"I wish to compliment Sphere India and EFICOR for the painstaking efforts in documenting a few community-led disaster risk reduction good practice interventions in India. I hope the various stakeholder groups in disaster risk reduction within the country and abroad will disseminate this publication widely and explore the potential for replicating the good practices for strengthening community disaster resilience in disaster-prone areas."
— Prof. N. Vinod Chandra Menon
Member, National Disaster Management Authority, Government of India

“Timely initiative and essential reading...could easily end up setting a trend for documentation of numerous meaningful and commendable efforts across the country.”
— Anil K Sinha
IAS (rtd), Global Forum for Disaster Reduction

The Environmental Responsibility Reader is a definitive collection of classic and contemporary environmental works that offers a comprehensive overview of the issues involved in environmental responsibility, steering the reader through each development in thought with a unifying and expert editorial voice.

This essential text expertly explores seemingly intractable modern-day environmental dilemmas – including climate change, fossil fuel consumption, fresh water quality, industrial pollution, habitat destruction, and biodiversity loss. Starting with “Silent Spring” and moving through to more recent works the book draws on contemporary ideas of environmental ethics, corporate social responsibility, ecological justice, fair trade, global citisenship, and the connections between environmental and social justice; configuring these ideas into practical notions for responsible action with a unique global and integral focus on responsibility.

Infanticide is the cut-price way to rid families of girl children. Killing your own child or ‘permitting’ their killing is an unnatural and appalling act, a powerful social taboo. Yet this slaughter of innocents is a socially approved practice in which mothers and mother’s mothers are complicit in turning against their own. Young girls who survive will turn to their grandmothers and say, “You tried to have me killed”. 

The astounding part of this story is that female infanticide and girl-specific abortion are simply the outcome of every day discrimination against women and girls, running according to its internal logic. This discrimination seems to have reached a tipping point and is spinning freely towards its logical end – the extermination of girls before or at birth. What brought on this tipping point? Why has international law not recognised this result for what it is, the gender equivalent of genocide? And if it did, might we see the institutions of patriarchy held as complicit in a crime against humanity?

The relationship between Rights and Duties has engaged the attention of philosophers since time immemorial.  The questions they raised have eternal significance. When do the needs of the community take precedence over the rights of the individual?  How should the claims of the individual, on the basis of his or her inherent rights, be reconciled with the claims of the State, of the community and of other individuals, on the basis of shared community values and interests?

The concept of Human Duties and Responsibilities serves to balance the notions of freedom and responsibility. While rights relate more to freedom, duties and responsibilities are associated with responsibility. Responsibility, as a moral quality, serves as a natural, voluntary check on freedom.  In any society, freedom can never be exercised without limits.  Thus, the more freedom we enjoy, the greater the responsibility we bear towards others, as well as ourselves.  We must move away from the freedom of indifference towards the freedom of involvement.

Globalization of the world is matched by global problems, and global problems demand global solutions on the basis of ideas, values and norms respected by all cultures and societies.  Recognition of the equal and inalienable rights of all peoples requires a foundation of freedom, justice and peace – but this also demands that Rights and Responsibilities be given equal importance to establish an ethical base,
so that all people can live peacefully together.

The papers in this volume were presented at a South Asian workshop at Bangalore in early April 2008 on the theme, ‘Uniting in Responsibilities in a Culture of Rights – Locating Possibilities’.