Radical Alternatives to “Progress” | Shrishtee Bajpai

Across India and around the world, communities are resisting destruction and reclaiming their right to shape their own futures. Shrishtee Bajpai, researcher and activist with the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, reveals how local struggles for self-determination connect across cultures and what is being done to weave a 'pluriverse' of possibilities rooted in social and ecological justice. Highlights include:

How Shrishtee's upbringing as an upper caste, urban Indian girl living along the river Ganga shaped her search for personal freedom and ecological and social justice;

How her work with Indian village communities resisting ecological and social destruction helped her connect academic critiques of feminism and development to lived realities;

How she challenges oppressive systems while also interrogating her own privilege and colonial inheritance;

Why creating a 'pluriverse' of diverse, locally-rooted alternatives is essential to move beyond the dominant development model and progress narrative;

Why the Global Tapestry of Alternatives supports 'radiating out' values and lessons rather than 'scaling up', which risks destroying the important nuance of local context;

Why strengthening communities’ imagination, confidence, and self-determination is central to her work;

Why the Rights of Nature movement must de-emphasize the perspectives of NGOs and governments and center the voice of local communities with long-standing connections to their environments;

How profound experiences with the more-than-human world and with story-based community ritual sustain her work. See episode website for show notes, links, and transcript:

https://www.populationbalance.org/pod...

OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance

OVERSHOOT tackles today’s interlocked social and ecological crises driven by humanity’s excessive population and consumption. The podcast explores needed narrative, behavioral, and system shifts for recreating human life in balance with all life on Earth. With expert guests from wide-ranging disciplines, we examine the forces underlying overshoot: from patriarchal pronatalism that is fueling overpopulation, to growth-biased economic systems that lead to consumerism and social injustice, to the dominant worldview of human supremacy that subjugates animals and nature. Our vision of shrinking toward abundance inspires us to seek pathways of transformation that go beyond technological fixes toward a new humanity that honors our interconnectedness with all beings.

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