The problem

THE theme of nature in the present is ubiquitous given the far reaching and perhaps even epochal transformations in the human environment that we are living through. Nature in contemporary India can hardly be viewed apart from the larger context of the planet we live in and are part of.

Here, the long- and short-term shifts in the global economy and environment are of importance for all. The term the ‘Anthropocene’ is often used to describe the era since the late 18th century when fossil fuel use first became prominent. Their use has only grown since and they now account for four-fifths of all energy consumed on the planet. The global picture of the long-term matters, and not only to historians. But of more direct relevance to us is the idea of the ‘great acceleration’ in economic growth and demographic expansion that took place worldwide after the end of the Second World War in 1945. The period from then till the early seventies was one of unprecedented levels of economic change. By then, not only did economic expansion begin to slow down on a global scale, but various currents of environmental concern had also matured to a point when they could mount a challenge to the dominant ethic of ceaseless expansion.1

In a broad sense, the Indian experience fits such a larger narrative, with the end of the sixties marking the coming to fore of many different, diverse, often contending, shades of green concern. The depletion of forest cover and water pollution, the endangerment of charismatic fauna and monuments, and the livelihood struggles of a variety of underclass groups – fishers and pastoralists, artisans and cultivators, especially Adivasis – were among those which helped shape the new environmentalism. By 1982, this pluralism was well represented in the first citizen’s report on India’s environment by the Centre for Science and Environment, a landmark document.

In retrospect, it is clear that the clash of and conversation between the popular and eminent domains shaped the public space in the 1980s. This was evident in well publicized and studied conflicts such as the dams in Silent Valley (on biodiversity), the Narmada (on displacement and social justice) and Bhopal (on relief and follow up). The ground level or popular movements laid much emphasis on local empowerment and people’s knowledge while rekindling Gandhian ideas of appropriate technology. These trends did not end with the decade of the eighties. Alternatives were exemplified in very original studies on village level biomass (Towards Green Villages) and potable drinking water supply (Dying Wisdom). Such ideas of grassroots level environmental regeneration gained support from a fresh crop of scholarly studies by social scientists who often traced the collapse of such systems that had combined renewal of resources with participation to the period of imperial rule.

It was in this context that the regulatory apparatus of forests and wildlife, air and water pollution, land and water use took shape. Rates of economic growth also declined from a heady 4% in the early years of planning to 3.5% (1965-80). There were larger debates in the polity on growth and redistribution of economic opportunity. Legislative and executive measures included a ban on tiger skin exports in 1969, to the enactments on wildlife, air and water pollution in 1972-74, all the way through to the Forest Conservation Act of 1980, the year that the Union government set up the Department of Environment. The ‘eminent domain’ was thus not immune to ground or intermediate level pressures; the adoption of Joint Forest Management was in part a response to the calls for curbing if not dismantling ‘rule by fiat’ of the forest estate by the Forest Department. Similarly, there were changes in some legal enactments, most significantly the Environment Protection Act in 1986. India’s political leaders, both at the Union and state level, did not abide by grassroots concerns but they did modify their stance to take account of them. This was true even in the Narmada case, where the Gujarat government reached out to a section of anti-dam protestors who were willing to engage with it on issues of resettlement.2

The picture has significantly changed over the last quarter century or so. For one, the pace of economic growth picked up, from 5% in the 1980s, to a high of 8.3 in the years 2003-11. Even if it has dropped since, the base of the economy as a whole is broader and more variegated than it was in the pre-1980 era. Levels of integration with the global marketplace are also far greater. While issues of economic disparity and job creation have held centre stage, the ecological consequences of the change may be more important than apparent at first sight. Greater rates of extraction of biomass, intensified demands on the biophysical environment (mining of coal or iron ore), or more extensive use of the ecological infrastructure (soil, water, air) or depletion of biological diversity (flora and fauna) or even whole biomes (mangrove, wetland, scrub jungle, savannah, estuary or forest): all these have become more prominent than ever before. From being the prime investor, the governments at both the federal and state level have moved to being facilitators of investment. These far-reaching changes have unleashed new pressures and pointed to a slow unravelling of the earlier systems of environmental renewal and public consultation.3

There was also a stepping back after a phase of instituting a flurry of rights based laws on land and forests. By 2014, decision makers had come to believe that green regulations were a drag on business, growth and development as they hampered rapid implementation of projects. This followed significant victories of environmentalists – mining in Niyamgiri and the eventual failure of the POSCO steel mill and port on the Odisha coastline. But these were small victories against the backdrop of larger defeats.4 This was also clear in cities where floods (Mumbai, 2005 and Chennai, 2016) proved unavoidable as real estate development and settlements blocked water courses. In early 2016, Delhi too experienced a near state of atmospheric emergency due to a mix of factors that drove up levels of air pollution.5 Long-term campaigns on air quality have had little coherent impact on policy. The recharge of groundwater and protection of the flood plain to help meet drinking water needs and lessen damage by floods gets more lip service than action in most Indian towns. The precautionary principle lost out and growth as good won out. While there was a renewal of hope of democratic pressure, laws and executive action, the media and courts (including the National Green Tribunal) helping rein in industry, both public and private, for the greater good, the routs and reverses turned out to be more important than the victories. A fresh sense of crisis is widely pervasive.

The same period since the early nineties also saw new kinds of fissures arising in the environmental movement, in turn leading to shifts within what were earlier largely hermetically sealed categories of state, market and community. Each had limitations that have become more, not less, obvious over time. To be fair, each had advocates whose practice was nuanced and whose own specific attitudes shifted over time. Nonetheless, a broad category-wise look may help to show why and how we came to the present impasse.

Statism had long enjoyed support, specially to protect forest wealth and imperilled wildlife, a legacy which goes back to princely and imperial initiatives in the early 20th century acquiring fresh currency due to a heightened sense of ecological patriotism and anxiety about desiccation in the seventies and thereafter. Faunal protection has since seen a divide between those who sought to sequester nature in strict reserves and other more inclusive modes of conservation. Even well policed parks such as Sariska, Rajasthan, were found bereft of tigers by 2005.6 Ivory poaching had meanwhile brought down the male to female ratio in much of southern India to one to one hundred. Most seriously, as a result of a series of decisions under successive governments, parks and sanctuary land has been whittled away to make way for mines, roads, dams and townships. Its indisputable legacy of securing natural cover and populations of rare species on lands under protection notwithstanding, the statist model has clearly worn out its appeal. It is at its wits end especially when confronted with mobile animals (leopards or elephants), as its rigid models do not take account of the fluidities of nature and market alike.

By the end of the 1980s, market forces had won major ideological victories worldwide and thus it was only to be expected they would play a larger role in mediating our ties with nature in a post-reform India. Pricing forest lands via net potential value was seen by the courts as a way of extracting a price from companies and concerns that cleared woodlands. A higher price for forest products such as timber was also believed to be a deterrent to over use. Most recently, the Union government has imposed a cess on coal to discourage its use, while taxing greenhouse gas emissions. A slew of scholars, multilateral agencies and policy advocates want to quantify ecosystem services to drive home the value of habitats such as wetland or forest. But the sad fact is that the payment of levies has not managed to deter those who want the land deforested, nor is there serious evidence that the funds so realized are used for serious ecological restoration. Quantification sounds a fine solution until one takes into account the market value of coal, gas, or oil that lies under the lands in question. It is worth noting how market friendly fishing has led to the depletion of fish stocks of a host of species along both the Coromandel and Malabar coasts. Even as the push for market friendly means by economists and revisionist conservationists alike is notable, but as of now, the major focus has been on where it falls short.7

Disenchantment with the market as much as with the centralized agencies of the government had led many to turn to the community. There is little doubt about not one but multiple cases of local water bodies, forest patches and groves being protected over long periods due to energetic local initiatives. The many forms of knowledge and skill involved, as in the case of water sources, require both deep study and appreciation. Interestingly, whereas gender issues had long been critical to ecological debate, caste based exclusion in both statist and community level resource protection initiatives is only now being openly questioned. Laws such as the landmark Forest Rights Act, 2006, did expand the penumbra of rights for forest users in the arena of individual land title but have done precious little to expand the scope of community control. Dalit claims have often faltered even as Adivasis, seen as more ‘authentic’ forest dwellers, have made some gains.8

The caste and class blindness of many early environmentalisms is evident in the way internal hierarchies were lionized for resource renewal. There was far less acknowledgement not only of labour as resource, but that material and human dignity ought to be as critical as ecological repair. New work in various parts of India now shows more complex forms of collective assertion that foregrounds politics and reinvents ideas of association. Far from being a survival of yore, they draw on ideas of democracy and science to assert claims of those who work the shoreline or the forest.9

The pragmatic and cautious approach would be to draw on each of these dimensions where relevant but seek to fashion a situation or site specific response. This still leaves us with the question as to what the guiding principles can be or, at least, ought not to be. One way forward would be to see how new kinds of questions have arisen in the recent past. It would be naive and foolhardy to claim there are ‘lessons’ or ‘answers’, but it is the case that there can be fresh insights.

The picture then in 2017 is not one totally at odds with the past even as the challenges remain all too real. To think these through, both coherently and in depth, is even more vital than ever before. This hinges on how we define the present and where we draw the boundaries of what does or does not make up what we see as nature or the natural. Some concerns are not new: the obliteration or remaking of ecosystems, clashes over access to the bounty of nature or divisions on who will bear the burden of its despoliation. These are tropes that come to our present from the past. But the pace of change and the socio-political context has changed, often very markedly so.

Earlier, it was possible to draw on rural or local community cases as exemplars of resource stewardship, however imperfect, as a way to harmonize human aspirations and nature. It was also possible to look at the village or small town as alternatives to the growth of mega city agglomerations that invariably evolve to have large ecological footprints. But we are now in a world where not only information, capital or humans but animals, plants and materials also move across huge spaces in short spans of time. Nowhere is the intensity as clear as in the question of how to direct the growth trajectory of mega urban agglomerations. Creating ten million jobs a year in sustainable ways is also a challenge in small towns, villages and forested areas.

Needless to add that the concerns on resource repair or renewal, on the need to retain key public goods like fresh water or air, or the retention of biotic wealth and critical habitats are all important. But the ways we think and act on them may need to engage more deeply and in newer ways with different institutions. Doing so will likely reopen older debates about whether incremental change is better than an all-out fresh model. We acknowledge such deep reflection, but the long journey begins from where we stand. To begin to change the present for the better and assure nature a more secure future, it is essential to ask how we got here. This may help illumine far better the way we ought to go.

Specific choices in the past often played a key role in shaping our present. Unlike some critics of the process, we do not see any way of rolling back the twin processes of globalization and liberalization, while recognizing the case to renegotiate some of their key features. Our journey in this issue of Seminar is through specific works that unpack three dimensions of the problem: the history, the current crisis and innovative ways to move forward. Most of the essays draw on long engagements with specific sites or issues and try to map the way keeping the larger challenges in mind.

The common element, if any, is a larger belief in the need to step more lightly on natural cycles and systems and in ways that expand, not contract, opportunity for the underclass. How can this be done in a democratic and knowledge sensitive way? Common lands even in a globalizing city such as Bengaluru, as much as in marine ecologies, need to survive intact not only for reasons of livelihood but because of their critical larger ecological functions. The coming century is a time to draw on history for insight, our understanding of the crisis to re-energise ourselves, and build on creative impulses to expand the spaces for collective and individual action. After all, a city such as Delhi has been a home of urban humans for well over a millennium and Bengaluru is close to the 500-year mark. How did these cities stay habitable and productive? What if any elements of those systems are still intact or can be reconfigured in new ways?

This may not always be the case viz., in the age of climate change, key cities along the coast that date to colonial times are especially vulnerable to rising sea levels.10 But there may be ways to lessen negative impacts on citizens without turning the clock back in history. Recent crises have rightly led to questions about how a new sense of community can be forged to meet the challenge.11 The present crisis may be an opportunity to rethink our approaches and refashion a new 21st century environmentalism.

New kinds of alliances are the need of the hour. There have been very positive insights as in the case of trawler fishing off the Odisha coast, where advocacy of fisher rights has the combined effect of helping turtles and marine ecology and saving livelihoods.12 Less central to the national imagination are issues of floods, flood plains and dams on the Brahmaputra. Here, the issues are deeply socio-political in nature as they entail who pays the price for large-scale engineering interventions in a fluid, shifting landscape where livelihoods are intertwined with water, silt, fisheries and access to land.13 Similarly, science based interventions can do much to take the edge off human-animal conflict by securing livelihoods in a manner that saves rare species as well.

These may be critical in vast landscapes where production and conservation, certain human activities and wildlife presence cohabit the same space. This marks a widening of the canvas beyond refugia and holds out hope of wider networks to conciliate producers and nature.14 At the same time, rethinking nature requires not only an acknowledgment of its resilience, but also of the vulnerability of certain key processes and species under both state and community stewardship.15 There is, to put it simply, no silver bullet solution. At another level, in an increasingly urban society with large levels of waste, there are also dead and polluted landscapes that need urgent intervention. A new kind of alliance building may need new kinds of technique, of recycling and resource use. Are there ways forward? We have reason to believe there are steps possible in democratic ways; the generation of wealth in new ways can lessen, not just add to, the ecological burden.16

The Great Acceleration or the specific phase of it in India especially since around 1980 has indeed exerted new pressures but equally, the opportunities it opens up can be drawn upon. Rethinking nature’s present also calls to rethink the idea of a pristine past. After all, humans have been around for millennia. Some challenges and pressures are new but we also have more nuanced ideas of nature and society to draw upon than we did some decades ago. Frankly, it is as yet unclear how the re-minted alliance of industry and government, intent on growth at all cost, will be tempered.

This shift, prefigured by key shifts in the previous ruling alliance in India, was consolidated and accelerated after 2014. There has been significant roll-back of some of the gains of the previous period such as rules and laws governing forests, water, and land use. We are likely to see a similar pattern emerging in the world’s largest economy, the US. This leads us to wonder if environmental concerns only acquire purchase during periods of high growth and tend to wane when growth declines sharply. This was evident in the West when those economies boomed for thirty years after World War II. It was in that context that environmentalism was projected as a concern of the well-off – a point of view that Indian scholars rebutted, often citing community-led efforts in Third World countries. A resource frugal, technologically appropriate and collective approach seemed an antidote to the dominant modes of both the old West and the socialist East. These categories have themselves moved into history. India has become a key emerging economy. Its role in the Great Acceleration has become more not less central.

The challenge of our environmental present and future may or may not track those of the West. What will be the role of history and the past in helping us make our way ahead? If we do adopt key features of the West (high speed roadways and rail, large urban settlements, extensive ports on the coastline, larger formal industrialized sector), how will it reflect in environmental policy and politics? Green energy such as solar, wind and water have become key government and private sector driven programmes, each with major ecological and societal implications. How spaces for nature shrink or grow and how society-nature linkages evolve will be of central importance. We are too close to the changes to make coherent sense of them, but we are all involved in working out how to reshape them. Unlike China, India is a multi-party democracy with public spaces for debate and contestation, but the trials we face are serious. Democracy is good for liberty, but how will it measure up to the dilemmas of ecology? This is now our question of questions.

The debate on how, where and in what form ecological sanity and environmental justice will prevail is an active one. We make no grandiose claims. But ours is a journey of hope as much as an appeal to reason. Nature’s present is an invitation to begin anew.

MAHESH RANGARAJAN

RINKI SARKAR

RAVI AGARWAL

 

Footnotes:

1. J.R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene Since 1945. Belknap Press, Harvard, 2013, esp. pp. 1-5. On reasons to be critical of modern eras as uniquely destructive of ecologies see Kathleen D. Morrison, The Human Face of the Land: Why the Past Matters for India’s Environmental Future. Occasional Papers in History and Society, no. 13, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi, 2013. On the importance of the uneven role in ecological impacts depending on socio-economic and political status see J. Guldi and D. Armitage, The History Manifesto. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2014, pp. 70-71.

2. Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narian, Towards Green Villages. Centre for Science and Environment, Delhi, 1992 and Dying Wisdom, The Rise Fall and Decline of India’s Water Systems. Centre for Science and Environment, Delhi, 1997. The shifts over time are examined in M. Rangarajan, Nature and Nation: Essays on Environmental History. Permanent Black, Ranikhet, 2015. For the earlier period, M. Gadgil and R. Guha, Ecology and Equity: The Use and Abuse of Nature in Contemporary India. Penguin, Delhi, 1995.

3. A critical view of the changes is provided by Aseem Shrivastava and Ashish Kothari, Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India. Penguin India, Delhi, 2010. On China see Jonathan Watt, When a Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind – or Destroy it. Faber and Faber, London, 2010.

4. On anti-dam movements see Sanjay Sangvai, The River and Life: People’s Struggle in the Narmada Valley. Earthcare Books, Mumbai, 2000; Uma Maheshwari, When Godavari Comes: People’s History of a River – Journeys in the Zone of the Dispossessed. Aakar Books, Delhi, 2014. On Niyamgiri, Felix Padel and Samarendra Das, Out of This Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminium Cartel (2011). Orient BlackSwan, Hyderabad, 2010.

5. A graphic and moving account on urban air pollution is Pallavi Aiyar, Choked! Everything You Were Afraid to Know About Air Pollution. Juggernaut, Delhi, 2016.

6. Ghazala Shahabuddin, Conservation at the Crossroads: Science, Society, and the Future of India’s Wildlife. Orient BlackSwan, Ranikhet, 2010.

7. H.S. Pabla, Road to Nowhere: Wildlife Conservation in India. Create Space Independent Publishing Platform, Bhopal, 2015. A senior forester and wildlife official advocates sport hunting to finance protection of fauna and flora. Tourism with local revenue sharing is advocated by Valmik Thapar, Saving Wild India: A Blueprint for Change. Aleph, Delhi, 2015; also, see Pavan Sukhdev, Corporation 2020: Transforming Business for Tomorrow’s World. Island Press, Washington and Penguin, Delhi, 2012. For a searing account of the collapse of regulation as market forces take over administration in key natural areas see J. Mazoomdaar, The Age of Endlings: Explorations and Investigations into the Indian Wild. Harper Collins, Delhi, 2016.

8. Dalit claims and movements have also, where strongly mobilized, tried to gain fresh ground under the terms of the act. The need to prove occupation for three generations (waived for Adivasis) makes their task more difficult. But it opens a door where earlier there was none. See Anand P. Vaidya, ‘The Origin of the Forest, Private Property, and the State: The Political Life of India’s Forest Rights Act’. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University, 9 April 2014. For a different view see Kamal Nayan Choubey, The Forest Rights Act and the Politics of Marginal Society. Occasional Papers in Development and Society, No. 31, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi, 2014.

9. For different notions of community recast via socio political action in southwest and central India see Ajantha Subramanian, Shorelines: Space and Rights in South India. Stanford University Press, 2009; Yoda Press, Delhi, 2013. For work on the Chhattisgarh labour initiatives of the 1980s see Radhika Krishnan, ‘Red in the Green: Forests, Farms, Factories and the Many Legacies of Shankar Guha Niyogi (1943-91)’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 39(4), 2016, DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2016.1216243.

10. Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Penguin Allen Lane, Delhi 2016, pp. 50-78. Kolkata, Chennai and Mumbai were built in a time of global networks and paid scant attention to the dangers of climatic events on vulnerable sections of the coast. Yet as N. Jayaraman argues in this issue, the 19th century did see some wisdom in Chennai with drainage provisions. Today, these are being rapidly dismantled by real estate interests and government. For a more optimistic view of an older city and its environs see Harini Nagendra, Nature in the Indian City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present, and Future. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2016.

11. T.M. Krishna, ‘Moving on in Chennai’, The Indian Express, 29 December 2015, argues for a common sense of citizenship overcoming social and economic divisions in the flood hit metropolis. In a vastly different setting on the cultural assertion in Arunachal against land take over for statist nature preservation see Ambika Aiyadurai, ‘Tigers Are Our Brothers’: Understanding Human-Nature Relations in the Mishmi Hills, Northeast India. Unpublished PhD thesis, NUS. Singapore University, July 2016.

12. This is examined in depth in Kartik Shanker, From Soup to Superstar, The Story of Sea Turtle Conservation Along the Indian Coast. Harper Collins, Delhi, 2015.

13. Sanjib Baruah, ‘Hydropower, Mega Dams and the Politics of Risk’, Seminar 640, December 2012. Himanshu Thakkar, ‘India Facing its Worst Water Crisis Ever’, Business Standard, interview with Aditi Phadnis, 14 May 2016.

14. For further discussion on these aspects see Gopi Sundar of the International Crane Foundation, Vidya Athreya’s work on leopards in western Maharashtra (under aegis of the Wildlife Conservation Society India). See, Vidya Athreya et. al., ‘Big Cats in Our Backyards: Persistence of Large Carnivores in a Human Dominated Landscape in India’, PLoS One 8(3), e57872, March 2013. For another view see Joe Walston et al, ‘Bringing the Tiger Back from the Brink – The Six Percent Solution’, PLOS, 14 September 2010, http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1000485 DOI: 10.1371/journal. pone.0057872 Source: PubMed; The two decades long Nature Conservation Foundation and Snow Leopard Trust’s work in the Himalayan states is notable. Charudutt Mishra, The Partners Principles for Community-Based Conservation. The Snow Leopard Trust, Seattle, Washington, 2016.

For a sympathetic but often critical look at such initiatives see Bahar Dutt, Green Wars: Dispatches from a Vanishing World. Harper Collins, Delhi, 2015. Also, see Umesh Srinivasan and Nandini Velho (ed.), Conservation at the Margins, Stories from the Periphery of India’s Conservation Landscape. Forthcoming.

15. Rinki Sarkar, ‘Sustainability of Endemic Chilgoza Pine Forests in the Western Himalayas: Habitat Threats and Conservation Exigencies’, Unpublished Paper at workshop on, ‘Wildlife Conservation in India: From Policy to Practice’, New Delhi, under the aegis of the Centre for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania, 4-5 November 2016.

16. For a thoughtful overview of the spaces afforded by legislation and how these can expand accountability and citizen participation see Madhav Gadgil, Science, Ecology and Democracy in India. Occasional Papers in Development and Society, No. 12, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi 2013. For a grimmer view of present prospects see R. Guha, ‘Day of the Locust’, in C. Chandler and A. Zainulbhai (ed.), Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower. Simon and Schuster, Delhi, 2012, pp. 258-267. The growing gap emerges in the potential and the decline of public action is shown in two works separated by a few years. Meenakshi Kapoor, Kanchi Kohli and Manju Menon, India’s Notified Ecologically Sensitive Areas: The Story So Far. Kalpavriksh, Pune, 2009; Kanchi Kohli and Manju Menon (ed.), Business Interests and the Environmental Crisis. Sage Publishing, Delhi, 2016.