u/thseeker_431

In 2019, 27 law students in Vanuatu sat in a classroom watching sea-level rise consume Pacific shorelines and decided to ask a simple legal question:

"Could a country be held responsible under international law for wrecking the climate?"

What started as a student initiative (Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change) grew into a massive international campaign. They convinced Pacific leaders to take the cause forward, secured backing at the UN General Assembly, and brought the case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague.

Their fight helped trigger an unprecedented wave of climate litigation globally—establishing that nations and major fossil-fuel polluters owe a legal duty of care to protect basic human rights against environmental catastrophe.

Their story is featured in a new short documentary titled All Rise! (produced by Open Planet Studios / Wellcome). It's a reminder of what grassroots legal activism can achieve against all odds.

At least 56 people were killed and 46 others injured in Uttar Pradesh in the last three days as heavy rain lashed the state, leading to large-scale inundation and waterlogging in several districts. According to the Met Department, the state recorded 775 per cent above normal rainfall in the last 60 hours, causing heavy damage to houses and crops.

A clip from a Q&A Acharya Prashant did at Oxford in June 2026.

An engineer in the audience asks the standard question, we're aware of the ecological crisis, what's the solution? and he declines to answer it in those terms.

The argument, roughly:

Don't start from the solution. Start from the fact that whoever created the problem is still here, unchanged, and is now presenting himself as the one who'll fix it.

Carbon capture built by the same appetite that emitted the carbon doesn't subtract anything, it licenses more, If you do come up with carbon capture, that will only entitle you to release even more carbon.

He then tests the phrase genuine need on air travel. If the demand were genuine it wouldn't scale with price, Slash ticket prices and genuine needs will double. What kind of genuine needs are these?

Same treatment for the price of development, whose development, and why does the word do so much hiding?

He's explicit that he isn't against the technology. His claim is about sufficiency, not merit, that no efficiency gain survives contact with an appetite nobody has examined.

What I'd be curious to hear from this sub: he locates the driver in the individual psyche rather than in capital, growth imperatives or policy design. That's a different diagnosis from most degrowth writing, and I can't decide whether it complements the structural account or quietly substitutes for it.

Does an argument like this help, or does it hand the systemic problem back to individuals?

Checkout the full video on YouTube, here is the link.

https://youtu.be/ggA6D90i6pE?si=ZPwf8qZ5LEIdsHet

At least 20 persons have died in the floods as of Monday, The New Indian Express reported. The state government has announced Rs 4 lakh in compensation for the families of those who died.

Bihar has recorded 79.6 mm of rainfall in September so far, 31% above normal, PTI quoted the Bihar Meteorological Service Centre as saying.

https://scroll.in/latest/1095604/bihar-floods-over-34-lakh-affected-across-13-districts-as-ganga-crosses-danger-mark

About a century ago, long before environmental degradation became the crisis of our times, Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore had sounded early warning bells about the destruction of forests.

Though Tagore was born in the city of Kolkata, he had a deep and abiding contact with nature from childhood, and it shaped his many-sided genius in diverse ways. As an adolescent, he accompanied his father Debendranath to the foothills of the Himalayas, an experience he wrote about in his autobiographical notes.

Later, he was a frequent visitor to a zamindari estate in Shilaidaha, now in Bangladesh, where many of his short stories and songs were written while on a boat on the mighty river Padma. He had experienced the vast expanse of nature – in the sky, in the mountains, in the rivers and the flat, verdant lands of the Bengal delta.

Simultaneously he witnessed the urbanisation of the sleepy villages around Kolkata and Kolkata itself, and lamented the oppressive bounds of concrete and the lessening of contact between human beings and nature. When he founded his school, now a part of the Central University, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, a Unesco World Heritage Site – he ensured that classes took place under canopies of trees rather than within the confines of four walls.

https://scroll.in/article/1095382/mankind-destroyed-whatever-was-gifted-as-life-tagores-lament-for-the-environment-87-years-ago

This is so relatable

I'm an avid reader of history and I do consider the inner(probably lost) layers of Mahabharata as something that did take place historically because there is some literary evidence of Kuru Kings before and after the conflict period such as Dhritrashtra Vaichitravirya, Parikshit, Janamejaya. However, there is absence is of Kings in the MBh. The Kuru Polity as we know it shaped Vedic era and promoted it.

Krishna's role is the most intriguing for me in the MBh. If I view from a strictly historical and logical sense I cannot accept incidents such as Vishwaroopa in Sabha or on the battlefield as absolute ground truth. Krishna for me is an actual Vedic-era hero who played a gigantic role in shaping the Kingdoms of that era. For me he is someone with immense knowledge of dharma, a brilliant strategist, statesman and someone who rose to a great status in Chandravamsha lineage specifically for the Yadavas. Vasudeva Krishna of history did exist for me but I may not accept him as the Supreme Godhead and the origin of the universe.

There is also a mention of Ghora Angirasa as the teacher of Krishna Devakiputra in the Chandogua Upanishad but he does not get a mention in the MBh(ofcourse since it does not centre around Krishna) or his childhood although explains the reason the initial 3-4 chapters of Gita focus on dharma karma and yoga through some sort of "upanishadic lens".

His childhood is also absent from the Mahabharata and Harivamsa was developed way later. It might incorporate his actual childhood passed within the Yadava clan but got exaggerated to an impossible extent which is the same for Mahabharata which was developed through layers which made it evolve from a bard of dispute to a grand encyclopaedia. The core of Mahabharata involves a 100% true story for me even if there is no archaeological evidence but enough literary evidence.

Link: https://hindupedia.com/en/Ghora\\\_%C4%80%E1%B9%85girasa

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.486148

Eager to know your view on this.