Ramachandra Guha on the three waves of Indian environmentalism

Environmentalism, according to Dr. Ramachandra Guha, “like feminism, like socialism, like democracy,” is a modern phenomenon. “It’s really the product of the industrial revolution, which started in Europe and then, of course, moved to other parts of the world,” says the Bengaluru-based writer and historian at a recent public lecture at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bengaluru. The Industrial Revolution, driven by fossil fuels, for the first time, saw radical transformations of transport and communication systems and gave birth not only to the factory system, but also to capitalism and colonialism, he adds, at this illuminating talk titled The Three Waves of Environmentalism.

Guha argues that the Industrial Revolution led to the devastation of landscapes and forests, the tainting of air and water on an unprecedented scale. “It is this colossal destruction that modern industrial technologies enabled for the first time, which gave birth to modern environmentalism…human beings could be architects of their own destruction unless they came up with alternate ways of organising politics, economics, society, technology and lifestyles to achieve some kind of equilibrium with their ecological surroundings,” says Guha, suggesting that the English Romantic poet, William Wordsworth, was possibly the first modern environmentalist. “You can see it in his writings.”

First wave of Indian environmentalism

The Europeans did not take long to bring their destructive technologies to their colonies, including India. In the early 20th century, some intellectuals recognised the scale of environmental destruction that was beginning to unravel in the subcontinent. At the talk, Guha mentions his latest book, Speaking with Nature, which offers insights into the lives and thoughts of ten of these people who “collectively constitute the first wave of Indian environmentalism.” He is also quick to point out that Mahatma Gandhi, though “one of the first Indians to recognise the unsustainability of western models of industrialisation”, is not among the ten people featured in this book because “I have already written 2000 pages on Gandhi, and I thought that I should give that particular guy a break,” he quips.

According to Guha, the first wave of Indian environmentalism sprang up at a time when India was beginning to industrialise, coinciding with the country’s freedom struggle. As a result, some of those involved in the movement started thinking and writing about how India, when it became free, should develop and modernise, but they were clear that India should not model its growth after the manner of the West.

Guha lays out three principal reasons why some of these thinkers felt that India could not industrialise like the West: one, because of the sheer population of the country, 300 million back then, with a population-to-land ratio that was much higher than early industrialisers like England, France, Germany and the U.S.; two, because the West had already divided the whole world amongst themselves, and there were no new colonies to conquer, India had to live within its own resources; and finally, because tropical ecologies are more fragile than temperate ecologies.

Some of the ten thinkers featured in his book include the poet Rabindranath Tagore, “for whom harmonising human needs with ecological integrity was central to his writing, his educational work and his activism”, the agricultural scientists and pioneers of modern organic farming Albert and Gabrielle Howard, “an extraordinary couple”, the economist J.C. Kumarappa “who worked very closely with Gandhi” and the social economist and town planner, Patrick Geddes “who was Scottish by nationality, spent a decade in India from 1915 to 1924, writing more than 20 plans for Indian cities, foregrounding questions of urban sustainability.”

Speaking with Nature
| Photo Credit:
NCBS

Unfortunately, after independence, the writings of these early pioneers were completely marginalised, claims Guha, attributing this development to the “noblest of intentions, which in hindsight, we may see as misguided but at that time was pretty understandable. Those who built economic policy in the 50s and 60s went about adopting the capital-intensive, energy-intensive model of large-scale industrialisation pioneered by the West, thinking that it was the only way that India could develop.”

The Chipko Movement

In Guha’s opinion, the next wave of environmentalism in India began in 1973, through “the celebrated Chipko Movement.” This forest conservation movement, consisting of peasants in the Himalayas hugging trees to prevent them from being felled, was significant in several ways, believes Guha: it was an indigenous, grassroots, bottom-up movement; it employed Gandhian techniques of non-violence; it blended concerns of environmental sustainability with social justice; and it was about both community protest and ecological restoration. “All this was what I call the second wave of Indian environmentalism, where, unlike the first wave, it was composed of activism and community mass participation,” he argues.

Drawing comparisons between the first two modern environmental waves, Guha says that while the first wave was composed of critical intellectual work anticipating the destruction of what was to come, the second was a response to the destruction that actually happened and was articulated by these grassroots movements. “These movements had a significant impact on policy and administration,” he says.

For instance, in 1974, the year after Chipko, the Planning Commission set up a committee for environmental planning for the first time, while the Indian government, in 1980, established the Department of Environment, now called the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change. “Legal and institutional changes begin to take place, not because the politicians or the parliament come up with them, but because of pressure from below,” he says. He also feels that the Chipko movement was significant for yet another reason: “Without Chipko, many people now teaching environmental history, environmental sociology in different parts of India would not have taken up that particular career trajectory,” he says. “Without Chipko, I would not have been an environmental scholar.”

Beyond climate change

The vigorous environmental activism of the 70s and 80s ended when India deregulated and opened up its economy in the 1990s, says Guha. “Now I am not a critic of economic liberalisation; in many ways it was necessary,” he clarifies. However, while economic liberalisation raised rates of economic growth, reduced mass poverty and solved India’s economic foreign exchange crisis, it “also led to a massively negative impact on the environment,” adds Guha, who believes that while the government needed to deregulate the economy, it should have continued to regulate the environment “because the market cannot really solve environmental problems.”

In response to the new economic agenda, the only people asking tough questions about economic liberalisation, except old-fashioned Marxists who thought the Soviet Union was an economic utopia, Guha insists, were the environmentalists. But they were often subjected to savage assaults, and seen as “the enemies of progress, the guys keeping India back,” he says.

Now, after decades of environmental destruction following liberalisation, a new movement is finally beginning to emerge again. “It is incipient, just beginning…is visible among young people. And it is largely caused by the challenge of climate change,” says Guha. In his opinion, however, it is too soon to comment on how this third wave of environmentalism, “the response of young people to what they see as a dark future for themselves and future generations,” will take shape and evolve.

Search operations near flattened houses after a massive landslide hit the Mundakkai village in Wayanad on August 1.
| Photo Credit:
THULASI KAKKAT

Dismal state

Guha goes on to paint a dismal picture of the state of the environment in India today, which he feels would still be abysmal even without climate change. “The first point I want to make is that even if climate change did not exist, India would be an environmental disaster,” he states. For instance, many of the major environmental challenges assailing the country today, including air pollution, river death, chemical contamination of soil, degradation of groundwater aquifers, biodiversity decline and the proliferation of invasive species, “are independent of climate change.”

He also points out that though these environmental issues may not have anything to do with climate change, climate change intensifies their impact, further elucidating this point by talking about the dangers faced by the Himalayas and Western Ghats. “Unregulated, careless building of roads, reckless expansion of tourist resorts and mining, all of which make these ecologies more fragile. And then you have climate change that adds onto it and intensifies the devastation.”

On the slightly more positive side, India today has a vast reservoir of scientific and social scientific expertise that can help mitigate our environmental crisis, unlike in the past. The country’s universities and research institutes have ecologists, soil scientists, agronomists, hydroplogists, urban planners, transport and energy experts who, he says, “combine professional expertise of an international standard with deep field experience of socio-environmental conditions.” “In this respect, India may be blessed. It is unlikely that any other country in Asia and Africa has it.” Unfortunately, “these domain experts are largely, if ever, consulted by politicians in power, and if they are, their proposals are never implemented,” he rues, pointing out that this disregard for environmental sustainability operates across political parties.

In his view, this is “a critical time for the environmental development debate in India.” The question that needs to be confronted, according to him, is this: How does one lift people out of poverty, give them access to social services, to education, to dignified employment, without undermining the interest and needs of future generations, indeed the interest and needs of nature itself? “The third wave of Indian environmentalism that is emerging, and the work of scientists in this room can help take this forward.”