The Indian journalist Gayathri Vaidyanathan explains why living in lockdown has made her resolve to be a “non-consumer for as long as possible”.

Gayathri Vaidyanathan remains with her family, in her own, self-imposed lockdown in Chennai, India. Her resolve is to be a “non-consumer for as long as possible”. She continues, “I’ve been trying to cut down my consumption for a while, but my execution was imperfect. I tried to grow some vegetables in a raised garden bed back at my house in Bangalore, but white flies decimated them. I continued to buy things I didn’t need. I ordered lots of takeout. I bought a bamboo salad bowl last year when I don’t even enjoy salads. Why did I buy it?”

She recorded her resolve ahead of the broadcast, and was fearful of what would happen in the next few days. Each day she learns of more cases nearby, just two lanes away or one street down. “Workers in India don’t get paid to stay at home, there is little choice but to work,” she reflects. “The daring, the desperation is all set to burst”.

The whoosh of the wind through the junipers, the whinny of horses in their stalls, the raspy squawking of ravens – those are the sounds Don and Jane Schreiber have grown to love on their remote Devil’s Spring Ranch.

The views are mesmerizing, too. Long, lonesome ridges of khaki-colored rocks, dome-like outcrops and distant mesas rise from a sea of sage and rabbit brush.

The ranch and surrounding countryside are a surprising setting for an enduring climate change problem: a huge cloud of methane – a potent, heat-trapping gas – that is 10 times larger than the city of Chicago. The main sources, scientists say, are leaks from about 25,000 active and abandoned wells and 10,000 miles of pipelines that snake across the San Juan Basin, providing about $3 billion worth of natural gas per year.

Home to stunning prehistoric ruins, cathedral-like canyons and silt-laden rivers, this basin in the Four Corners region of the Southwest emits substantially more methane per unit of energy produced than most major gas-producing areas, according to a Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting analysis of industry data reported to the federal government.

Read at Reveal

This summer, a crew of strangers arrived in the tiny village of Pak Lan along the Mekong River in northern Laos. They sat around in shorts, examining technical drawings, and then surveyed the area, measuring the height of the riverbank, the size of the rice paddies and even the number of pigs.

The tally is necessary because Pak Lan may soon disappear. The government will need to move it and 18 nearby villages, because they will be partially or fully submerged if a highly controversial dam, called the Xayaburi, is built. The US$3.5-billion project will create a 60-kilometre-long reservoir and generate 1260 megawatts of power, which will earn between $3 billion and $4 billion a year for the developer, CH Karnchang Public Company of Thailand.

Somchit Tivalak, village chief and representative of the ruling communist Lao People’s Representative Party, is not quite sure what a hydroelectric dam is or how it will work, but he is convinced that good things are on the horizon. He says that his village will move to a place where it will have roads and electricity, as well as a reservoir teeming with fish.

Many others, however, are deeply worried. The lower Mekong, which winds through Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, is one of the last big untamed rivers in the world. Nearly 60 million people depend on its rich fisheries for their survival. If the Xayaburi dam is built, it will set a precedent for 10 other hydropower dams proposed for the main stem of the river. If all those proceed, nearly 55% of the river will be converted to slow-flowing reservoirs.

Read at Nature

Charles “C.J.” Bevins, a 23-year-old roughneck, was pinned against a trailer by a forklift. The vehicle was partially sunk into the ground. C.J.’s legs dangled like a rag doll’s.

The driver hurriedly backed up, and C.J. crumpled to the ground. As the men milled around, unsure how to help, C.J.’s face went white, his lips blue. He looked up at his friend and colleague Steve Riffle, whom he called “Dad.”

“Dad, I ain’t going to die, am I? I ain’t going to die, am I?”

“No, you will be back to work tomorrow,” Riffle said. “You will be all right.”

C.J. died hours later at a hospital near the rig site in Smyrna, N.Y.

Oil and gas sites are among the most dangerous workplaces in the country, according to federal labor statistics and an ongoing EnergyWire investigation. Multiple pressures weigh on the people who work in this high-risk, high-reward industry, including the need to produce on schedule and keep costs down. The company men and their workers have a “get ‘er done” attitude that sometimes leads to safety compromises that go unnoticed and undocumented.

Sometimes events tilt toward tragedy.

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It has been more than a year since the accident. C.J.’s sister, Charlotte Bevins, 26, keeps her brother’s blue safety helmet in the back seat of her car.

Since C.J.’s death on May 1, 2011, Charlotte has been driving a few of her brother’s old co-workers to their rig jobs. Along the way, she quizzes them about the company’s safety culture to piece together why, exactly, her brother died.

When a roughneck dies, the local newspaper runs a short obituary. The company pays for a funeral service. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration conducts an investigation and fines the company. In C.J.’s case, the fine was $4,900. Under the state’s workers’ compensation program, family members get a percentage of the victim’s monthly salary.

The process is designed for an efficient cleanup. The company pays its share, and it moves on to drilling the next well.

Read at EENews

Environmental journalist Gayathri Vaidyanathan considers the impact of Philosophy and Religion on animals as food. In and around Chennai in India, she reveals how India is managing a terrible dilemma in the massive rise of buffalo meat production next to the catastrophe of animal welfare and environmental pollution. She talks to Jains, Hindus and Buddhists and visits fast food restaurants where young people associate eating burgers with independence and modernity. She also spends time at a pioneering dairy along with one of the many animal sanctuaries in the city.

Producers: Rose de Larrabeiti and Kate Bland

Anuradha Saha died painfully in May 1998 at the age of 36, her skin sloughed off all over her body, except for her skull. She was encased in bandages meant to prevent infections that had already lodged in her system. Her immunity had been compromised after receiving a high dosage of steroids from some of the top doctors in Kolkata.

For the past 15 years, her husband, Dr. Kunal Saha, has pushed Indian courts to hold at least five doctors and the hospital responsible. Though the lower courts rejected his cases, Dr. Saha persisted, appealing all the way to the Supreme Court, which found the doctors and AMRI Hospital (Advanced Medicare & Research Institute Ltd.) in Kolkata guilty of negligence in 2009.

It took another four years for the Supreme Court to award Dr. Saha an unprecedented amount in a medical negligence case in India — 60.8 million rupees ($1 million), plus 6 percent annual interest for each of the 15 years that Dr. Saha has been fighting his legal battle.

Read at NYTimes

JHARIA, India — Night falls here by 5 p.m. and people stream into the open-air market to catch the latest political news. They have much to discuss, because elections are currently on in the state of Jharkhand, which is famous for three things: corruption, a home-grown terrorism threat called Naxalism, and this area’s economic life, which is marked in every imaginable way by coal.

Coal-fired electricity lights a single incandescent bulb in each shop, and the combined yellow glow gives the market a festive air. Underneath this town, the earth is burning. Suresh Kumar, 50, secretary of a local union, leaves the tea shop where he has his makeshift office and steers his motorbike down a road lined with dark piles of mining debris.

The light from his headlight is blocked by plumes of smelly, sulfurous smoke seeping out of the ground. He stops suddenly, seeing how close he has come to the edge of an open-pit mine. In the far distance, there is an orange glow in the sky. It is a non-natural sunshine reflecting the burning of millions of tons of prime coking coal. The underground fire has burned out of control for nearly a century.

Coal is the bane of Jharkhand, and the reason why Kumar and his fellow residents need to move out of the town. If the government has its way, 17 open-pit mining complexes will be built here. Below the town lie 19 seams of prime coking coal. The government’s goal is to get at the coal before the fire does.

There are many offshoots of this little drama that illustrate the high environmental and public health costs of extracting the biggest natural resource sustaining India’s economic boom.

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