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2010:
Choose Your Future Today
BY
SUNITA NARAIN
A
new decade. For me, three decades of work in environment. I wonder: have
matters improved since the early 1980s, when I began? Or, are things
worse off? Where do we go from here?
Two things are evident. First, there is no doubt that environment holds
centrestage in the country. It is talked about extensively, considered
in policy; frankly, nobody today would dare to say they aren’t
environment friendly. Car companies sell their products for luxury and
sustainability; real estate giants boast about rainwater harvesting
systems; Bollywood stars dance their fondness for all things green. And
governments say they want low-carbon economies for the future. Being
green is the ‘in-thing’. This is an achievement of three decades of
activism but a key difference as well. In the early 1980s, there was
some awareness about environmental issues, but these were thought
fringe, marginal, seen at best as a fad of some lovers of bees and
birds. Indeed, the latter was the more well-known trademark - the ex-
shikari who’d graduated from hunting wild creatures to being
passionate about their survival. But, second, in spite of this
phenomenal rise in green consciousness, the real matter is going from
bad to worse. The pollution in our rivers is worse than three decades
ago. The garbage in cities is growing, even as governments scramble to
find ways to reduce plastic and hiding the rest in landfills in far-off
places. Air pollution in cities is worse and toxins hurt our bodies. The
report card is not good.
Perhaps the only sector which can claim success is forest protection;
remote sensing data shows green areas are growing. But such protection
has come at the cost of local economic growth of people who live in and
around these areas. The poorest people of India still live in its
richest forests. Clearly, not the way ahead.
So, where do we go from here? As a society we increasingly care about
environmental issues. This is good. But as a society, we are
increasingly failing to manage the environment. We are failing in two
ways. First, in managing the ecological fallout of economic growth - the
pollution and toxification, which comes from generating wealth. Second,
how to use the wealth of the natural environment to build economic
wellbeing, what I call the development challenge of environment.
This is really because we, as a society, have to now graduate to not
just caring about environment but also doing something. Very difficult:
the answers will not come easy or cheap. They will require a new
understanding of the way we do things, tough policies which change the
direction of growth and difficult choices we make in our personal lives.
This is the crossroad.
These are the same choices the environmental movement of rich countries
asked their countries to make, some two generations ago. They failed.
This is why the challenge of climate change remains a challenge. Today,
these societies are rich, they have cleaned up their streams and their
black smoke. But their economic growth and their lifestyle is putting
the world at risk and they have no answer to the future because they
want to only tinker with the present. They look for small solutions to
the massive problem of increased emissions, linked to growth.
The Western environmental movement also has a different history from
ours. It began after these societies had acquired wealth. So, the
movement was a response to the garbage, the toxic air or the polluted
water, resulting from the growth of their economies. They had the money
to invest in cleaning and they did. But because they never looked for
big solutions, they always stayed behind the problem - local air
pollution is still a problem in most Western cities, even if the air is
not as black as ours. It is just that the toxin is smaller, more
difficult to find or smell. They keep spending. Keep investing in
technology to deal with the present. As such, the rich world’s
environmentalists are garbage managers, nothing more.
We want to emulate them, with fewer resources and far more poverty. We
cannot find answers in the same half solutions. This is the challenge of
our next decade.
This is why, in January of 2010, we should remember again the genesis of
the real environmental movement of India. It lay not in the garbage of
our cities but in the forests of faraway and unknown villages. But we
must then remember that the women of Reni, who protected their trees
from the woodcutter, did not do so to ‘conserve’ the forests. They
did so to demand the first right to cut the trees; their local economy
was built on the survival of the village forests. Theirs was a political
movement, which demanded rights and deepened local democracy over
development pathways. It knew that environment could not be protected if
development was not inclusive.
The next decade awaits us. Will we drown in our excreta and the spit of
our cars and pretend that the problem has gone away? More talk, more
conferences and more buzz about all things green? Or, will we do things
differently? For instance, take the modern, convenient bus, not just
celebrate the answer of the fuel - efficient or hybrid car? Find
different answers. The choice is ours to learn and make. Only ours.
Sunita
Narain has been with the Centre for
Science and Environment from 1982. She is currently the director of the
Centre and the director of the Society for Environmental Communications
and publisher of the fortnightly magazine, Down
To Earth.
[©
CENTRE FOR SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENT]
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