Green Options

Australian musician Ben Lee brilliantly weaves daunting issues such as the global water crisis, religious intolerance, hunger, renewable energy and climate change into this catchy pop song. Lee has also been named one of PETA’s world’s sexiest vegetarians.

An awesome Public EcoArt Project with the Metro Station in the vicinity

48° Celsius is the highest temperature that the city of Delhi, India has witnessed in its recorded history. 48° Celsius is also a reference to the exigencies of global warming - which can be felt in Delhi’s continuously escalating summer temperatures each year. Delhi, by any score, qualifies as one amongst the world’s most dynamic and complex urban settings. Like most other urban centers of this country and of the south Asian region, the city of Delhi is characterized by multi-layered historicity and multiple urbanisms that get expressed in varying conditions within its cultural and physical fabric.

With this as the backdrop, and as a combined Goethe-Institut and GTZ initiative, the 48c Public.Art.Ecology Festival was recently celebrated in Delhi. A large empty bucket, a tree hanging from a crane, a hanging garden for want of space, a crash landing, cycle-rickshaws as local story-tellers, a bamboo art, a step-well with a large inverted mineral bottle on top…Delhi witnessed it all this December!

I’ve always thought that many of the issues I am concerned about—the environment, human rights, peace, overconsumption, animal welfare—are all really one big issue. Everywhere I look I see countless connections between many social, political, and environmental issues. I may be involved in many separate causes, but they overlap so often that I feel that I’m really just part of one big movement. Which is why when someone asks me why I’m vegetarian, I am so overwhelmed with reasons that I don’t know where to even start explaining. The top ones are the environment, animal rights, and health, but no matter what you call them, they’re all one big issue to me.

I’m not the only one who has noticed this overlap, of course. And rarely have I encountered such a thorough examination of the connections between animal welfare and just about every other issue that concerns me than in the book Why Animals Matter by Erin E. Williams and Margo DeMello.