Land Under Pressure
This story explores how environmental pressure and economic necessity reshape daily decisions in forest-edge communities. As traditional livelihoods narrow, clay extraction and brickmaking emerge as survival strategies, drawing people deeper into protected forests. Through field observation, the article traces how these choices alter land, water, and risk, linking upstream deforestation to downstream flooding and revealing the quiet trade-offs made when survival leaves little room for alternatives.
The Garo Record. Part One:
The Garo Man Who Came Home
North of Dhaka, a different order still holds. Among the Garo, or A·chik Mande, land passes through women, memory moves through the household, and culture is lived rather than displayed. This opening chapter begins not in the forest, but in the city, with a security guard whose return home reveals a system far older and more complex than the labels used to describe it.This is the entry point into a world under quiet pressure, where songs fade, language thins, and continuity is no longer guaranteed. ETHNOMAD steps inside, not to observe from a distance, but to document and support what remains while it is still being lived.
This essay traces life in self-built neighbourhoods from Karachi to Dhaka through the lens of friction rather than poverty. Drawing on long-term fieldwork, it examines how effort accumulates or resets, how traditional knowledge sustains continuity, and why development often stalls when it fails to recognise where daily life actually slows, strains, and holds together.
In the complex web of life on Earth, humans and wildlife share a relationship marked by both symbiosis and conflict. This dynamic, evolving over millennia, echoes the broader narrative of our role within the natural world. With the advent of agriculture, this relationship underwent a profound transformation. Once an integral part of the ecosystem, humanity began exerting dominion over it, reshaping the environment and our place within it.
When the Earth Moves Us
Culture, Climate, Malthus and the Fragile Grounds of Belonging
The story of Ireland and Palestine is not one of identical suffering but of shared memory, two peoples separated by geography yet bound by the experience of occupation. Both have lived under foreign rule, both were partitioned by imperial decree, and both have seen their histories rewritten by others to justify their subjugation.
.jpg)
Written by Farhana Akter, Living With the Hills explores everyday life in Bangladesh’s hill regions, where communities navigate steep terrain, fragile ecosystems, and the quiet pressures of climate change and development. Through close observation and local voices, the article reflects on adaptation, resilience, and what it means to live in a relationship with the land that shapes both livelihood and identity.
The Emery Way traces the deep connection between wine, land, and inheritance in Saint Émilion through the story of Château Coutet, one of the region’s last family-run estates on the limestone plateau. Centred on la façon émeri, an eighteenth-century glass sealing method, the article examines how heritage survives amid UNESCO recognition, rising land values, and growing pressure from global capital.
The Aging Harvest
Who will grow food in the future?
The global food system is at a critical juncture. Across the world, the average age of farmers is rising, while fewer young people are entering agriculture. This article explores the stark realities behind this trend-why the next generation is turning away from farming, the impact of water scarcity and climate change on food production, and the depletion of nutrients in our soils.
As I had done many times over the past few years, I was once again making my way to the outpost village of Kraska, hidden deep within Rajasthan's Sariska Tiger Reserve. Home to the Gurjar people, a Hindu tribal community, Kraska is a place where life still moves with the rhythms of pastoral tradition. For generations, the Gurjars have raised buffalo and goats, their livelihoods intertwined with the land in a semi-nomadic existence.