In Taiwan, the community air-monitoring projects often have difficulties in identifying the specific pollution sources due to the historical patterns of industrial development that tend to set up dense clusters of different factories in the industrial parks along the west coast (Liu 2012).3 The agglomeration of polluting facilities complicates pollution identification that further creates significant knowledge gaps between the predicted emission, the actual emission, and the community sensory experiences throughout the policy process. This pattern of development has somehow constrained Taiwan community air monitoring to target the specific polluters."

Adrian Martin is a professor of Environment and Development at the School of International Development, University of East Anglia, UK. His prior publication, Just Conservation: Biodiversity, Wellbeing and Sustainability, calls for reassessing conservation from the viewpoint of social justice. He describes the goals of his research as being centered on informing “the management of natural resources in developing countries, particularly in relation to governance of protected areas, integrated conservation and development, participatory forestry and agricultural intensification.”

“The ‘new conservation’ camp has the advantage of rejecting segregationist and elitist approaches, but it fails to challenge the inequalities or unsustainability of current economic systems and priorities. The ‘protectionist’ camp does challenge current economic systems, but it is essentially an upscaling of a segregationist model of protected-area conservation that is unlikely to be effective and would fail to recognise other ways of knowing and living with nature. “ (Martin 142)

“First, we need to break free from some of the mental dispositions that we are currently conditioned to think with. First and foremost, this means ceasing to think with the dominant economic ideology that makes a goal of economic growth, consumerism and individualism. It is this way of thinking that now threatens the destruction of humans and the rest of nature. Second, we need to understand and embrace the many past and current cultures ‘that promote harmonious forms of co-inhabitation among communities of diverse human and other-than-human beings’”. (Martin 143)

• “Rozzi looks at the 2009 constitution of the plurinational state of Bolivia, including the phrase ‘Suma Qamaña’. This translates as ‘living well together’. In the Aymara language, it means to inhabit, in the sense of both living in and living with, and it emphasizes the relational value of co-habitation” (Martin 143)

• “An example of a protectionist position is the ‘Half-Earth’ call for a massive expansion of protected areas (Wilson, 2016)” (Martin 142)

• “In the last twenty years, there has been a major scientific effort to quantify the benefits that humans derive from biodiversity and ecosystem services, including the influential report on The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB, 2010).” (Martin 142) 

• “The need for transformative societal change that addresses such root causes is now making it into globally agreed reports such as the UN’s 2019 Global Sustainable Development Report.” (Martin 135)

• A key point of the UN’s 2019 Global Sustainable Development Report emphasizes the necessity for “sustainable and just economies” and the safeguard of food systems as a whole. Recovery of Vietnam’s Central Provinces will require joint commitments between Vietnam and Taiwan to prioritize the preservation of environmental resources over GDP growth. Such commitments will need to incorporate more stringent regulations for manufacturing infrastructure, greater funding for supporting recovery efforts both on the part of affected ecosystems as well as fisherman communities whose operations have been suspended, and stipulations for community consultation processes in all future related manufacturing processes. 

• “A collaborative process led by the International Institute for Environment and Development has employed the environmental justice typology of distribution, procedure and recognition to develop an equity framework for assessment in protected and conserved areas (Schreckenberg et al., 2016; Franks et al., 2018). Use of this framework has now been adopted as voluntary guidance by the Convention on Biological Diversity and is being promoted by IUCN.” (Martin 142) 

Martin’s main argument centers on the importance of moving beyond the dichotomy of  anthropogenic and ecocentric framings to conceptualize methods of addressing biodiversity loss. The future of conservation, as noted by Martin, will need to embrace alternative framings of natural diversity which “deliberately integrates human and biological values into a holistic expression” (Martin 143). The importance of emphasizing “biocultural diversity”, argues Martin, serves to “decolonize” conservation via centering indigenous valuations of  “living in nature or as nature” (Martin 144) and rejecting dominant emphasis on upholding current economic systems and extreme segregationist views. While Martin does not provide an example of what a conservation scheme based on biocultural diversity could look like, he does use ideas presented in the 2009 constitution of the plurinational state of Bolivia to show that such ideas have in fact been gaining traction as an alternative means to framing conservation. 

Covid-19 and class inequalities :

As India Battles Covid, Class Divide is Growing https://www.deccanchronicle.com/opinion/columnists/070520/sanjay-kumar-as-india-battles-covid-class-divide-is-growing.html

 A Pandemic in an Unequal India https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/a-pandemic-in-an-unequal-india/article31221919.ece

 India cannot Fight Coronavirus without Taking into Account its Class and Caste Divisions https://scroll.in/article/956980/india-cannot-fight-coronavirus-without-taking-into-account-its-class-and-caste-divisions

The Lockdown Revealed the Extent of Poverty and Misery Faced by Migrant Workers https://thewire.in/labour/covid-19-poverty-migrant-workers

India's Response to COVID-19 Is a Humanitarian Disaster http://bostonreview.net/global-justice/debraj-ray-s-subramanian-indias-r...

Documentation of Disaster Relief Work :

PM-CARES Fund 'Not a Public Authority', Doesn't Fall Under RTI Act: PMO https://thewire.in/government/pm-cares-fund-not-a-public-authority-rti-act-pmo

 Community volunteers:  

https://www.facebook.com/thejucommune/