Indigenous Peoples

Isolated by the surrounding desert, Kashgar was once
an oasis on the old Silk Road. Now the city is being overwhelmed in the rush to open up the region’s oil and gas reserves. By Dan Box.

The economic troubles in Argentina have been widely reported around the world. The impoverishment of the middle classes and the Argentines’ growing cynicism about their politicians have been extensively written up. Less well covered in the news has been the effects of the crisis on Argentina’s very poorest – people who live far from the eye of city-based reporters, the country’s original inhabitants, a people despised and vilified as ‘savages’ by the settler population.

Considering its estimated 25,000-plus uses – for producing food, fuel, medicine, paper, plastics and even dynamite – the most wasteful thing you could probably do with hemp is smoke it. Jake Bowers describes hemp’s potential to transform agriculture and the plant’s demonisation by huge and competing industrial interests

Grandmother Earth - Thirteen matriarchs from indigenous cultures are currently touring the world, promoting peace, unity and a respect for nature. nicola Graydon meets one of them, Mona Polacca

Kirkpatrick Sale is shocked by a new and disturbing view of the ecological role of the American Indian.

Nandor Tanczos thinks the modern legal system could learn a lot from traditional ideas of justice, such as those of the Maori people

Aidan Rankin argues that modern liberal values can be more of a threat than a liberation.