Sharad Lele on 'Understanding Sustainable Development'

Understanding Sustainable Development - Sharad Lele - 10th Wipro Partners' Forum
(This is an unedited transcription of Sharad's session and has been retained as close to original as possible)

Dr. Sharat Chandra Lele: My environmental journey probably began in my school days when I was introduced to trekking in the Sahyadris. That time, I was in Pune in a school, I had a very enthusiastic teacher who took us hiking and trekking in the Sahyadris, more associated with the historical sights – forts of Shivaji and so on.

And continued … (Electronic disturbance – a few words not clear) by the introduction of bird watching. And for those of you who would later hear me being somewhat critical of the conservation community, I must first pay respects to that community because it was through a ___ (Word not clear) and world wild life fund (Electronic disturbance continues in the background) that I got actually introduced to bird watching and I sort of saw the same world around my Urban Pune with a different set of glasses after the bird watching camp. But it sort of stayed at the hobby level till I … (Electronic disturbance continues in the background) when I was doing my B-Tech in IIT Bombay, and at some point of time I sort of felt that well the B-Tech route which most of us took including all the people in my class, was to go into the broad … and join the corporate sector in India and sort of do some fairly routine kind of things in most cases. It was not my cup of tea and I was looking for something more interesting or rather socially more relevant. And I think one of the reasons I started doing that and got into environment is that because 1982, while I was still in my B-Tech, many of you will now … the first citizens’ report on the state of India’s environment published by Anil Agarwal, Ravi Chopra and Kalpana Sharma – edited by them, was published in 1982. It was really for me, sort of a life changing experience to read the report. A bunch of us were doing wildlife and mountaineering and got hold of a copy and read it and really it sort of brought home to me for the first time that environment was not just about wildlife and birds. Not just a hobby that you pursue in your spare time you know, while otherwise you are just living your normal economic life. That environment was really about everything around us. Relating to all aspects of our lives whether it was water, forests, energy, culture and so on. And habitat, occupational disease, all kinds of things. So really it was a path sort of a career changing experience for me to sort of absorb the ideas that were being put together in that report. And I think in many ways it was a path breaking set of ideas that the 1982 report put out in the world of environmentalism itself.
And that led me to doing a masters in the Indian Institute of Science on the question of hydro power and its environmental impact and then PhD at Berkley and so on. So I kind of moved from an engineering background more into sort of engineering economics, then got into forest ecology, then you know, now recently forest hydrology, and simultaneously picking up a lot of social science, economics, more recently maybe reading more in political science and so on. So it’s been a journey and I am sure it will continue to be a journey. Maybe 10 years later if we meet I’ll be talking about different things.
But one thing that has kept my attention for a … for all this while is trying to understand the idea of environmentalism. What do we really mean when we say we are environmentalists? And every so often, I’ll be reminded of the question. I remember 10 years ago, somebody mentioned the “Anti-dam movement”. I think about 10 years ago there was an article. Very sort of ‘So-so’ article in Deccan Herald around the Narmada movement saying basically, all these environmentalists they are fed by foreign money, foreign defense funds from New York and all these guys are pumping money into this MBA and they are making a lot of Hungama but really these environmentalists are coming in the way of development of the country and the up-liftment of the poor and all this kind of stuff. So it got me thinking that it was interesting that ‘Narmada Bachao Andolan’ which is trying to fight for the lives of peoples’ … people in the Narmada valley, and whose lives will be submerged by a dam, are being branded environmentalists. They … in the end it was not talking about the forests in the Narmada Valley or talking about some pristine Tiger in the Narmada valley, or leopard or deer. They were talking about people’s lives, agriculture, and so on. And it was interesting that they were being branded as environmentalists. And it was being used as a pejorative term to beat them in some sense. And so, it keeps happening that people use this idea of environmentalism and environment in many different ways. And that here is going to be my focus in this session.
Saumitri had actually the tough task of conveying to you the multi-dimensional and complex ways in which the environment is in the crisis. And I will take it as a … as given … although there were questions about problems being raised, I also understand that the questions were also raised from a different perspective … that … some … middle question. What is happening? – Has been answered by Soumitri in some sense. Ground water is depleting, soils are being salinized in the Punjab, Haryana area, elsewhere soils are being eroded and therefore agricultural productivity is declining, increase of certain kinds of pests in agriculture, you’ve got water scarcity in urban areas, you can sort of characterize in some sense the commonly understood features of the environmental crisis as against you know, the term is used … environmental crisis, what do we mean by that? Maybe floods are increasing, droughts are increasing, etc, etc. So you can lay out probably some of the broad parameters of what is happening. But I think it is important now to, in a sense, place this in a larger context from both sides. And both sides were mentioned I think … our friend from … many people actually … the previous set of questions pointed out that this needs to be linked up in a certain ways in you know … how do we understand this crisis? Because even in this description of what is happening, in some sense … there is both an a normative component and an analytical component. And by that I mean, normative as in value … what we think ought to be in a sense that you know people ought not to be poor or people ought not to be deprived of water, or people ought not to be dying of hunger, or people ought not to be dying because of breathing polluted air and so on. So we have a whole bunch of ‘ought’s attached to it and also why we think the crisis is happening in some sense. So that’s really the two fold linkage that I want to draw out but not in a specific sense of a particular example but just to sort of help us think through any environmental problem that people talk about … what you know how do you think through that problem. So really the goal here is to you know, give … help us unpack … as Prakash put it … unpack these ideas a little bit more so that when we confront them again and not only in the subsequent sessions but later on, if one is talking about if one is then talking about how does one relate all this to education, which I am not going to talk about … we’ll have an apparatus through which one can look at this problem. So that’s really what I am going to do here.
And so the two links that I am going to focus on are … on one hand when you say what is happening, the characterization of a problem – why is it a problem? So somebody actually raised this question in the previous session. Why is this a problem? Why should I care? Let’s say the temperature is increasing by 20 Celsius, or ground water has gone down to 1,000 feet. Does it matter? And in the way it matters, there is a whole normative component. And the nature of environmentalism and in fact the developmental world or for that matter, any social problem that we look at … I treat environmental problems as a subset in some sense … or special subset of social problems. In any social problem you have to say why it matters. Why is it a problem? Otherwise it is just a phenomenon, right? Climate is warming, climate is cooling, water is going up, water is going down, floods are increasing, floods are decreasing these are all descriptive terms with no pejorative or negative connotation. It’s just increasing or decreasing. But we care about it only because of something. And we need to unpack that a little bit because there are not one thing that constitutes environmental ego, environment is scared about this – that’s why it matters. That would be kind of circular way of putting it. So we need to unpack “why does it matter?” And we also need to unpack “why does it happen?” And in between here somewhere … and of course the ecological “why” also … “Why does it happen?” in terms of … sort of your science? So what are the ecological … why does the climate warm up? Or cool down? So you can have a whole session on you know, the science of climate change. Right? Or we can talk about why does DDT kill … why did the DDT kill the Bald Eagle? And we can go through the science of DDT accumulation in the food chain. And things like that. So there is the scientific “Why” in some sense. Bu then there is a whole socio-political why. Why does DDT get used in the first place? Why does it get used even after its evils … evil effects are known? Why does it get replaced with something else which is even more harmful than DDT? And so on and so forth. So then you can have a whole why … social why – comes here. And there is actually a very interesting link between this and this. The way people analyze why the problem exists and therefore of course how it can be solved. It is very intimately often. But not completely, but there is an intimate correlation often unknowing, between that and how to characterize the problem in the first place. I just sort of failed to instigate that … OK. So this is just sort of an attempt to put in front of you what I am going to do in this session.
So let me take the example of a problem closer to home. Somebody said that climate change is sort of a little too far away, 2100, happening in the Arctic, Polar bears are disappearing, I have never seen a Polar Bear in my life so what the hell? So let’s take a problem close to home. Let’s take a problem Niyam.

I’d like to see a bit of a head count to see how many people have heard of the Niyam Giri Controversy. 1, 2, 3, 4, So since there are not that many people in the room, I’ll just take a few minutes to sort of elucidate on that problem as I understand it.
Niyam Giri is a hill in Orissa. And you have, very close to that hill Tribal communities dwelling – the “Kondh” tribal. And they have a very strong cultural and religious attachment to the hill. And the hill. And the hill is a densely forested hill, with a fair amount of bio-diversity on it including now biological studies showing some rare species which is not found in other parts of the country, etc, etc. So it’s a fairly diverse ecological system, in some rare species. And a strong cultural attachment … possibly also material attachment to that hill of the local tribal community. And this hill is being demanded for bauxite mining by a company – a multi-national. So this is being characterized as an environmental crisis in some sense. Or an environmental problem, or an environmental movement from Niyam Giri to stop bauxite mining from happening in the hills. So the question that occurs to me is “why is this a problem?” If a company wants to come in and mine the bauxite in Niyam Giri hills, why is it a problem? So even if you don’t necessarily know all the contours of the particular issue, I am sure you could volunteer to tell me why it might be a problem?
A Participant (Female): It will displace a lot of things for the tribals … (Last few words not clear –disturbance again close to the mike).
Another Participant (Male): Destruction …
Another Participant (Male): Possible destruction of the habitat.
Dr. Lele: Whose habitat?
Earlier participant (male): Of the people.
Dr. Lele: OK. I’ll put that here.
Dr. Lele: Anything else?
A Participant (Female): Disappearance of rare species … vegetation …
Dr. Lele: I’ll put vegetation under rare species if you don’t mind?
Another Participant (Male): The religious beliefs are affected.
Dr. Lele: Can I call that as cultural loss? As against this (Displacement of tribals) in a sense material loss? Yeah? What about the fact that actually bauxite mining will actually increase the availability of Aluminum to our country? And therefore increase the possibility of us having all these things that are made out of Aluminum?
Another Participant (Male): Is it the only source?
(Interrupted). Mr. Hardy: To whom does the bauxite belong to? The tribals or to you? That’s the question we need to ask.
Dr. Lele: So who benefits? Owns? Any other concerns? Why is it a problem?
A Participant (Female): I think one of the things that they are fighting about is that the long conveyor belts which are there because of which they have to move around quite a bit now just to negotiate and get to their own villages. Apart from the fact that they treat their hills as god and worship them. They are also not able to … they have to walk much more to get to their own villages. Because they have to cross this then.
Dr. Lele: Shall we say it’s a cultural problem, material problem? … An ownership issue … Why do I have to walk when I was here before the Alumina Company or something…? What is interesting is that this is a very different environmental problem from … if you are reading environmental literature in the 1970’s and 80’s when the literature was about limits to growth … you know the firewood crisis, the crisis of declining natural resources, ‘70s was you know first oil shortage. So you know, that’s part of a whole literature about we running out of oil … and we are now getting that literature back as … peak oil kind of a … it is called “Peak Oil literature”. We are talking about sort of how in the next 50 to 100 years we will actually run out of most of the cheap oil reserves … that really hit a threshold in terms of cost going up. So the 70’s had a big environmental literature which was limits to growth. And the limits to growth were really you know resource scarcity. What is interesting here, we are really not talking about resource scarcity. Mining of Bauxite will actually enhance the availability of Aluminum to the word in some sense. And it is the anti-mining environmental group which is going to increase the resource scarcity in some sense by denying the world a supply of Aluminum. Right? So this is a very different form of calling something an environmental problem. And so you have for a change, in the Niyamgiri case, you have the tribal communities sort of looking at the livelihood and cultural issue, and you also have the conservationists talking about rare species.
Rohit Dhankar: Since you are in a conversation mode, could I ask you why do you go with an environmental … this is something like dispossessing something like out of his own home … and changing his or her lifestyle forcibly. So why do you characterize this as an environmental problem rather than injustice to the tribal community?
Dr. Lele: Absolutely. So you can very well say that you are saying only about this and about who decides and it’s really not a problem at all. Except to say that well, to the extent that livelihoods depend on material resources. A fight about material resources is a fight about environment. So one of the contributions of the Indian environmental movement has been to broaden actually the idea of environment. From simply talking about rare species lost, to say that if you deny people resources that are necessary for their livelihoods, that is also an environmental problem because it actually destroys their livelihoods.
Rohit Dhankar: No, no. What I was hinting at supposing that I fight to possess your land which is going to produce equal amounts of wheat even in my possession, still that might be a problem and at that time this might not be an environmental problem. This is a justice problem. Social justice problem. So I was talking in that sense.
Dr. Lele: Absolutely. The reason why it becomes an environmental problem and typically your taking my wheat land and growing wheat will not be seen as an environmental problem is because of the transformation involved at the same time. Right? It is also the transformation. For example, even when it is a forest, if the forest department decides to cut trees and plant teaks, and the people protest and go and burn down the teak plantations, it is seen as an environmental problem to the extent that there is a bio-physical process involved in mediating between the forest department and you. That’s really why it becomes … I am not sort of hanging on to it and saying I just want to define it as an environmental problem.
Really, taking cue from Rohit as said, fertile farm land being taken away for industry. Another Participant (Female): How would you define it? As an environmental problem or …?
Dr. Lele: I mean in many ways, these are terms for us to you know, use and re-use. For example there was an argument that the NBA allowed the environmental label to be attached to it because it garnered a certain international environmental organizations got their backing and so on and so forth. So you can argue that taking away farm land for building industry it is an environmental problem to an extent that you are changing the gamut of natural resources available to society. You are moving farm land … I mean fertile land into something else. It is the same argument here that you are also simultaneously changing the natural endowment in some fashion.
Another Participant (Female): So, in other words the boundaries are becoming blurred.
Dr. Lele: Yeah.
Another Participant (Female): What you mean to say …?
Dr. Lele: Environment being interconnected … (Female participant interrupts)
Earlier participant (Female): How we have learned to look at this whole environment issues? How intimately it is related to our own lives?
Dr. Lele: And what I am trying to show is that it is linked to our lives in different ways and into different stakeholders also. So you might see that the tribals are really talking about the cultural and material value of the … yes … (Interrupted by a male participant)
A Participant (Male): If, for example, there were some locals mining it, a multi-national company came and wanted to mine it so that the productivity will increase, that would be a totally different order.
Dr. Lele: That’s right. So when you say that the question is only about who benefits, it doesn’t remain only a social problem. The question is about … (Hindi) “Mining toh hum bhi karenge” (We will also do mining), but the question is me mining versus you mining, then it becomes a standard social conflict. Right? If the question is also what should be done on that hillock and while I am mining I am devastating some natural heritage, which otherwise we share in common, etc, etc … then that comes in the realm of the social environmental problem or something. Right? It is an issue of ownership. It is also an issue of what you do with the … that system. I am not talking about … I am not saying natural in a very pristine sense … what you do with that environmental system. But what this highlights really is that there are different stakeholders here and they are talking about different things. So the conservation is really about the rare species. Right? Focusing terribly on tribal life and culture. Except that itt is convenient to build bridges with those who would like to support the other caused … for this reason (“Displace tribals” – written on the black board) Right? So what is interesting is the fact that the word “Sustainability”. You are able to ask the question – “Is this a sustainability problem?” It is very difficult to see what is the sustainability problem here. You can not continue to mine bauxite for the next 20 years. God knows. Depends on the size of the reserves. Maybe it will run out in 20 years or 50 years. We know mining is always an unsustainable activity by definition. There is a fixed amount and you extract that certain amount and that’s the end of the story.
Earlier participant (Female): Sharat … sorry to interrupt. You are asking about sustainability, I was wondering … sustainability for whom?
Dr. Lele: So we come to this issue. Is it really a sustainability issue or is it really an issue of “Whose resources to begin with?” And what are the rules to modify that resources to suit their livelihood needs? And who are the other stakeholders? So can you say legitimately that somebody like me who lives in Bangalore raises a (Hindi) “Jhanda” (Flag) saying you know a rare species of plants and some rare animals who live in Niyamgiri should be preserved and should not be converted into mines. Now am I a legitimate stakeholder in Niyamgiri or not? Niyamgiri has forests. So maybe a U.S power company will say forests in Niyamgiri are you know are siquesting (Word not clear) carbon and that is mitigating climate change and therefore the forest should not be cut down because this is mitigating global climate change. Which means that the whole global community is a stakeholder in Niyamgiri. Right?
So the idea is that … there are multiple stakeholders and they have different stakes, different relationship with nature in some sense, the link with me and Niyamgiri is much more esoteric and at the same time not completely deniable. Unless somebody says you are absolutely nobody except the person who lives next to the tiger can talk about the right of the tiger to survive. Unless we take the very extreme position you’ll say yeah you still have a legitimate point that the tiger will disappear. At whose cost you should save the tiger … whether it’s at the cost of the tribal or somebody else, that’s a whole different ballgame. The point then being if you only think of environmental sustainability, then it becomes very confusing. Yes – sustainability is a very nice and convenient word and at one level sustainability simple means good. So sustainable society is what? Good society. A sustainable livelihood is a good livelihood. Then it becomes … fine as a catch phrase but useless in an analytical category. What is sustainable? Anything that is good is sustainable. Anything that is sustainable is good. It becomes rather a rhetorical device rather than anything else. If you think about the origin of the word sustainability, sustain is to simple continue over time. So if you say mining is a sustainable activity, you can ask that question. It is a legitimate question to ask and you may get a certain answer whether it can be sustained over 50 years, depending upon the size of the reservoir of 100 years. It’s much harder to ask this question to ask “To convert Niyamgiri is that a sustainable thing to do?” That’s a much more difficult and useless question to ask in some sense. Because sustain is only telling you what is that you want to continue over time. Right? And so in the 70’s debate, or even today’s debate over oil, you can really ask the question. If we continue to be a heavily oil-dependent economy or a society, can we sustain? That’s a reasonable question to ask. And you can say well, we might continue for another 50 years and then crash. Unless we move off quickly into renewable … something like that. We can have an answer to that question. Can we sustain ourselves beyond 50 years if we continue to be oil-dependant? And that was the kind of question … that was the sort of … one of the defining questions or sort of key questions of environmentalism in the 70’s and sort of you know triggering ideas of sustainability as much as you have sustainability ideas in fisheries and forestry. Which are coming from an earlier era. We talk about sustainable forestry, sustainable fishing … as you know … If you continue to log forests at this rate, can you continue to log forests in the future? In that very clearly defined narrow sense. Log them today at a rate which will enable you to log them in the future.

A Participant (Male): Aren’t there a lot of money through these mining operations? And could convert their lives into a more urbanized life than they are used to? That could be sustainability or something?
Dr. Lele: It could be development for them. Right? Whether it is sustainability is the more … confusing question in some sense. Right? So that’s the whole problem. Where as sustainability can be usefully used in assessing given … let’s say like (Hindi) keti ki aap baat kar rahe the ki yehaan pe gehu ki kheti ho rahi hai… (You were talking about agriculture. Here you are growing wheat) So you can ask that question … that to pump fertilizers at a certain rate into this soil to grow (Hindi) “Gehu” (Wheat), will it become infertile from now? And not produce Gehu? That’s a reasonable question to ask, you know … do certain amount of investigative investigation, then try to come to a certain understanding. Well if you say that it is gehu today and becoming a city tomorrow, and is this transformation sustainable? There is no real answer to that. It’s a transformation from one kind of a land use to another, one objective to another, one stakeholder to another … the farmer is out of the picture and now some industry which is using this piece of land, and so you have a change of stakeholders, so what do we mean by sustainable here?
Rohit Dhankar: I am sorry to interrupt but you do have a sense in that. Sustainability if you are defining at the level of the tribal community itself, or if you are defining at the level of people living in the 10 kilometer area, that’s a different kind of … so here the idea of sustainability of the tribal lifestyle itself could be the idea of sustainability in that sense. But perhaps, most of the people when they talk of sustainability in the environmental and global scenario, then perhaps they are talking of a sustainable society for human flourishing. And in that sense, each little thing including giving farm land to the industry itself could be made into a sustainability question if this becomes a policy what impact it is going to have on the human race in say, if this starts happening in the large scale. So there could be a sustainability angle to it when the sustainability of human race and human culture is involved.
Dr. Lele: Absolutely. I agree with you. The challenge now is to look at whether are there other ways also of defining the question? … as an environment question, which highlight other dimensions … without denying this dimension, highlight other dimensions of the question. Yeah.
Earlier participant (Female): One question – I am just saying, I’ll take the wheat example where tribal group is growing wheat and giving to a company which is also growing wheat. The way it is done, how it is growing, it is different. The tribal is doing it for its own sustenance in a … much … the livelihood is much different. Where when it’s a company, the whole scenario is very, very different.
Dr. Lele: Yeah. So my question here would be are we attaching social value to … and then calling it an environmental value? It could be the same kind of farming but it goes to two different people. It’s possible. I am saying theoretically it is possible that the company will follow the same practices as the tribals. Because it is certainly possible the other way round and we are seeing that, the tribals are increasingly following practices that are company practices. Right? We are seeing that across the face of the country. That more and more this nice and cube separation of subsistent farmers following traditional cultural practices which are environmentally friendly, it turns out to be a completely fuzzy category. And completely mixed up with farmers involved, doing commercial agriculture, mining the ground water, pumping in the fertilizer, using the pesticides indiscriminately, there is no such need separation of farmers … just because farmers … even small holders, even tribal farmers, necessarily not following you know what we think of corporate and eco-friendly, etc, etc. So these need separations are no longer functional very well.
The point I am trying to make here is, let’s take a different example. So in the state of Karnataka for many years, and the first year of environmental report in ’82 itself highlighted this problem. ‘Harihar Polymers’ is a company situated on the banks of Tungabhadra. And it is a sort of a paper and pulp kind of a factory. And as many of you know, paper and pulp industry is a fairly polluting industry. And they have been dumping pollutants into the Tungabhadra river for a long time. Sp my question to you would be “Is this an environmental problem?” Why? So I’ve given you the fact that Harihar Polymers is dumping pollutants … maybe I shouldn’t use the word pollutant because to is signaling something … I should say dumping “X” number of chemicals into the River. Right? So is it a problem? Why?
A Participant (Female): Is it the water?
Dr. Lele: And so?
Earlier participant (Female): … life in the river (not clearly audible)
Dr. Lele: So life of the fish?
Another Participant (Female): And drinking water? And then underground water to a certain extent? (Barely audible) Crops again, which are dependent on this water?
Dr. Lele: Which crops – Upstream or downstream?
Earlier participant (Female): … life in the river (not clearly audible)
Dr. Lele: Down stream.
(Laughter)
Dr. Lele: So then the question from me is so what is wrong is Harihar Polymer dumps pollutants and somebody downstream is losing their crop? What’s the problem? How would you characterize the moral stance on this problem?
Earlier participant (Female): … Who is affected finally? (not clearly audible)
Dr. Lele: Somebody. Maybe a rich farmer. Right? Could be a rich farmer downstream …
Another Participant (Female): … and why not poor farmer? (not clearly audible)
Dr. Lele: Could be … I am saying we don’t know – A farmer, whether rich or poor is affected. My question is what is the moral stance here? Typically what we bring to this problem? Would you call it … this is unsustainable! Oh! This is terrible because this is jeopardizing the life of … the future well being of the future human race.
Another Participant (Female): No … also the industry is being irresponsible, no? Someone else is paying the price of …
Dr. Lele: So what’s the ethical issue here? Is it the future generation which are in jeopardy? This is my question.
Another Participant (Male): We have a primary ethical problem with someone using a resource undeservedly. Who hasn’t paid the sot for it. The traditional economic argument that there is an external cost that somebody is bearing. That’s the first one. The second one is Harihar is pumping something into the river is an exercise of arbitrary power. It’s a power issue.
Dr. Lele: OK. Could that question as a “why?” I mean they are able to get away with it because they have the political power to do it.
Earlier participant (Male): Or the political system is not responsive to deal with the use of power in this particular fashion just like say in the case of Niyamgiri Hills. Power is … see the main moral problem seems to be in … an exercise of power in a way which offends our moral sense.
Dr. Lele: So I want to keep the pre-fix “un” and you know in the first example I said even perhaps the Niyamgiri case, we can make some argument that this is unsustainable for the human race at some level. Right? Would you use that … would you attach the “un” to sustainable in this Harihar Polymer case or would you attach the “un” to something else?
(Electronic disturbance)
Rohit Dhankar: Why to go so far in the Harihar case? It is initially unsustainable for the farmer who is downstream …?
Dr. Lele: … for Harihar Poly-fibers?
Rohit Dhankar: No, no. Not for Harihar Poly-fibers, but then, who is more important for the society and human race and …
(Interruptions and cross-talk: Individual voices not clear).
Dr. Lele: See Harihar Uses a different way of characterizing the situation.
Earlier participant (Male): One more thing … one more point… See, you could ask the question, if Harihar has to pay the tax for dumping the traditional … again … economic … tax for dumping the chemicals into the river, does it become fair. Harihar could say “Look, we have paid the tax for dumping this much, it’s somebody else’s job to clean it up. Maybe government. It is still fair. But it still seems to upfront our moral sense that Harihar should be able to do that. Because …
Dr. Lele: Because it is unfair. Because if the farmer got clean water, then you would not have a problem, right?
Earlier participant (Male): Harihar could say, look, at the outlet the government should clean it up because I have paid for dumping.
Dr. Lele: That’s fine. But I am saying if you … but if the only reason is if you are concerned that dirty water gets into somebody else’s stomach or farm or something, it is unfair. Whether the unfairness is attached to Harihar Polyfibers or to Karnataka pollution control board.
Another Participant (Female): But it is also unsustainable because the river is going to die. When that is happening, the rivers are going to dying.
Dr. Lele: Dying in what sense?
(Crosstalk again – individual voices not clear for a few moments)
Earlier participant (Male): Non-instrumental … (words not clear) … affronts my sense that look a river is being assaulted.
Dr. Lele: Correct. But would you deny that for somebody else, it’s an issue of fly-fair? (Last word not clear)
Another Participant (Male): But in a more material sense, messing with such a complex system can sometimes give a sense of unsustainability. Just like a forest and its complex system, while doing something, (Someone close to the camera man coughing loudly again into the mike … voice of the participant not clear) … working with something that is rather complex and complicated and it can impact many, many things. That seems to give you a sense of unsustainability.
Dr. Lele: That’s very dicey, I would use … (last word not clear). We were messing with the river all the time. The farmer by the very … of putting an pump-set into the river and pumping out water is messing dramatically with the river. The farmer builds his own dam and diverting the water up-stream and you don’t even know about it. Right? Farming itself is messing around with the system. Farming is a complete mess of the system. All the terrace agriculture that you saw in Uttaranchal, (Referring to Mr. Soumitri’s presentation) it was there 800 years ago!
Earlier participant (Male): I am not clear about you using the word “un-fair”. What are you saying?
Dr. Lele: Basically this, right? It is because Harihar Polymers is upstream and they, by virtue of … if for example, there was no river for them to dump their pollutants in, and so the pollutants sat around their own factory and created a cesspool, its less likely that they would continue to do what they are doing. They are getting the pollutants out of their system. Right? So it’s unfair that they have to emit stuff that somebody else has to suffer from.
Earlier participant (Male): Economics answers that without giving a notion of fairness at all. You are bringing in fairness for that (Loud coughing near the camera again). I am saying traditional economics, answers that question without the issue of fairness … right? If the costs have been paid for, there is no issue of fairness.
(Crosstalk – individual voices not clear)
Dr. Lele: No, no. It’s fine. You are illustrating our point and how you analyze this thing to … how you analyze the government this side …
(Crosstalk – individual voices not clear)
Another Participant (Male): … are playing the cost-benefit game. Effectively you are because what is unfair is the cost being paid by somebody else. That’s what you are calling unfair. So your cost-benefit game is based on the way you draw the boundary. And I can keep changing the boundary and show you that it is affecting people in a different way or benefiting and make an argument to tell you that you are all better off and …
Dr. Lele: No, no. You are playing the cost-benefit game by … you might play the game by saying the net of Harihar doing the paper production is higher than the cost of the community. That’s the economist cost-benefit game. You can ask the person on the street, that the person on the street may say this is unfair. We need a poll in the class on these … environmental issues. And ask people is pollution a problem of fairness or is pollution a problem of inefficiency? What you are saying …
Earlier participant (male): No, no. I am not talking about inefficiency. When you say the cost is being calculated, who is paying the cost? – is the issue. That’s where the unfairness comes.
Dr. Lele: Exactly.
Earlier participant (male): I am saying the cost-benefit game, you are throwing away the fairness-unfairness by … that’s a traditional economy.
Dr. Lele: Yeah. Exactly. That’s my point … really. That issue … pick a layperson in the … you know and ask them what is the problem with Harihar pumping pollutants into the river … ethically what’s the problem? Typically you are going to get a response saying it is not fair. Its not fair of person A. And its not necessarily Harihar because it’s a company and somebody downstream is a poor farmer. Even if you were to reverse the situation and talk about farmers upstream pumping pesticides into their ecological system and somebody else downstream having to drink pesticide polluted water, we would still say that the problem is it is not fair. It is not fair for we downstream to drink polluted water which somebody else is doing upstream because they are doing a production activity which required a pesticide. I am not saying pesticides are bad but they should not be dumped unfairly into my area. That’s basically the kind of response that you get from people. the point I am trying to illustrate here is that the idea of unsustainability doesn’t take us very far. Because we have been doing this for centuries. We have been converting forests into farm land for centuries, we have been doing mining for centuries, we have been doing all kinds of activities and so to worry about the nebulous future consequences, when somebody has died downstream today because of drinking polluted water and to cast that in a sustainability terminology has a certain problem. In a sense that it doesn’t really resonate with what is really bothering you … what type of problem. What is really bothering you, at least me is that it is unfair for somebody in the Narmada valley to play the displacement cost for supplying water to somebody in the Rann of Kutch, supposedly. Right? So the Narmada issue in some sense, you rightly pointed out –it was about fairness – unfairness. It was about equity in a very social sense. And … but there is an environmental linkage because there is a material change we are making through which the environmental displacement occurs. So you can do mining in Niyamgiri and we will ruin the life of someone in the neighborhood of Niyamgiri or you might do this kind of a … so there is a real sort of material linage through which that’s happening. That’s all. Its not a direct dispossession of the land. Sort of take the people of … it’s not a case of people from the Rann of Kutch being brought and put into the agricultural land of the Narmada Valley. Then it would have been a direct sort of social dispossession sort of a question you know. Who owns the land which is owned by somebody else …?
Dr. Ram Kumar: I want to relate it with immediate example. Like the drainage water in Bangalore. I mean, people are using it and it is just going towards Kengeri and nobody knows where exactly it is ending up to. And people don’t know where, what exactly is happening there. But I, as an individual think that you know yes I am paying tax and it is for the corporation to look into it so that … say from my home it is cleared and my problem is over. That’s how the … if you talk to individual thought process works but nobody thinks that it’s creating a …
Dr. Lele: No … that is for another reason why one needs to be careful in defining the problem. Because we know from environmental science that there is a certain amount of pollutant load that the river can actually handle. Not all use of the environment is degrading. Because by that standard we should not be breathing at all. Because then you know we are doing a … interfering with the environment. Right? Not all use of the environment can be called degrading. You can … what they call certain amount of biological oxygen demand and chemical oxygen demand in the river is actually sustainable. You have to be careful of course when people toss around these ideas of sustainability. So, for example when somebody says that 3 tons of equivalent per capita emissions globally is a sustainable level of emissions. You know, you need to unpack that a little bit. What does it mean? What it means really is that well. If you assume that under 2 degrees Celsius is not going to lead to catastrophic consequences, then you can say, in the sense of avoiding catastrophic consequences 3 tons per capita emission is sustainable level of emission. Defining sustainability in a particular social manner and saying if we accept that then it is a sustainable level. So we need to always interrogate these ideas but there obviously are levels up to which you can use the environment. If there weren’t, then we would not be in a position to use or … even in the minimalist tribal sense of subsistent livelihood, we could not. Shifting cultivation is also messing around with the environment. So in that sense it becomes very problematic if we take everything as a degrading action. Right?
So what I am trying to highlight here really is that there are multiple ethical concerns on which environmentalism draws. There is not a single concern. And of course, that means different shades of environmentalists prioritize different shades of those concerns. So when we said for example, conservationists are worried about rare species, what’s the concern here? Its not about fairness. At least not from a social justice perspective. They have redefined the idea of fairness and expanded it to include all organisms … all human organisms also. It is unfair to destroy non-human organisms because they have a right to life. So you could cast it as unfairness in that sense. Right? Or you could say that it is really not unfairness in the same sense that you would say unfair to other human beings, it is about the esthetic value of species. And when you say cultural value, of the tribes that’s what we mean. You can use different terms, cultural, spiritual, esthetic, religious … they fall in that same broad notion that something has value beyond the materials and you attach a value to it. Right? So there is no single ethical position that environmentalism draws upon. Different strands draw upon different … or highlight different concerns. And sometimes they collate (Word not clear). So in the Niyamgiri case, the esthetic concern for the leopard in Niyamgiri might coincide with the justice concern of the mining company … should not have the right.
Another Participant (Male): One sec … people are agitated with their food (Not clear)
(Laughter)
Cut

Dr. Lele: … Captured in a nut shell. This is only the only way that either summing up the issue or only they are characterizing it … the idea is the major contributions of the Indian environmentalist movement, at least one subset of it was to highlight that there are as much issues of justice and equity involved in the environmental problems as there might be questions of the esthetic values of the tiger or the need for me to have pure air in Bangalore even though I drive around in cars or something of that kind.
So they are not obviously issues of quality of life, in the west the focus on environmental
Struggles have been on quality of life, in the form of cleaning up Los Angeles air pollution, or cleaning up the smog in London or Ozone hole leading me to more skin cancer rates, the reason the ozone hole is a problem is because you have especially the upper latitudes you know, the 40 degree kind of latitudes and at higher elevations you have increase in skin cancer rates. And for people with light pigment. It’s not such a big issue for us because we already have dark pigment that we handle lot of cosmic rays that escape through the ozone hole.
So it was really quality of life problem. That if I get hit by too many cosmic rays and start getting skin cancer you know … at the extreme situation it might be real life threatening. Most of it is not life threatening. So environmentalism as it evolved in the west was a) around the quality of life as defined by wilderness, and quality of life as defined by pollution. Affecting my immediate health, asthma, etc, etc. the contribution of the Indian environment movement has been to point out that there are serious issues of justice and equity involved in the environment. Because any transformation of the environment particularly in a dense populated country like India or many parts of the tropics, it’s not a transformation in the isolation.
See, one of the problems with the western societies is that they first cleaned out their environment of all ‘silly’ native Americans, and then they had a free hand to set up the Tennessee dam or set up the Hoover dam or all kinds of dams in order to transform that environment without affecting livelihood, because there were people who were already removed from that space, and later on come and say well we need some areas bereft of dam because we want to consume them as wildlife tourists.
So that’s one way of relating to the environment. But in the Indian context you have … if you are going to set up a dam, you are already going to destroy life then and there of the people living in that valley. So the environment movement’s contribution really was … there is a whole bunch of justice, equity issues in the material transformation of the environment. Who gets the benefit from that dam? … and some of it may simply be an issue of pure justice. If the Narmada valley people owned the Narmada dam, they would have agreed to set up the Narmada dam. That situation can not be denied.
So at one level it might be simply a question of democracy. Who owns the resources and who has the right to take a decision on resource rather than … that Narmada valley people are more pre-environment than Kutch people. It is kind of hard to make that argument. So it is at some level, a core sort of equity issue. There is also a question of sustainability of course. Because there have been situations where … agriculture. Irrigated culture … the farmers … it’s not an unfair situation ki (that) farmers were given irrigation in the poise (word not clear) of Bhakra Nangal dam. Over time you realize that technology that you were either given or you have yourself adopted sort of fairly blindly is leading to a situation of salinization of lands and therefore loss of productivity and livelihoods. And so that sustainability issue is also very much there in some of these situations. Whether you adopt technologies without knowing the consequences, or perhaps knowing the consequences. For example, pumps – you know the evolution of pumps … the bore-well technology for the last 20-30 years leading to serious mining of ground water. At one level it is hard to say that farmers are farmers are so stupid that they didn’t know they are mining water – that is a put in a bore well and pump water then (Hindi) kabhie kabhie toh paani khatam hone wala hai (At some point in time the water is going to run out) but at the same time they are doing it. And they ask questions about why does it happen? Why do farmers then pump water and waste that and demise their own future along with the future of their neighbors … whatever …
So you definitely have questions about sustainability. They need not be as esoteric as climate change happening 100 years down the line, it is true that our pumping out Carbon Dioxide from our cars which we all used to … Vistar (Word not clear) … today will contribute to climate changes by 2050 … if not even 2100, much earlier than that. But it is also true that perhaps the bigger environmental problem by my car coming from Koramangala to Vistar was the kind of local air pollution that I put out in terms of SOX, NOX and what not – diesel particular matter, which is going to affect somebody else’s asthma, right? … along the neighborhood that I drove through.
So there is a whole bunch of issues … sort of intertwined in the issue of environment. And as some of you may have had the chance of reading on sustainability, the idea is not that sustainability is not a deep issue or you know … a crisis. Many of the things that you are doing cannot continue for long. But many of the things that we are doing, are built upon the destruction of somebody else’s livelihood. So we don’t just invoke the future and future generations and my children and grandchildren as a way of generating support for environmentalism. And one of the downsides of doing that … sort of this life board ethic, you know that idea that everything should be defined in terms of sustainability-unsustainability, it’s nice because it sort of tugs people’s heart strings by saying your grandchildren’s future is at stake, your great-grandchildren’s future is at stake and every one wants their great-grandchildren to survive. So at that sense it is a very effective “mother and apple pie” kind of approach. But there is also a downside to that. It is implying that all problems are about jeopardizing your future. But lot of problems are about jeopardizing somebody’s present today. And they kind of get showed under the carpet every … the entire focus is on the world collapsing in 100 years from now. And not about people’s lives that are being destroyed today. And at another level what has not yet happened even in the Indian environmental movement is the third angle which is the quality of life issue. Because the quality of life issue is always associated with the rich, the well-fed, you know Ram Guha calls this the “Full-stomach environmentalism” of the west. (Hindi) “Khana peena hogaya sab …” (Finished eating and drinking …) all the wheat products and the unsustainable rice products went into your tummy, now you are going to shout about wetlands and birds that need to be surviving and so on and so forth.
But you will not do that if your food was at stake in some sense. Right? So, but really the issue is can you make these kinds of clean separations? Are we saying that if everybody gets a car then the world bereft of tigers is fine. If that’s the consequence … If that’s the cost that we have to pay for everybody getting a car. Right?
And then that sort of highlights the you know … there is a relational issue here how we relate to nature around us which is also very deep and fundamental. You can’t just pin it down to you know a cost-benefit analysis and say that the tiger is more beneficial than the car, then the tiger scurvies, otherwise the tiger goes out of the window. Its not … you know that kind of cost-benefit analysis. Or material terms.
So there is a dimension to environmentalism, which is about quality of life, it can be about basic life and this is a link with development really. And if you look at it now, what are the ethical basis for arguing for arguing for development of any kind. Or which developmental movements draw upon. It is actually not terribly different from these basis. Some of them draw upon equity as a central issue – whether it is the human rights movement, whether it is the tribal rights movement, whether it is the farmers’ movement, it is really unfair that the kind of prices that we are getting as farmers are unfair. This is the argument that farmers would invoke in a very developmental context of fair prices for agricultural produce. Right?
So the developmental really in some ways does overlap with these concerns. But mostly these two has focus less on sustainability. Historically sustainability was not in question. But then equity what they were focusing on – for example, if you were a Dalit rights activist, and you are talking about social rights and equity, in a sense which is slightly different from the way I characterized the Harihar Polymer for example. It is unfair to the downstream farmer to have to use polluted water to irrigate his farms, when Harihar, upstream is irrigating it, for a social justice person it would be unfair that is is Harihar upstream and farmer downstream. If you reverse the situations it is going to be a little more complicated. So it’s the farmer upstream and a company downstream lifting the water which is polluted with pesticides and say, producing Coca-Cola and getting hammered by Sunita Narayan for producing pesticide contaminated Coca-Cola. Right? (Laughter) Now is it unfair to the company? That they are getting pesticide from upstream farmers who are doing say, Sugarcane cultivation with those pesticides or cotton … more likely?
Rohit Dhankar (Says something – not clear) No. It is not unfair to them …
(Laughter).
Rohit Dhankar: When you are a farmer … The farmer has some sort of natural entitlement to that water resource because of generations living there or whatever. Companies, particularly Coca-Cola, because it is … (Laughter … words not clear).
Dr. Lele: (Hindi) Thums-Up hai toh chalege (Its OK if it is Thums-Up). No … for example, the entitlement to use the water extend to the entitlement to pollute the water? With pesticides? Pesticides came only 30 years ago.
Rohit Dhankar: It would be unfair because of some other reason not because of the company lifting the polluted water. As soon as you bring the company in, the situation is going to change … to my mind. I might be wrong.
Dr. Lele: Ethical issue is still the same, no? Upstream person is dumping polluted water …
Rohit Dhankar: No. See, if you leave the company out and simply say that polluting the water in the river in itself … is there any ethical issues involved? … I do understand that. And perhaps this is unfair. But coming in company lifting polluted or unpolluted water, this depends on several other things. Because company might have taken the license and paid very little price for lifting water because this was already contaminated and they built it in their own system to clean it up, etc … and therefore maybe paying very little price for this. So therefore company … complicates the issue … (Interruptions from another person)
Another Participant (Male): … you are right … when Rohit is making a statement, then within his legal framework there is one kind of an attitude for the farmer and the other for the Coca-Cola company. That’s all. Ultimately … (Interrupted by another participant) … it’s an ethical issue.
Rohit Dhankar: No. That you are actually misinterpreting my ethics!
(Loud laughter from all participants)
Dr. Lele: I am stepping in here because Hardy has pointed out that I am running out of time …
Rohit Dhankar: Let me just say at least 2 sentences because I want to retire my ethical … (last word not clear – loud laughter again from all participants). Just 2 sentences. You see, the distance … difference I am making, we can discuss that later on in greater length, 2 things. Is there any kind of traditional entitlement involved. Part one. Part two: Is the buyer of certain kinds of goods already has taken into account what he is buying and what kind of quality. So these two issues, unless and until they are cleared about the company, bringing in company is a problem.
Dr. Lele: So recently what I’ve started thinking is that can we turn the tables and say that upstream is a poor farmer using pesticide and upstream is a rich consumer – could be a company or something else? This is where the social justice position starts differing from the environmental justice position. From purely environmental angle (Hindi) Oopar aap baithein hain, neeche main baitha hoon (You are sitting above, I am sitting below), you dump pollutants, it is unfair to me, whether you are poor and I am rich or I am poor and you are rich. Because you are making unfair use of the relationship between you and me which is upstream-downstream relationship. It’ll happen in the case of chimneys, it can happen in the case of people burning dry leaves outside your house and therefore polluting your house (Hindi) Delhi mein log bahar jisko thand lagti hai who bahar thand lekeliye kuch banatein hain,andar aap ko toh dhuaan peena padta hai (In Delhi, people outside make arrangements to protect themselves from the cold but then you have to inhale the smoke) … so you know, it is unfair. The question of how you address it socially, whether you impose the same stringent norms on the farmer that you would impose on the company or you would ban the farmer’s activities in the way you would ban Harihar polymers’ activities is I think is more … where you would bring in social justice consideration beyond purely environmental justice. So … which is also intertwining all these other debates – climate change … you know? So if an affluent person is using … emitting carbon dioxide to let us say … Goan tourism, and the same amount of Carbon dioxide is being emitted by a poor person burning unsustainably harvested firewood in the “Choolhas” would you assign the same amount of blame? From an environmental science perspective, carbon dioxide is carbon dioxide. Right? But from a social justice perspective, you would have to add on there as to who is the person, what is their social position, before you come to a conclusive answer about you know … liability encouraged and responsibility to change and so on and so forth …
But the point is that in the environmental problem, the whole bunch of ethical issues that are intertwined, not only issues of sustainability, that is one of them, that is meaning, do we have the right to jeopardize the lives of future generations, d we have, in fact, the right to jeopardize our own future maybe 20 years from now, but also a question of unfairness – do we have the right to jeopardize or affect immediately people’s lives today? – because of our resource consumption or pollution activities, and questions about quality of live. What do we mean by quality of life? What is it that we want to sustain? In lot of the sustainability literature, there is a confusion between wanting to sustain the tiger because we have an ethical or an esthetic or a religious or a spiritual value associated with the tiger and saying that the tiger ought to be saved because otherwise life will become unsustainable.
So some of them … I use … what shall I say … bit of an extreme conservationist position and he debates the argument that you ought to save the tiger because by saving the tiger you will save the forest, by saving the forest, you will save the rivers from drying up, and by saving the rivers you will save the (Hindi) ‘Paani’ (Water) which is for your survival. Its kind of you know … really bending over backwards to make an argument to save the tiger … well you really want to save the tiger because it is a nice beautiful furry animal. And I am saying that in a pejorative term. I think it is perfectly legible for somebody who says the tiger is an animal which has a right to survive in the face of this Earth. The question here is that then when I move from here to here, I start with the tiger saving position, and then I’ll say that we will kick out the tribals from whatever … Nagarhole National Park, because they are jeopardizing the tiger’s existence. That’s when it becomes a social justice issue and that becomes more complicated … yeah.
A Participant (Female): Sharat, I just want to say, you know, in working as an environmental communicator, the issues are complex but the message has to be fairly simple. You know, this is the challenge many of us may have faced, you know?
Dr. Lele: Fair enough. So might as well …
(Cross-talk, all participants laugh)
A Participant (Male): Supposing … immediate effect of polluting the river, when you say polluting, obviously you are dumping stuff which is more than the river can handle, isn’t there a basic issue just in that? Without having to look immediately as to who is affected?
Dr. Lele: I am saying … in a sense no. because to me, environment is a social concept, degradation is a social concept. There is nothing … as somebody else mentioned earlier this morning, that if you destroy the tiger, I mean … tiger might have been destroyed because of meteorites that hit the earth 1,000 years from now and wipe out all large mammals like they wiped out dinosaurs. Right? (Hindi) Toh (So) extinction is part of life in geological terms. There is nothing sacrosanct about life on earth. So at that level, you can not make an argument, unless you are there, taking an ethical position on any particular dimension of it. Either unfairness, unsustainability, or … my esthetic value, my cultural value, whatever you want to attach to it. You have to attach a value and that’s a normative position. It’s a very subjective, ethical, position. You don’t have a scientific reason why …

…that’s the message, if you want to put it in simple terms. If the earth is going to hell in a hand-basket, we define what is hell and what is hand-basket. Otherwise there is no hell and no hand-basket. That’s one part of the story.
The other part of the story relates to why it happens. There are a lot of questions – how will individual change really contribute, or will it be sufficient to solve the problem? – and so on and so forth. As you can already start seeing, that links with how you characterize what is the problem here, say pollution, and therefore what is the solution. There are some interesting links or correlations, although not hard and fast, hopefully. If they are hard and fast, then we are sunk. The idea of explanations which are more than mono(?) is important. Otherwise we are stuck with this one way of explaining the problem.
But you can see – for example, if somebody says it is a problem of unfairness. Harihar Polyfibres’ dumping of pollutants into a river is unfair. The response is likely to be, ‘then slam down on Harihar – make them shut down their operations or clean up their activities till they generate only clean water’. We will be sort of straightforward. If you say, well, it is not exactly a problem of fairness or unfairness; this is a net benefit cost analysis which is right now negative, then only do that much pollution control that will bring the net benefit cost analysis to positive. (1.20) benefit (?) cost is hidden in the economic calculus. So that would be a different way. The way you characterize the problem depends on what solution you seek. So put a tax on Harihar and then maybe that is an efficient way of… But it is not efficient – it is not getting rid of the problem – until you can actually do something else with the pollutant.
Somebody else would then say well, it is really the whole issue of unfair access to resources – Niamgiri – it is a problem of tribal empowerment. Whereas somebody else would characterize it as because of the demand on aluminium, which is driven by unsustainable lifestyles in the West, or for example, in urban Bangalore, which is imposing a demand on the resource for somebody else. So I need to become a Gandhian in order to save the tribals of Niamgiri. Which is a legitimate argument at one level – that I need to change my consumption lifestyle if I am not to impose those demands on the environment.
So you really have, in some sense – and the same argument you can see, to some extent, reflected in the developmental sphere. That is, why is there poverty? If you ask this question, you will have to ask, what is wrong with poverty? And what is wrong with poverty has different connotations for different people. For some, it is an absolute notion that nobody should live below the poverty line. Whereas, there can be inequality in a society. That is not a problem as long as everybody is above the poverty line, like perhaps in the US. Which is a very liberal, democrat kind of a position – that nobody should be dying of hunger, but there is going to be inequality in society above the hunger line. And that’s perfectly acceptable. It’s a very liberal sort of position.
Whereas you would argue from a much more, let’s say, red position that no, there has to be equality not just in absolute terms of loss of poverty but actual equity in society. Then that would be a much stronger position to take. And the solutions you would then come up with, in terms of a developmental answer to poverty would also correspondingly vary. Land reform is a much stronger response to the question of poverty than, for example, the minimum wage act, right? It is a different response. And you will agree that it is not really that the communists support land reform and the pink or light pink socialists only support minimum wages. So obviously it is not so sharp and clear-cut. There may be situations where even after a strong position on equality, you might only find minimum wage act as the practical solution in a certain socio-political context – it is the only practical step that you can take. There are obviously these correlations. If you have a strong position on poverty – why poverty is bad – you would push for a stronger solution in the form of land reform.

So similarly, you find in the environmental discourse, or any environmental developmental discourse in some sense. How do we have an environmentally sound and socially just developmental path? Or why do we not have it today? To say how we will have it in the future, we need to know why we don’t have it today. And you will of course find a whole bunch of different answers to that question. Why is it that we are emitting too much carbon dioxide? Why is it that Harihar is able to get away with the kind of pollution that it is imposing on downstream farmers? And so on and so forth.
And you will have questions from a Marxist analysis – the questions of political power of the Harihar Polyfibres. From the economists’ perspective – maybe from a neo-classical economist’s perspective – it might simply be that well, the problem is essentially that the net benefit cost is right now negative and if we internalize those costs, then pollution control will increase to the level that is socially efficient in some sense.
There could also be the argument for markets. If you see a lot of the literature today on management issues, people are now talking a lot about market-based instruments for pollution control. This is something I have been trying to figure out for a long time – how it works. And it also relates therefore to all kinds of additional positions that one takes about the relationship between the individual and the state, individual and society, structure, and what is it that a structure can – and should – influence individual action, and so on and so forth, because of over-population and ignorance of the poor. And those are perhaps two of the first hurdles we have to cross before we get into the more sophisticated discussion on why these problems occur. And you will see that they are inter-related to how we characterize the problem in the first place.
But it is possible to have a wider perspective of why something is a problem and it is hopefully possible to also have a wider understanding of what might be the various causes that intertwine into making a problem happen. It is not just the exploitation of the Dalits or women, or the lower classes or Mother Nature, or something else that is driving these things.
I think I will stop at that and maybe take questions.

Questioner 1: One quick question for you. You said you wanted to complexify the problem space. But the solution space is also very complex because we don’t have the wealth to even think about solutions. So what is happening there? In the sense – the institutions required, the (?) required – before we even get into education. We don’t even know what education can contribute, but from a socio-political environmental perspective, what have been the barriers to thinking coherently about solutions for this very complex issue?
Speaker 1: (It’s) also a complicated answer in some sense. One of the things we can simply argue about is that well, there is just a paucity of environmentalists of any kind – whether it is the eco-Marxists or the eco-feminists, or the eco-Dalits or the eco-institutionalists or whatever. There is a paucity of any kind; so why are we fighting over these details? At one level, it is maybe true. But the fact of the matter is that even if you sum up all the people who care only about the tiger or only about pollution or only about something else and add them up, they are still a miniscule number in some sense. So even if they really are at loggerheads amongst themselves or not seeing eye to eye, they are still in a minority on the whole. So that itself is a challenge.
And that way, you could argue that there is a problem of values. There are just not enough people who even care about the future, about the neighbour, or about the their own quality of life in the way that we understand the green quality of life. If they have defined their quality of life in terms of living in boxes with TVs feeding them all entertainment, then you don’t need to have nature around – as long as Animal Planet has archived all its (material). Which is what I also asked the conservationists at some level – because some of the conservationists are driven by the notion of genetic diversity. I said, well, if you just store all the germ-plasm in a cryonic bank, then you can destroy the real genetic diversity out there. Is that true? There is not an easy way of getting around that position.
So at one level, yes. I think at another level – I personally feel – that within academia, we also have too much of this fragmentation. So we are not able to think. We are still locked into our own little neat answers to these problems. We are not willing to think plurally; we are not willing to join hands on that end also and accept them. One of the issues is – of course you should know very much – that the conservation movement, particularly in India, has been often at loggerheads with, let us say, the developmental movement – rural development and tribal rights kind of movements. Why? Because we are not able to see that environmental justice is intertwined with social justice. And we cannot take a position.
The deep ecological position that has been taken by the wilderness lobby in the US cannot be taken in isolation without having an implicit position among people. You can’t have a position about the rights of the tiger or the spider without first having a position on the rights of other human beings. And if you are going to jump that step and just talk about the rights of the tiger or the Amazonian butterfly or something, and therefore put a fence around the Amazonian armed guards in order to shoot anybody who dares to tread in to tap rubber or something, then you have a problem.
A lot of it is refusal to see that, as environmentalists when we intervene, we are also taking social positions. When we take environmental positions, we are taking social positions. And that we therefore have to have a wider sense of ethics and not just about this or that.
Questioner 2: This whole thing about solution, Harihar – since you brought it up – SPS Dharwad took them on headlong and the whole campaign is now history. And this is way before public hearings and all became a law. And they did strive for and got some kind of solution out of that whole issue. So you could also look at it as, given how complex things are, this could be cited as some attempt at arriving at a solution.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. I think what I was getting at was that there are not enough SPSs out there. That is what I am saying. I am not saying that what SPS is doing is... Definitely we need a hundred more SPSs to take on the hundred more Harihar cases that are around us. That is what I am getting at – why do we not have that scale of the environmental movement? It is because we have still not perhaps accepted that there is a problem because it does not affect me directly; or I have an isolationist sort of position on what is the nature of the problem, and am not seeing the links between my life’s trials and the problems out there. As long as certain species are safe in certain pockets for me to see as a people tourist, I am not willing to look at the larger issues associated with that kind of management and so on.
So what I am saying is that there is not enough of us; there is not enough unity on these fronts and certainly not at all too much dialogue itself on the analysis of the problem. And that’s why, for example, you see that even the environmental economists are at loggerheads with many other environmental activists because nominatively they don’t see it as an unfairness issue; analytically they see that the power of markets has been so wonderful that all problems can be solved through that route. And so that’s part of the problem.
Questioner 3:: You said we don’t have enough of us. How do you make enough of us? That is my question.
Comment from audience: There is something called the (?) form or whatever, where amongst us, there could be so many amongst us that it could be a problem also.
Questioner 3:: What I mean is, I am asking about the broader public awareness for you to find. It can’t be ten-ten people all over this place – it has to be a lot bigger. You see, after all, the capitalist structure is based on a network. And given the network structure in these institutions, only networks can resist. The old structure of individual institutional resistance will not work here. It has to be network resisting network. In that sense, enough of us have to come about by building larger networks across these pieces. How do we get there? That’s part of the educational process as well.
Comment from audience: Just networks is not enough; because when you look at networks like the socialists’ forum or alternative groups which came up, they somehow don’t have the wherewithal to use it in the same way against the other networks which have much more resources (and) money, which cannot be generated by these networks.
Questioner 3:: If you look at the capitalist structure, making money is the single objective, which makes building the network harder.
Speaker 2: We are running out of time, so I request people to be brief.
Questioner 4: I will just comment, and would like your response on that. It seems to me that as long as you take the environmental problems only as fairness problems within the society, they are basically socio-political problems against which concerned people who think that this is unfair will get together and fight. And this does not become “the human problem” as such, unless and until you bring in the sustainability of the human race through environmental issues. So far, it seems that the sustainability of the human race and the sustainability of the kind of human life we are looking at, that is not brought in focus; that is not actually very well – crisply – defined. That seems to be the problem to me.
Questioner 5: A number of issues and the way you summed up the problem – analysis as well as the solution part – to my mind also seems to point to a much more fundamental transformation of education in terms of a more holistic, and in that sense, networked perspective. Because what tends to happen in our educational perspective is that one concern gains attention and gets added on. So that’s why you have this Supreme Court judgement that you must teach environment studies. All the other subjects are going on the way they are going on. And in the specialization mode also, the mathematicians will look only at mathematics and will not look at other things.
So I think a much more fundamental re-looking at the framework of curricula and the place of disciplines in such a re-looking and how they relate to each other – that is one part. And the way children are socialized into looking at the other – who is the other? Why is my grandchild or great-grandchild more important than the farmer downstream? The farmer downstream today is the other. My unborn great-grandchild is me. So how we grow up looking at ourselves and who’s part of us and who’s part of the other and how we get concerned about which issues, these two are some of the very (there would be others) fundamental issues which may not immediately look as if they are concerned with ecological sustainability. But with education, to incorporate world views of sustainability and ecology – that is the kind of thing we should look at.
Speaker 1: Thank you. You were able to link this. What was the question here?
Questioner 6: Two comments. Basically, what I also got is – between the why and why it matters – I think fundamentally it is also a question of most people having a view, rather than a world view. That links into your wholeness. And I can share something very fundamental to education. One of the things is that I have been an activist in environmental movements and as me and Nithya were smiling, we were there in Cane(?), we were there in anti-Narmada, we are there in Hasiru-Usiru – we are there in every environmental meeting or activists’ meeting. And I run into the same people, I run into the same set. I can count to fifteen people in my head – I can actually name them. There are fifteen activists in Bangalore who are standing in Lal Bagh, who are standing for Chickpet, who are standing for lakes, who are doing research – Sharath knows most of them too. So there is this whole motley – we call ourselves the motley group.
And so the whole education teaches you to be disciplined, but for standing up for the environment, for standing up for the rights of people, for fighting for Dalits, we are absolutely not taught resistance. In fact, any bit of resistance in the classroom is shut up. I can tell you where I learnt resistance. I thought it was unfair that my teacher gave me fifteen pages of writing as homework. So instead of my father writing a letter to the Principal, he said why don’t you tell that to the Principal? So I went, and in front of a whole crowd of people, shivering, I went and told that I think it is unfair that you are giving us fifteen pages; it takes me so much time, and I very nicely calculated and said. I did get punished, but then the homework came down to five pages. That was in a CBSE school. So I am sure.
As I was standing, fighting for the trees in Malleswaram circle, a very elderly gentleman came up to me and said, ‘You are a very bad girl. You are doing all this strike and everything, leading our children astray. These are bad things. Go away. Don’t waste your time. Do some useful work and earn money’. He actually gave this lecture to me on the road. So I think one of the things that we teach our children is to go on being sheep. And I think, as you said, if we – I mean, nobody strikes, whatever. It is all bad. And so when I send out the list to – excuse me for using the term – but when I send out a list saying there is resistance to the whole Wipro crowd, I may have two people from a company of how-many-ever – you know, five hundred or ten thousand, or whatever it is.
So basically I think it is about the world view, Sharath. Because environmental movements, unfortunately, are about justice, you may find that in your own working, out of ten people you may get one. I think education itself has to re-think about how we are making compliant citizens rather than citizens who are aware and willing to speak their mind out.
Speaker 1: A friend who moved from a Marxist-activist kind of position into an eco-Marxist position in his work summed it up very nicely – which is that in standard Marxist theory, we say people exploit people. Your standard conservationist says people exploit nature. But really, these two are inseparable. People, by exploiting nature, end up exploiting people – for example, in the Niamgiri case. And people, by exploiting people, end up exploiting nature also in certain ways. But it is not the only thing to reduce everything to one single problem, but to say that there are multiple ethical reasons why we should save both the environment and worry about social justice – and the content of what we define as ‘the good life’.
One of the things that neither the sustainability approach alone, or the social justice approach alone really tells us is – what is the content that you want to save? What is the content of that life that you either want to sustain across generations, or spread to everybody else in the world today? Is it a nano-car based life content, an Animal Planet-based life content, or is it something else? That part is not really answered by either the sustainability perspective or the social justice perspective. So we need all three perspectives. And that, I think, that’s sort of the expansion that one needs to have in terms of how we understand the problem before we talk about, in a sense, ‘spreading the word’. What is the word that we want to spread?
I just wanted to end by saying that one other thing that you will find in this – Anjali’s point sort of brought it home to me – is that if you see the environmental education curriculum that is being drafted today and all its merits, I think the idea of the court to patch on environmental education as an additional subject is fundamentally a problem. And then, in addition, you end up – you know, the court itself, for example, understands environmental education...
as environmental science education. And this sort of de-politicizes the environment, right? Because how would an environmental scientist put across the message? Your life is in jeopardy – your future is in jeopardy. That’s about it. Very rarely you will come across an environmental scientist who will say you are very unfair to others if you pollute their lives by driving around in a diesel vehicle which emits particulate matter while you are sitting in an AC vehicle inside; so you can’t feel the same there. So really, nobody in the scientists’ sphere is going to cast it as in a wider ethical kind of framework. And that’s one of the things that we need to watch out for when we need to integrate – when we start thinking of the educational viewpoint.

Hardy: I just want to add two things which are here in the paper, which he has not talked about. One, of course, is the fact of what is sustenance? What needs to be sustained? That is a question that we need to think about. When you say that a preservationist looks at the (unclear) of everything which we sustain. But there are many things in the world – in our society – which we don’t want to sustain. So when we talk about sustenance, there has to be some understanding and analysis of what – is it worth sustaining over time? Some of the things people talk about obliquely. There are deeper ethical and social issues that will determine what should be preserved and what should not be preserved. Everything does not need to be preserved. And that’s one main (unclear).
The second thing is that he has also talked about – in some sense – the largeness of the system. For him, the problem is with our feeling helpless. There is this feeling of helplessness; so what do you do? This is also because the system that we all are living in is very big. It’s really huge; we don’t know where to start with things – where we can start intervening to make a difference. That is also something which he has talked about – that there is something about a stand that a small system – and it’s not from shoe-markets’ (unclear) that he is saying. He is saying that a system damages itself. Catastrophes and disturbances in a larger system are more difficult to predict, and they can cause larger damages.
The other thing is the way for the frank and smaller system is to go democratic. It has more possibility for being equitable and gives everyone a voice. That also becomes important. And the last thing which I think is very important – what we take away from here – is that if we have education, we are able to talk about what is a good life, personally. What is concern for the others? And that a good life means being concerned about others. If that message is a care-love combination, then that’s a much better way of talking about the issues of environment than talking about global warming and (unclear). Thank you.