THE ENVIRONMENTALIST OF THE POOR: ANIL AGARWAL, Economic and Political Weekly - R C Guha

For more than twenty years Anil Agarwal was India’s most articulate and influential writer on the environment. Viewing his career in the round, one is struck by several features. First, the ability to synthesize the results of specialized scientific studies. Second, the knack of communicating this synthesis in accessible prose. Third, the insistence that it was not enough for the environmentalist to hector and chastise: solutions had to be offered, even if the state was as yet unwilling to act upon them.
One is impressed, too, by the range of Agarwal’s work. Forests, water, biodiversity, and climate change at the global level, air pollution in a single city: he had studied and written about them all. What united these dispersed and prolific writings is that Agarwal sought always to approach environmental problems from the perspective of the poor. His oeuvre provided an intellectual and moral challenge to the belief that the poor were too poor to be green. He demonstrated that in the biomass economies of the rural Third World, the poor had a vital interest in the careful management of forests, soil, pasture, and water. (The rich could more easily shift to alternative fuels and building materials.) In his later work, he showed likewise that the more prosperous the country or community, the more likely it was to insulate itself from the harmful effects of pollution, while passing on the burden to the disadvantaged.
If one were forced to recommend a single essay of Agarwal’s, it must be his World Conservation Lecture of 1985, first published in The Environmentalist, 1986, and reprinted in an anthology edited by the present writer, (Social Ecology, OUP, 1994). This presents a detailed picture of environmental destruction in India, against the backdrop of the rather different Western experience. The examples are drawn from across the country, and deal with different natural resources. But the conclusions are crisply and unambiguously stated. The ‘first lesson’ is that ‘the main source of environmental destruction in the world is the demand for natural resources generated by the consumption of the rich (whether they are rich nations or rich individuals and groups within nations)…’ The ‘second lesson’ is that ‘it is the poor who are affected the most by environmental destruction’; thus, ‘eradication of poverty in a country like India is simply not possible without the rational management of our environment and that, conversely, environmental destruction will only intensify poverty’.
In this essay of 1986, Agarwal anticipates a theme later picked up by feminist writers. As he put it,
The destruction of the environment clearly poses the biggest threat to marginal cultures and occupations like that of tribals, nomads, fisherfolk and artisans, which have always been heavily dependent on their immediate environment for their survival. But the maximum impact of the destruction of biomass sources is on women. Women in all rural cultures are affected, especially women from poor landless, marginal and small farming families. Seen from the point of view of these women, it can be argued that all development is ignorant of women’s needs, and often anti-women, literally designed to increase their work burden.
The process of resource degradation, wrote Agarwal, had made it more difficult and dangerous for women to go about the business of fuel, fodder and water collection. He made an inspired distinction between ‘male’ trees¬—species promoted by the forest departments that seek to increase cash income—and ‘female’ species, those species that lighten the woman’s load yet tend not to be favored by public agencies. On the whole, Agarwal’s understanding of the gender dimensions of the environment debate was indubitably ahead of its time. It has always seemed to me that his precocity has not been adequately recognized, perhaps because in this regard he happened to belong to the wrong gender himself.