How to approach environmentalism (by Sunita Narain)
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2010 was a loud year for the environment. High profile projects—from
Vedanta to Posco and Navi Mumbai airport to Lavasa—hit the headlines
for non-compliance with environmental regulations. While 2009 was the
25th anniversary of the Bhopal gas tragedy, it was only last year that
we were all outraged by the disaster. The realisation of how every
institution—the judiciary, parliament and government—had miserably
failed to provide justice to the victims shocked us deeply.
It was also in 2010 that allegations of “rigging” of climate change
science took the world by storm. The sceptics had their moment of
glory as they ridiculed science and picked holes in its analysis. And
even though most of what they had to say was proven wrong, the damage
has been done. Even as extreme weather has hit parts of the world,we
are not certain anymore if this variation is the growing impact of
climate change. Then in December at the meeting in Cancun, the world
took the final step to deny the problem of climate change. It agreed
to do nothing to reduce its emissions at the scale and pace needed.
The question is what is the cacophony adding up to. Where is it leading us?
Take the issue of projects that have been cancelled or held up because
of environmental reasons. It would not be wrong to say that virtually
all infrastructure and industrial projects—from mining to thermal and
hydel and nuclear power to cement or steel—are under attack today from
communities who fear loss of livelihoods. These communities are at the
forefront of India’s environmental movement. They are its warriors.
For them the environment is not a matter of luxury; it is not about
fixing the problems of growth, but of survival. It is fixing growth
itself. They know that when the land is mined and trees are cut, their
water source dries up or they lose grazing and agricultural land. They
know they are poor. And they are saying, loudly and as clearly as they
can, that what others call development will only make them poorer.
This is what I call environmentalism of the poor. The fact is today
development projects take local resources— minerals, water or land—but
cannot provide employment to replace the livelihoods of all those they
displace. It is for this reason that the country is resonating with
cries of people who are fighting development itself.
Where do we go from here? I would argue we need to listen to these
voices, not dismiss or stifle them in the name of anti-growth dissent
or Naxalism. This can be done by strengthening the processes of
democracy that ensure people have a say in development. For instance,
the Forest Rights Act demands that the gram sabha (village assembly)
in tribal areas must give its written consent to a project before it
is cleared. Public hearings held during the environmental impact
assessment provide the platform for people to voice their concerns. In
most cases today the effort is to rig and undermine these
processes.Public hearings and even video recordings of the events are
faked or the public is kept out through use of force. But what is
worse is that the final project clearance process does not demand that
these voices are not just heard but heeded too. In most cases one will
find the concern raised by people is brushed aside as projects are
rammed through in the name of industrial development. This must stop.
There is no doubt we need industrial and infrastructure projects, but
these cannot be built against the will of people. We will have to
reinvent the way we work with people and we will have to reinvent the
way to development. We will have to do more with less.Frugality and
innovation will have to be our way to growth. Our challenge is to
provide the gains of development to vast numbers of people. This
requires inventing growth that is both affordable and sustainable.
But what all this adds up to, in my view, is to define a new chapter
of environmentalism in the world. I say this because it is only now
that we are being forced to confront some tough questions on how to be
or not to be an environmentalist. We are learning that techno-fix
solutions, of cleaning up pollution even as we continue to emit more,
are not good enough. The rich world has failed to reduce its
greenhouse gas emissions through its investment in efficiency. It now
needs to find ways to reinvent growth without fossil fuels and to grow
within limits. The world failed us in Cancun because the rich are
still not prepared to accept the writing on the wall: there are limits
to growth, unless we can grow differently.
We in urban and middle-class India must learn this lesson quickly. We
cannot afford this environmentalism of costly solutions that want to
put band-aids on what is so badly broken. We must understand that our
future lies in being part of the environmentalism of the poor, as this
movement will force us to seek new answers to old problems.
The bottom line is that in this New Year we must embrace a new
philosophy: unless we rock the boat we will not have a boat at all.
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