Whose globe? Whose concerns?

Whose earth is it that we are talking about? Whose concerns are global environmental issues, such as a growing population and the destruction of bio-diversity? Who is articulating all this? Is it the prerogative of the minority, and powerful, elite to make these statements? If this is the segment of society that is going to be prosecutor and judge, then clearly, the point has been missed. Because, there is a lot more to the subject than is visible on the surface, says noted environmentalist PANKAJ SEKHSARIA.

ABOUT eight months ago, Butterfly Futures, a little known journal published from Bangalore by the "Alliance for a Responsible, Plural and United World", asked me for an article on today's global environmental concerns and what was being done about them. My first reaction was no. I could not do it because I did not know enough on the subject. It is a burning issue of our times and scientists and experts all over the world are seriously involved in the science and technicalities of this very urgent matter. Matters are complex and are being discussed at various national and international forums and maybe I am not qualified to comprehensively look at, understand and write about all this. This was quite my immediate, and almost instinctive, reaction.

But as I put my mind to it, a series of thoughts questioning this refusal and challenging these assumptions ran through my head. Was I scared that I did not have the scientific and technical information, the data and the figures? Was it, in my perception, that I needed to know all this to deal with these issues of global concern? Is the matter of my survival so much a matter of what the figures say, how the statistics look, what the averages are and what the experts opine? And then, there were the other very basic questions that have always been a concern for me... whose globe and whose concerns?

This prompted me to try and articulate some of these concerns and questions and I sat down to write them down. What helped me further was the fact that I had just returned from a long meeting and training session in New Delhi on the environment and the buzzword of development practitioners, "sustainable development".

Let me illustrate this. A series of experts talked to us on related topics at this session. Almost unanimously, they included rising populations in developing countries, global warming, increasing pollution, the ozone hole, deforestation and destruction of biodiversity in their list of urgent global environmental concerns. All this is known, but there was something I thought that was still missing.

Many of them came with loads of data, graphs, tables and lots of figures. One of them, a senior agricultural scientist and bio- technologist, spoke eloquently and at length on the damage that had been caused by the chemical agriculture of the Green Revolution, of the depleting quality of the soil, of the loss of water security and the destruction of biodiversity. He spoke of how the excessive use of chemicals was making the land sterile, of how water intensive agriculture had led to water logging that was threatening large parts of Punjab and how biodiversity destruction could be the bane of future agricultural stability. We went wrong, he said, and we should have been careful.

His solution? Biotechnology. He ended by saying this in as much as one single line. So simple, that it sounded absurd to me. But, and this is a big but, do I have the right to question this? As a common citizen, does my opinion matter? Or will it be that we shall take certain decisions as a people, and as a nation because some experts decide this is the way it must be? I may not know enough about biotechnology. However, I do have fears, I have questions and I have doubts and I know that people all over the world do. How then can I trust that this "expert" or one of his breed will not be back after 25 years and explain to the next generation how big a mistake biotechnology was? Maybe it will not, but that is exactly what we thought of the Green Revolution when it began, didn't we?

Another speaker during the workshop was a senior expert on population and demographics. At some point in his presentation, he was talking about productivity and national wealth. The most critical parameters to evaluate these, he explained, were the level of education of the nation's citizens, how much they earn and how much they spend. Individuals who do not meet these criteria are useless as far as the well being and progress of the nation is concerned.

By inference, this meant that the large percentage of the population - our farmers - are useless. Most of them, we know, are illiterate (not uneducated), many do not spend money on chemical fertilizers and pesticides and neither do they sell their produce in the market place. They make no numerical contribution to the Gross National Product (GNP) or the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or any other such very important (sic) indices! Are we saying then, that they are lesser citizens? Do we have no value for what they do and what they have? What about the tremendous knowledge and wisdom with which they live their life and influence many others around them? If they are not even contributing to this nation, is anyone going to be bothered to ask what his or her problems/concerns are? Are we aware of, or willing to look at the globe as he or she does? Or is it that they have to look at the world as we see it and also want them to?

This is what brings me to - the basic concern that is reflected in the title of this essay as well. Whose globe after all is it that we are talking about? Whose concern are these global concerns and, importantly, who is articulating these? Is this the prerogative only of the miniscule elite of society (where I include myself)? The elite that has the power and the resources to sit in comfortable offices, connect to the world with modern means of communication and make statements on the state of the environment and what should be national and international concerns?

If this is the segment of society that is going to inform this debate, voice concern and decide remedial measures, then, clearly the point has been missed. There is a lot more to the talk about global environmental concerns than is visible on the surface. What about power equations, the distribution of resources, equity-inequity, misuse and intimidation, ambition and greed? Unfortunately, however, no one is willing to discuss and address these, and unless we do that, all talk about global ecological concerns will remain just that - empty talk.

What more proof can one want of this than the present status of the Kyoto Protocol to deal with climate change? Over the last few years, global warming has become central to the global issues on the environment. It is a well known fact that affluent North America and Europe have been primarily responsible for the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which is leading to rising global temperatures. Just look at the figures of carbon dioxide emissions, one of the most important greenhouse gases. For 1950 to 1995, the amount of carbon dioxide emissions from the United States was the highest in the world at 5,468 million tonnes. Per capita emission in 1995 was 20.8 tonnes. Compare this with emissions from India which were 908.7 million tonnes and one tonne respectively, and things are put into perspective. In spite of evidence of this kind, these richer nations of the North continue to be indifferent to the demand of the South to calculate greenhouse gas emissions on a per capita basis as each human being has an equal entitlement to the environment.

At the time when I had just received the request for the article from Butterfly Futures, George W. Bush was still only a U.S. Presidential candidate. He made it very clear even then, "I'm not going to let the U.S. carry the burden for cleaning up the world's air, like the Kyoto Protocol would have done. China and India were exempted from the treaty. I think we need to be more even handed." He sure has lived upto his promise. George Bush's backyard may be the dirtiest, but it is for us to clean it up and it is fair because he says it is so. The world might be burning down, but George Bush will continue to fiddle. It does not matter anyway because it is not his home that will be submerged when the seas rise. Some unfortunate Bangladeshi or Mauritian might suffer, but then that is his world.

Lots of other issues are also being discussed globally, but everything is made to revolve around the climate change debate. My question is why? We have, today, detailed international deliberations and agreements on climate change, on biodiversity, on desertification and on forests and deforestation. There is no doubting the fact that these are very important and we all need to honestly, and critically, deal with these issues. At the same time, however, I have never understood why something like water is not an issue of global ecological concern? The few "global" conferences or meetings on water have only been recent occurrences anyway. For the villager/farmer in some remote corner of India, the rise in global temperatures is not an issue and Kyoto may well be the name of another planet. Ask this person what he/she perceives as concerns and the answer will not be global warming, it will not be the ozone layer, it will not be deforestation. It will simply be water, because that is the world of this person. The problem, unfortunately, is that there is very little, if any, effort to find out from this person. Someone sitting in New York, or Tokyo or London or New Delhi just decides.

Similar is the case with deforestation. The rate of deforestation and the massive destruction of forests all over the world are matters of serious concern. They ought to be. However, while deforestation has become an issue of concern, fuelwood has not. A staggering 60 per cent of households in India use fuelwood as their main energy source for cooking. It is a matter of survival for a large section of our people and we have neither the time nor the inclination to look at it.

As a matter of fact, again and again, fuelwood collection is being blamed as one of the major causes of deforestation here. It does not matter that those who blame fuelwood collection for deforestation live in homes plush with exquisite furniture from these very forests. It is this section of society that continues to consume huge amounts of energy and resources that directly and indirectly play havoc with these forests and our environments.

This is the model of development that refuses to even accept that there can be alternatives; forget looking at them or trying to give them a chance. It is this kind of development and its proponents who point a finger at that "headload" of fuelwood as the main cause of deforestation and state in international forums that deforestation is the major cause of concern. In their backyard meanwhile, hectic lobbying continues for "development" like huge dams that submerge thousands of hectares of prime forests and mining projects that rip forests and leave the land threadbare.

The irony of this whole thing was apparent to me while attending the workshop in New Delhi that I have mentioned earlier. On one of those very days that we met in our air conditioned hall discussing the environment, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of progress and development of this great nation. At this altar, the Narmada, the fertile fields, thick forests and the thousands who live in this valley were made unwilling sacrificial lambs.

Why, may I further ask, is fodder not the subject of global concern? When this idea first crossed my mind, I thought I was stretching the argument a little too far. But after putting a little (not much) thought to it, it does not seem all that absurd. My life does not depend on fodder, nor do the lives of others like me who are asked to write and opine on these issues.

Recent surveys, particularly in the West, have shown that a growing percentage of school children do not know that the milk they drink every morning comes from the humble cow. For them it is the supermarket. This is the citizen of tomorrow and this is the generation that will tomorrow inform and dominate the global debate.

The person who is actually dependant on fodder and such natural resources is simply too busy trying to gather this resource because his/her survival critically depends on it. He/she simply has no time, unlike me, to spend a few hours trying to figure out what global ecological concerns are, what they should be and what they should not.

In realising this, I think, maybe, we will find some of the answers that we are looking for.

In association with The Transforming Word

The writer is a member of the environment action group, Kalpavriksh. He is based in Pune and writes regularly on issues of livelihoods, conservation and the environment.

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