Ashish Kothari is the founder of Kalpavriksh, an Indian non profit organisation working on environmental and social issues at local, national and global levels. He was trained at the Indian Institute of Public Administration and coordinated India’s National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan. He served on boards of Greenpeace International. He is part of the coordination team of Vikalp Sangam, the Global Tapestry of Alternatives and Radical Ecological Democracy. He is the (co-)author of several books including Churning the Earth (2012) and a co-editor of “Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary” (2019).
A Flowering of Radical Change
The Flower of Transformation has five petals: radical political democracy, radical economic democracy, social justice, cultural (and knowledge) diversity, and ecological wisdom.
November 22, 2022
Amitav Ghosh: The Nutmeg’s Curse
As we’ve seen, the few environmental movements that have succeeded in the long run are almost all built around certain ideas of the relationship between humans and certain spaces.
January 31, 2022
The promise and perils of democracy
Lets go back to basics. Democracy = demos + cracy, rule of (or by) the people. The power to take decisions is inherent to each one of us, it is part of being human.
September 21, 2021
A New Future for Conservation
We argue for an alternative approach to conservation policy moving forward, one that seeks to move beyond both protected areas and economic valuation. Our proposal is less concerned with the targets specified by the current post-2020 framework, and more focused on the means and processes by which these are achieved.
August 12, 2020
We are Doomed if, in the Post-Covid-19 World, We Cannot Abandon Non-Essentials
If there is one lesson all of us should have learnt during the Covid-19 crisis, it is about how to separate the ‘essential’ from the ‘non-essential’.
August 11, 2020
‘Development’ is Colonialism in Disguise
The paths to a bio-civilization are multiple – and the pluriverse is already visible in the cosmovisions and radical practices of many groups worldwide. The notion of a pluriverse questions the alleged universality of Euro-Americacentric modernity. As the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico, put it so wisely, the pluriverse constitutes “a world where many worlds fit”.
September 12, 2019