India’s environmental movement, like so much else, is about managing contradictions and complexities — between rich and poor; between people and nature.
But the movement in India has one key distinction, which holds the key to our future. The environmental movements of the rich world happened after periods of wealth creation and during their period of waste generation. So, they argued for containment of the waste but did not have the ability to argue for the reinvention of the paradigm of waste generation itself. However, the environmental movement in India has grown in the midst of enormous inequity and poverty. In this environmentalism of the relatively poor, the answers to change are intractable and impossible, unless the question is reinvented.
Just consider the birth and evolution of the green movement. Its inception dates back to the early 1970s with former Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s famous words at the Stockholm conference on environment that ‘poverty is the biggest polluter’. But in this same period, the women of the Chipko movement in the Himalaya showed that the poor, in fact, cared about their environment. In 1974, years before environment became the fashion, the women of Reni village, in Chamoli district, stopped loggers from cutting their forests. In other words, this movement of the poor women was not a conservation movement per se, but a movement to demand the rights of local communities over their local resources. The women wanted the first right over the trees, which they said were the basis for their daily survival. Their movement explained to the people of India that extractive and exploitative economies were the biggest polluters and not poverty.
This is because in vast parts of rural India, as in vast parts of rural Africa and other regions, poverty is not about lack of cash, but the lack of access to natural resources. Millions of people live within what can be called a biomass-based subsistence economy, where the Gross Nature Product is more important than the Gross National Product. Environmental degradation is not a matter of luxury but is a matter of survival. In these cases, development is not possible without environmental management.
In the environmental movement of the very poor, there are no quick-fix technological solutions that can be suggested to people who are battling for their survival. In this environmentalism, there is only one answer: We will have to change the way we live to reduce our needs and to increase efficiency for every inch of land needed, for every tonne of mineral and every drop of water used. It will call for new arrangements to share benefits with local communities so that they are persuaded to part with their resources for a common development. It will call for new ways to generate growth.
It is also clear that the environmental movement of the relatively rich and affluent is still looking for small answers to big problems. Today, everyone is saying, indeed screaming, that we can ‘deal’ with climate change if we adopt measures such as energy efficiency and some new technologies. The message is simple: Managing climate change will not hurt lifestyles or economic growth: A win-win situation where we will benefit from green technologies and new business.
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For instance, biofuels — growing fuel, not food, on land to run the cars of the rich — is one such techno-fix. There has been no discussion on whether biofuels, already competing for land with food crops and raising prices, will indeed reduce emissions when vehicle numbers are increasing. With biofuels under criticism for raising food prices and depleting water resources, the next-generation technical solution proposed is on the cards — hybrid cars. This is when all data shows that these are small parts of the big change we need. The transition to a low-carbon economy is not just about technology, but also about re-distributing economic and ecological space. The change will hurt; indeed, variable weather events that are destroying crops are already hurting the most vulnerable and powerless.
In other words, the time for small solutions to big problems is over. Take water. India cannot afford to first become water-wasteful and then become water-efficient. It cannot afford to pollute and then clean up. It will have to invent the water-management paradigm — in India’s case, it must borrow from past traditions by building millions of local and decentralised water-management structures to augment its resources. It must practice rainwater harvesting as doing this will build its water reserves. At the same time, it must borrow from the future by investing in water-efficient technologies for recycling and reuse. It must, for instance, reinvent the flush system, which is both capital-and material-intensive and uses water as its carrier and discharge pathway.
The environmentalism of the poor is teaching us our most critical futures lesson: Reinvent growth so that it can be afforded by all. And it will not cost us the Earth. Are we listening? Are we learning?