How many rabbit holes did you dive into last week, Reader?

I’m asking because I realized I went down many! From climate colonialism to a network of underground fungi (did you know we know more about the deep sea than about our soil?!), to Dutch journalist Ruben Terlou, who talks about reversed culture shock and finds it harder and harder to return to the “narrowminded” Netherlands after covering conflicts abroad (I can relate).

This newsletter might always read coherent, but it takes me at least six hours — and often more — each week to kill the darlings and choose from everything I consume the parts to write a smooth piece.

This week, I’m probably jumping more around topics, from one idea to the other, but I hope the thread of a decolonial approach, constructive storytelling methods, and well-being will be visible throughout: that is what Inclusive Journalism focuses on. If you appreciate only 1% of what you read, please share it on your social media.

Sanne

DEEP RABBIT HOLE

From climate colonialism to robotics

While still following the news of the devastating Himalaya flood in Nepal and Tibet, I came across the opinion piece "The Ice Failed Upstream. The Debt is Downstream." by Farhana Sultana in the Bangladeshi weekly newspaper Counterpoint. It caught my attention because Sultana speaks about “climate coloniality” and the fact that:

She is an internationally renowned interdisciplinary scholar on climate justice and decolonizing knowledge, with a particular interest in issues of positionality and decolonizing academia. It's right up my alley.
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Sultana writes about how neither Bangladesh nor Nepal contribute to the fossil fuel economy in substantial ways, yet they do bear the consequences:

It's incredibly interesting to hear her speak about this topic, and Rachel Donald of the Planet: Critical podcast had an in-depth conversation with Sultana in January, and also challenged her on the terminology of coloniality.

In her article, Sultana explains how the people in Nepal and Tibet who faced this massive disaster live beneath a danger produced elsewhere. Even though Nepal secured a Green Climate Fund grant of 36.1 million dollars to lower and protect dangerous lakes, the United States, the largest historical emitter, walked off the Green Climate Fund the day after announcing it would leave the UN climate convention.

The fund established at COP27 to address loss and damage holds pledges of around 822 million dollars against a preliminary Nepali estimate of four to five billion to rebuild, Sultana points out.

And this is what she also explains in the podcast: we talk about coloniality and not colonialism because it's about how the logic from colonial times still works through in governance today. The fact that the US can withdraw from a climate fund, leading to consequences for Nepal, is part of that same logic.

Patronizing charity vs. climate reparations

PhD scholar Sameer Budhathoki's says a similar thing in his op-ed in The Kathmandu Post, "Why Nepal Must Demand Climate Reparations":

It made me think about the role of media: why are we still putting so much time and money in breaking news reports that bring dozens of foreign journalists to Nepal the day after the disaster, everyone doing a similar stand-up, pushing the camera in the tearing faces of locals, bringing the same facts in tenfold, only to leave the country a week later, long before the real consequences come to the surface.
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It costs a lot of money and colleagues will say it’s important to show the size of the disaster so that politicians will be more eager to act and support financially. Which I hope is true. But there is a heavy burden on Nepali journalists now to track the aftermath on all levels.

If some of the breaking news money could go to supporting long-term reporting, it would help them immensely. A rental SUV for one day to bring a parachute journalist to the crisis location is similar to a month's salary for a local journalist.

And just to emphasize the importance, Nepali journalist Mukesh Pokhrel wrote a year ago for The Independent: "A ‘Himalayan Tsunami’ Has Just Devastated Nepal. It Should Be a Wake-Up Call".

Community-based warning saved lives

One other element of coloniality is the prioritization of certain knowledges over others. The European powers put their history and knowledge systems central in the colonies, pushing existing ways of doing to the margins. That has also become a logic you can still recognize in communities.

Abhaya Raj Joshi writes for Mongabay how “During Nepal floods, decentralized, community-based warning saved lives”. An example of how colonial logic is embedded in government system comes to the surface in this article that reports on how Nepali headteacher Rajendra Dawadi of the Tribhuvan Trishuli Secondary School saved lots of schoolchildren because the community warned about the upcoming water:

And speaking of community-based knowledge, something else popped up in my timeline: scientist Patrick Meier shared his TED Talk from ten years ago, when he spoke about the danger of glacier lakes and how we can use technology to measure the possible danger.

I encourage you to watch the full talk because it’s a beautiful example of how robotics can be used for a humanitarian goal, in co-production with communities, and it gives me — as a tech sceptic — a lot of hope for the future. It’s also a story I hope to see a Solutions Journalism article about.

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But in his LinkedIn post, Meier also mentions that the funding they’d asked for the water robots to measure the lakes in Nepal hadn’t been assigned. There we are with the governance again: was it colonial logic? Is it a coincidence that the dangers in the European Alps are much better studied and measured than the ones in the Himalaya?

A decolonial approach doesn’t seek straightforward answers, but instead asks more questions. I hope some of you pick these questions up to research further and produce important stories.

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See you next week!

Sanne