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Australia is on fire. Who is to blame for the millions of acres burnt to cinder, the lives lost and properties destroyed, the almost half billion animals killed?Australia is a major producer and user of fossil fuel. Australia Energy Update 2018, from Austra­lian Government’s Department of Environment and Energy (ener­gy.gov.au), says coal, oil and gas accounted for 94 percent of Aus­tralia’s primary energy mix in 2016-17.

Sixty-three percent of elec­tricity was generated from coal. Out of this, 11 percent was from brown coal, a source of energy environmental activists have long opposed due to its harmful health and ecological effects. Coal min­ing releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas that is one of the main causes of global heating.

Scott Morrison, Prime Minister of Australia, brought a lump of coal to Parliament in 2017. He sang the virtues of coal and its links to Australian prosperity, and said: “Those opposite have an ideological, pathological fear of coal. There’s no word for ‘coalo­phobia’ officially, Mr. Speaker… but that’s the malady that afflicts those opposite.” Morrison, who critics say also cut funding for fire­fighters, was later seen enjoying his holiday in Hawaii as Australia went up in flames. Volunteer fire­fighters died trying to contain the massive fires.

Economic “growth” almost always leads to more stress on the environment, leading to worse economic conditions for people in the long run. The Australian economy grew by two percent in 2016-17 to reach $1.7 trillion. Ener­gy consumption was 6,146 peta­joules in 2016-2017 for 24.6 mil­lion people. To compare, Nepal with a population of 27 million consumed 428 petajoules in 2010. Assuming two million Nepalis are working abroad at any given time, and the population being roughly equal in size, an average Austra­lian citizen uses 14 times more energy than a Nepali.

It is clear Nepal needs to increase its energy use if we are to run industries and be self-suffi­cient in articles of daily consump­tion. But does Australia need to reduce its energy levels? Is there a balance between the First World and Third World that could be struck, which puts us somewhere in the middle?

Australia also has large tracts of industrial farming lands which are saturated with glyphosate, a herbicide first created by Mon­santo and now sold by Bayer. Glyphosate is used to desiccate crops after they’ve been cut. This means it’s an agent that dries out organic matter. Now imagine mil­lions of acres full of grain and stalks saturated with this sub­stance, drying out the land across an entire continent. How could it not catch fire?

Then there’s Bolsonaro’s Brazil, encouraging cattle farmers to set the Amazon on fire. Australia and Brazil are both in the Southern Hemisphere. In the map, they appear to be separated only by an ocean. In other words, they are upwind and downwind from each other. Without doubt, hot winds of Brazil’s Amazon fires played a hand in temperature increas­es in Australia. The firestorms look more like tornados than for­est fires, which suggest heated air currents.

Last but not least, there’s euca­lyptus. Although the literature assures us that eucalyptus is native to Australia, are there plantations that have been put together in neat rows by human hands which have dried out groundwater? In Nepal, this tree was introduced in the 80’s by the Australian aid agency. It quickly became known for depleting groundwater levels for miles around. A similar situ­ation developed in India where eucalyptus had been planted in plantations. Is there human agen­cy behind the reshaping of seem­ingly virgin land which created conditions perfect for water table depletion and drought?

Poignant photographs of chil­dren staring at dead koalas and kangaroos are making their rounds on Twitter. Many species of animals, birds and insects may never recover their population and go extinct after this cata­clysmic event. For those who are children or in their teens, there is a sense of a world lost which can never be recovered.

Which is why it was enraging to see this tweet from Exxon Mobil Australia: “Stay safe and have fun this new year, from all of us at ExxonMobil Australia.”

One person responded: “Jesus Christ this is pure evil.” Another said: “Exxon needs to be prose­cuted for crimes against human­ity. Blood is on your hands. #GreenNewDeal now.”

And this may be the only way to respond to this apocalyptic fire which has devastated an entire continent. Can ecological crimes finally be taken to the World Court of Justice, as another Twit­ter respondent suggested? Are the actions of big corporations not leading to genocide in many places, with people being affect­ed in mass numbers by climate triggered events?

In Australia, people are shifting out of homes and neighborhoods they may never return to in their lifetime. It will take decades for forests to revive and restore. Where will all these fire-affect­ed people go? Who will help them rebuild their lives? Surely it won’t be the fossil fuel cor­porations who made billions of dollars in profit, but paid zero tax to the country.

A sobering note to begin the new decade with, but we must remember Nepal is one of the most climate change-af­fected countries in the world. Our people are also being dis­placed, through the slow deplet­ing of glaciers, ice and spring melt in the Himalayas. Who is to blame?

A few weeks ago, I wrote an op-ed called “Disband the UN.” A former senior UN official wrote to me and said he disagreed with my thesis. Had I looked at the possibilities of reform within the UN? I explained that my reasoning went beyond looking at the possibilities of change within the UN—the time for that is long past.What I am asking for is a radi­cal re-haul of our contemporary financial system. This system is based on colonial underpinnings of Western countries exploiting the economies of the East, and forms a complex, invisible mesh of international financial modali­ties which underpins the present inequality of nations.

This drama of inequality is kept in place by a “fourth wall” which maintains the illusion, or a theat­rical play, of a just international system. This play is embodied by the likes of the UN (“the actors on the stage”), and the reality of twenty-first century poverty (“the spectators”). Much like a play, it is funded by benefactors which have political leverage and finan­cial clout, as we saw in the COP25 meet in Madrid last week. Protest­ers and advocates against climate change were the spectators, while the actors on stage maintained the fourth wall with the illusion of international legality.

As the COP25 drama unfold­ed, oil producing Qatar proudly tweeted its support of the UN, say­ing it is one of its biggest financial contributors. How can a system whose survival depends on the financial support of oil-produc­ing states be expected to pass a global fossil-fuel ban? Which is what the COP25 should have done—hand down a 2030 dead­line for the phase-out of explora­tion, extraction and distribution of fossil fuels worldwide.

Yale University’s E360 website published “The Plastics Pipeline” by Beth Gardiner on December 19, 2019. The article discusses how Exxon, Shell, Saudi Aramco and other big petroleum companies are gearing up for massive plas­tic production in expectation of lower demand for fossil fuel. A fracking boom has led to high pro­duction of ethane, and they need a way to dispose of this feedstock. Millions of tons of new plastic are in the pipeline.

Plastic is the most destructive product we have ever invented. It clogs up our waterways, soil and air. It is found in every living being on earth. Birds, whales and deer are found dead with their stom­achs full of plastic. Plastic should be phased out as soon as possible. We should not be talking about “recycling,” a feel good euphe­mism that rich people in the West use for dumping their trash.

UN Secretary General Anto­nio Guterres expressed his dis­appointment in the COP25 out­comes—but disappointment is an inadequate response for a crisis in which the survival of humankind as well as all of life on the planet is at stake.

It is clear that the planet can no longer be governed in this man­ner—with opaque financial net­works, TNCs and special interest nation-states dictating the terms of international policy and law. With the effects of climate change exploding across the planet and tearing through the lives of mil­lions of people, we can no longer ignore the reality of a handful of destructive corporations which have chosen to deceive people and destroy the planet.

Australia has been burning with bushfires for the past few months. About 7 million acres of land have gone in 2019 alone. Lyn Bender, a 72-year-old psychologist from Australia, writing in Independent Australia.net, says “The human race is engaged in a murder-sui­cide pact of gigantic proportions.” She states the old methods of grief management is no longer adequate for this moment: “As someone who has worked with grief and trauma, I now find the age-old concepts of grief man­agement hopelessly puny and inadequate. The enormity of the growing evidence of environmen­tal destruction is now unfolding worldwide.”

In Nepal, the Himalayas are melting with each passing year. Each winter is warmer than it used to be. A billion and more people depend on spring melt water from the Himalayas for drinking water, cooking, irriga­tion, washing, laundry, animal husbandry, and other daily needs. When snow no longer covers the mountains, there will be mass migration of people seeking more livable environments, as Marty Logan (“Mt. Everest is Melting: Are you Moved?” December 20, 2019) pointed out in the Nepali Times. We are already starting to see this in our lifetime.

With certain environmental apocalypse awaiting us in 30-50 years, it is genocidal to allow a capitalist system which sees petroleum profit as “wealth” to dictate what money is, what value it should have, how it circulates, and where it ultimately ends up. As a post in the Extinction Rebel­lion blog recently pointed out, the valuation of Saudi Aramco as the world’s most valuable com­pany literally equates planetary destruction as capitalism’s most profitable endeavor.

We need a radical overhaul of the financial mechanisms that underpin the inequality of nations. The Bank of Internation­al Settlements, the World Bank and the IMF, the opaque finan­cial committees and gatherings, all of this needs to be examined and disbanded. Why do some nations get to print trillions for war and trillions for their citi­zens, while other countries can only print enough to sustain starvation and death? Surely there is a fourth wall between “actors” and “spectators” here that we need to dismantle. Only then will we be able to halt our current lethal stride towards planetary destruction.

As globalization gains momentum, the leading economies are trying to go beyond bilateral and other con­ventional economic diplomacy arrangements. But in a ‘Region­al Cooperation Framework’, a large economy invariably gets disproportionate benefits from sentimental groupings of unequal participants. Let us evaluate this in the context of India’s refusal to join the much-touted Free Trade Agreement (FTA) experiment: the Regional Comprehensive Eco­nomic Partnership (RCEP). The proposed RCEP comprised the 10 ASEAN countries plus Australia, China, India Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea.

The RCEP, a China-dominat­ed association, got a lukewarm response from India, which acted in its ‘enlightened self-interest’. Narendra Modi summed up it eloquently: “Whenever I try and gauge India’s interest in light of her joining RCEP, I do not get an answer in the affirmative; neither Gandhiji’s policy of self-reliance nor my wisdom allows me to join RCEP.” He made the statement based on realistic considerations, among them a silent confession that India’s economy is passing through a rough patch.

Noticeably, India’s GDP growth has slowed for five consecutive quarters. It is believed that the Indian economy was severely hit by the demonetization and Goods and Services Tax (GST). The core manufacturing and real estate sectors have lost their way and the situation is pre­carious. India’s case for joining the RCEP was weakened as it offered nothing tangible to revive the Indian economy.

Also, the RCEP conflicts with the interests of existing region­al and sub-regional associa­tions, such as the South Asian Association for Regional Coop­eration (SAARC), the South Asian Sub-regional Economic Cooperation (SASEC), the Ban­gladesh, Bhutan, India and Nepal (BBIN), and the Bay of Ben­gal Initiative for Multi-sectoral and Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC).

India’s official position of not joining the RCEP was calculated. Delivering the recent Ramnath Goenka Memorial Lecture in New Delhi, India’s External Affairs Min­ister S Jaishankar said, “And it was that no agreement at this time was better than a bad agreement. It is also important to recognize what the RCEP decision is not. It is not stepping back from the ‘Act East Policy’, which in any case is deeply rooted in distant and con­temporary history.”

He defended the Indian gov­ernment: “Our cooperation spans so many domains that this one decision does not real­ly undermine the basics. Even in trade, India already has Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) with 12 of the 15 RCEP partners. Nor is there really a connection with our Indo-Pacific approach, as that goes well beyond the RCEP membership.” What the minister said was that India already had a ‘grand strategy’. The RCEP was not only about trade for India, it was also related to India’s strategic interests.

With India on the cusp of a decision on joining the RCEP, neighbors especially Nepal also watched closely. Nepal, which has been grappling with high trade deficit and low manufactur­ing base, would not have gained much with India’s entry into the RCEP, and with the possibility of dumping cheap goods from mem­ber countries.

As Nepal is passing through a developmental condition where the modes, locales and scale of productions have to keep up with mass aspirations, it should aim for “Make in Nepal-Make for Nepal” strategy. Only this can lead to inclusive and sustainable growth. Moreover, Nepali policy­makers must think of unchecked outbound migration which is causing enormous losses.

India’s tryst with FTAs like the Indo-ASEAN FTA, the Indo-Ko­rea FTA and the Indo-Japan FTA has been disappointing. Notwith­standing the initial excitement, in practical terms, the FTAs have proved faulty. The cases with oth­er countries have not been much better. The fault lines can be spotted with the ‘late-stage cap­italism’ that necessitates devel­oping countries go ahead with the public policy of developed and saturated economies. One common case with the regional associations is that there is little scope for ‘level playing field’, as for the ‘protectionist measures’, they have nothing to offer except ‘double-standards’.

To maintain parity, an exper­iment like RCEP must offer fair competition to other mem­ber-countries that are not as capa­ble as China in their ability to pro­tect their economy. To make the RCEP or any new formation work for the ‘Asian Century’, its strate­gic and economic fundamentals have to be first ascertained. What matters is the fairness in intent and working for shared goal. With the RCEP, that is missing.

The author is a New Delhi-based public policy professional and col­umnist and can be reached at sum­[email protected]

Students as partners is the current vogue in higher education. How students can partner in learning is an interesting exploration, even though it might be a premature discussion in the Nepali context. In this brief write-up, I discuss the idea of student as a partner in education, observe this phenomenon in several academic spaces in higher education in Nepal, and gauge the level of student participation as partners in these spaces.

Students as partners in learning suggests learning is not unidirectional. Kelly E. Matthews (2016) highlights that students as partners views student engagement as a joint endeavor to shape and influence university teaching and learning, deliberately emphasizing the relational and social elements of mutual learning.

The term students as partners in learning was popularized by an education system which believes the truth is unknown. Thus both teacher and student are in the quest of truth and together they pursue this quest, with the teacher as a ‘guide on the side’ and the student as a worker alongside. The modern or the Western education system is an example. But an education system that holds that truth is already known places the teacher on a higher pedestal or as a ‘sage on the stage’ who helps the student to learn. Such a system has limited scope for students as partners in learning. The Nepali education system reflects similar dynamics between teachers and students.

I will now dig further into the levels of participation of students as partners in the modern education system. Bovill and Bulley (2011), inspired by Arnstein (1969)’s Eight Rungs on a Ladder of Citizen Participation, came up with the ladder of student participation in curriculum design. I believe this ladder is useful in understanding student participation in general.

Bovill and Bulley have ‘dictated curriculum—no interaction’ in the curriculum design as the first rung on the ladder, where students have no role in curriculum design. The second rung is ‘participation claimed but tutor in control’. Here students are asked for feedback on curriculum, but such information is not fed-back into the curriculum. In the third rung ‘limited choice from prescribed choices,’ a tutor considers areas of the curriculum where students can participate; the fourth rung, ‘wide choice from prescribed choices,’ describes a higher level of freedom within the prescribed limits of the curriculum.

The fifth rung, ‘student control of prescribed areas’ indicates that specific areas of the curriculum are designed and controlled by students. In the sixth rung, ‘student control of some areas of choice’ and the seventh rung, ‘partnership—a negotiated curriculum’, implies that tutors and students work collaboratively to negotiate and create the curriculum. In the top rung ‘students in control’, the tutor is absent.

Nepali experience

An observation of the Nepali education system using Bovill & Bulley (2011)’s ladder of student participation reflects that student participation in Nepal largely lies on the lower half of the ladder, with some differences between academic programs that are yearly or semester-based.

The yearly programs prevalent in Nepal largely perceive teachers as the ‘sage on the stage’ who have the mastery of the content (read: syllabus) and are primarily responsible for transferring this content to the students. When attendance in class is not mandated in this system the only participation required of the students is in the annual university exams. There is little or almost no expectation that students come prepared for the class. And I have often found students search for course syllabus, past questions, model questions and answers/guess papers/guides shortly before the annual exams. In this context, students participate at the lowest rung with ‘dictated curriculum—no interaction’.

Students as partners in teaching-learning is relatively prominent in the semester-system prevalent in higher education. This system expects teachers to be facilitators of learning or a ‘guide on the side’ and expects the students to come to the class prepared about what is going to be discussed, conduct group projects, make presentations, and write independent papers with elements of critical thinking. But my experience with the semester system in Nepal has largely been with students having a second rung participation with ‘participation claimed but tutor in control’. Some academic institutions allow for relatively higher student participation with students getting ‘limited choice from prescribed choices’ which falls on the third rung.

Although there is ample evidence in literature about the benefits of engaging students as partners in education, Nepal is yet to take concrete steps in that direction. Training teachers adequately for more engaged teaching, preparing students adequately to take charge of their own learning, and encouraging them to contribute to teaching-learning, can be a big step towards building an education system where students are partners in teaching and learning.

The author is a PhD Scholar in Social Work at Boston College, USA