Aparajita Sengupta

Eating Our Way Home: An Immigrant Family’s Journey For Sustainability

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A little over two years ago, we sold our house in Lexington, Kentucky to come back and settle in India. Me and my husband had spent seven and eleven years respectively in the United States and after years of confusion, vacillation, and endless planning, we finally decided to make the big move. Our compulsion to leave the United States was very strong, but our feelings were mixed. We had missed family and the surroundings familiar to us terribly the whole time we were in the United States, but so many years can hardly be just an interim—it is real time, and bound to be significant in certain ways.

The Fate of Civil Religion

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To describe faith in progress as a religion, as I’ve done in these essays numerous times, courts a good many misunderstandings. The most basic of those comes out of the way that the word “religion” itself has been tossed around like a football in any number of modern society’s rhetorical scrimmages. Thus it’s going to be necessary to begin by taking a closer look at the usage of that much-vexed term.

Guerrilla Forest Gardens

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In the last few years a popular meme growing throughout the ether of the inter-webs is the idea of guerrilla gardening. The idea of guerrilla gardening is really quite simple, but with some rather radical implications. Guerrilla gardening is the cultivation and care of plants (usually edibles) on land that you do not own. It is done on land that may be overlooked and forgotten about by private companies or municipalities. It may be D.O.T. land such as boulevards or parcels cut off by highways, and surrounded by entrance and exit ramps. It may be tucked away off of the beaten path in a county park, or behind the public library.

Current U.S. energy policy: Risk management that is worse than ever

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Current U.S. energy policy is, in fact, a hodgepodge of disconnected policies designed for specific constituencies with no coherent goal. What never gets asked and answered definitively in the policy debate is this: What should our ultimate goal be and when should we aim to achieve it?

The Sound of the Gravediggers

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Over the nearly seven years I’ve spent blogging on The Archdruid Report, the themes of my weekly posts have veered back and forth between pragmatic ways to deal with the crisis of our time and the landscape of ideas that give those steps their meaning. That’s been unavoidable, since what I’ve been trying to communicate here is as much a way of looking at the world as it is a set of practices that unfold from that viewpoint, and a set of habits of observation that focus attention on details most people these days tend to ignore.

The Fruit Hunters

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Recently my friend John who is a fellow fruit enthusiast like myself and helps run the NASE with me, sent me an email with a link to a program entitled The Fruit Hunters. Documenting the history of fruit and the industrialization of the food chain, The Fruit Hunters takes us on a journey through history and around the globe. From the jungles of Borneo and Bali, to a banana breeder in Honduras, and the flat northern plains of Saskatchewan, people around the globe have made it their mission to preserve, propagate, and share exotic, rare, and often times threatened species of fruit.

Will the final blow for America’s shale gas ‘revolution’ be high prices?

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As U.S. natural gas prices flirt with the $4 mark, some skeptics of the so-called shale gas revolution think prices are headed much higher. Such a move would, not surprisingly, seriously undermine the official story that the United States has a century of cheap natural gas waiting for the drillbit.

The Illusion of Invincibility

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One of the wry amusements to be had from writing a blog that routinely contradicts the conventional wisdom of our time is the way that defenders of that same conventional wisdom tend to react. You might think that those who are repeating what most people believe would take advantage of that fact, and present themselves as the voice of the majority, speaking for the collective consensus of our time. In the nearly seven years since I started this blog, though, the number of times that’s happened can be counted neatly on the fingers of one foot.

Afghanistan, Ecology, and the End of War

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Working with school children in Afghanistan, one experiences the great sweetness of the people there and the commonplace lack of ecological understanding of how the physical world works.  This absence of understanding is magnified by the striking deterioration of the Afghan land and the American effort to address these pressing problems with bombs and bullets.  

Playing Possum

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So I have something to tell you all. With much hesitation and trepidation, but with encouragement from my wife and my good buddy Bill, I bring you the story of why I have blood on my hands. Two nights ago I had to kill a possum. I did not do it because I wanted to, or because I thought it would be fun, but because I was defending my chickens.

Reinventing America

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It’s been more than a year now since my posts here on The Archdruid Report veered away from the broader theme of this blog, the decline of industrial civilization, to consider the rise and impending fall of America’s global empire. That was a necessary detour, and the points I’ve tried to explore since last February will have no small impact on the outcome of the broader trajectory of our age.