Asad Avenue Cleanup- GWEC ( written by Abrar B. Tohid )

It’s very recent and booming news that a team of foreigners, students from Japan have come over to our country to ‘clean up Dhaka’. They’ve even started their own page, titled ‘Clean Up Dhaka’ and have got a massive response from the population of Dhaka city. It all happened really fast, overnight the amount of support they got, overnight, overwhelmed even  the starter of this project, Jawad Mubashwir. 

They didn’t think that things would happen so fast, makes you think doesn’t it? Change is indeed inevitable, someone just has to get up there and start it, and Jawad was exactly that person that Bangladesh needed. He went abroad to study, if he wanted he could’ve never looked back and just carried on with his life but it was the love for his country and the love for the environment that brought him back and along with him some very willing friends from Japan, who wanted to be part of this change, this noble cause. Something to ponder on, why would they come here, leaving their country behind and coming here to clean up what we made dirty, It doesn’t really concern them does it? Maybe their love for the environment transcends notions of borders.

Our club, the GWEC decided to join hands in this noble work and we decided to clean up Asad Avenue.  

On the 24^th of August at 9 am we began our mission from the gate of our school, guided by our moderator Julian Malcolm Mendez sir, we along with the help of our A level students and teachers set our hands to work cleaning up our streets. It was tough but not impossible, and we proved just that. Shovels, gloves, plastic bags and down on the streets with just a handful of people, there were a lot of people just standing there, questioning what we were doing, why we were doing it. Some gave us encouragement whilst others had the audacity of saying that it is useless to do something like this. But that didn’t stop us, we were firm on our goals and firm on our love for the environment we live in. The leaders of tomorrow, but we start today or else this ‘tomorrow’ is never going to come. In a way we proved what the determination of the youth can do. It’s not about bragging, but setting an example that inspires someone out there, even if it is just one person because it was the thought of just one person that brought this whole thing together. The club persevered and we are proud that we were actually able to make a difference, we were able to attract people to this thing, the first hour went by and we thought maybe it would just be us and the people with camera taking videos and snaps but then swarming from here and there came students from different universities to help us out.  

One of the contributors to this very blog and our ex student Abie Rawad Akhand is someone who deserves a special thanks for helping us out in every way possible, he is a very active member of our blog and he writes in his free time to contribute to other news sources, he is someone who shares the very same agenda as us. We were short on hands but we hurdled through it. Raising awareness to people, picking every little cigarette butt, every little peanut peel, we did it all. On that day no one went ‘eww’ no one felt ashamed of bending over to pick up someone else’s trash, no one had an unnecessary feeling of ‘high class’ in them, one thought brought us all together and made us forget all of our pretences, a thought for a better tomorrow.

A lot of people have been commenting about this thing, they’ve been saying that it is so shameful that foreigners have to come and clean our country, maybe we should simply get this out of our head, these man made concepts of borders, maybe we should realise that this isn’t my world, this isn’t your world, this is our world, it’s about time we came together and realised that, it’s about time we understood that together we can make a difference. These people they say this whilst they sit behind their computer screens and sip coffee, maybe just posting a Facebook status isn’t enough anymore, heck, when was it ever enough? Your opinions have been heard, the awareness has been raised, it is time you got down to do something practical. When you see a fire you don’t sit on Facebook and update a status saying that someone should douse that fire, you simply go and put it out yourself. The Earth, the world you live in, is burning. The question is, will we be the ones to put out the fire? Or will we continue to let the earth burn up like a tinder box while we casually sip coffee in our air conditioned rooms.

002 by Abie Rawad Akand

005 by Abie Rawad Akand

003 by Abie Rawad Akand

004 by Abie Rawad Akand

http://goo.gl/forms/wY7oMJrAl1


Hey guys, this is the registration form for Aobhan's next event #Triple R.
It's an ECA that you can participate, based on the environment. It's a project I've been planning for a while now and I just thought it'd be worth sharing for those of you who are interested. The Registration Form is given in the link above.

An issue we all to be aware of. As members of GWEC the spread of education regarding environmental degradation is our duty. It's a link to my article


http://dhakainsider.com/bangladesh-news/importance-of-environmental-education-in-bangladesh-to-make-a-cleaner-path-to-induce-information-about-climate-change/

Urgent: Mandatory Reading for All

This article by R.C. Guha highlights a view point that we are trying to convey through the blog.
All members are encouraged to go through this.

Guha - The Paradox of Global Environmentalism by rashif95

No water, No life, No blue, No green

The attempt of Green Watch 15 is to increase awareness about a very important factor, something we all need, which is water. We are following the motto: "no water, no life, no blue, no green" which explains the current situation in a gist. This year we talk about hydrosphere. Our aim is not only to bring about a certain degree of awareness to the people reading our blog but we also hope to help them bring about a gradual change in the hydrosphere.

Greenwatch 2015 by rashif95

We at the GWEC aim to implement newer ideas to spread awareness about the issue at hand. This year we are planning to hold up all recent issues and developments regarding the hydrosphere in our Green Watch 2015 which is the official magazine for our GWEC. 

Urgent: Meeting Update for 08/08/15

Cabinet general and alumni members meeting tomorrow from 9 to 12 at the class 7 Mars venue for making the GWEC schedule for the academic year of 2015 - 16
Please kindly attend tomorrow Saturday, 08/08/15. Thank you.

The World Tiger Day 2015 - GWEC (compiled by Abie Akhand and Rashif Al-Mahmood)

106? - this happens to be the result representing the preliminary findings of a very rather interesting population of tigers left within the boundaries of Bangladesh, it is indeed worrying to say the least. Especially for a nation that prides the great cat as its nation animal. Eleven years ago when the Bengal Tiger started to face extinction, statistics and data capture provided figures of the big cats to be around 440 in the wild. Efforts to help tiger populations began all over the world to help reduce the number of casualties in the ever growing war against poaching of these magnificent animals.  The people of the world helped by raising awareness and for a while due to selective and captive breeding, hope seemed to rekindle for the tigers representing our nations to the world. With everyone doing their part, S.F.X Greenherald International School also joined in on it. Our very own GreenWorld Earth Club (GWEC), led by Julian Malcolm Mendez and Shariful Anwar marched and enthusiastic faces consisting almuni as well as current students from Manik Mia Avenue with hundreds dressed in orange standing up for the endangered species. An army of orange made its way to Krishibid Institute of Bangladesh to attend a workshop on how to inspire the nation to dedicate its resources to save these magnificent animals.

Yet after so much effort, it seems the tigers are once again at the face of extinction. 29^th of July has been recognized as the World Tiger Day to raise awareness for the presence of such adversity to the cats. It is recognized all around the world every year and was founded at the Saint Petersburg Tiger Summit in 2010. Many animal welfare organizations pledged to help these wonderful creatures and are still helping to raise funds to reach this goal. The goal of Tiger Day is to promote the protection and expansion of the wild tiger habitats and to gain support through awareness for tiger conservation.

With every factor weighing in even if by the slightest, tigers are anything but safe from extinction. Right now, the best we can do is assist to raise awareness regarding the issue and taking a stand to help maintain more canvases of orange with stripes. For it’s our help that shall engender the balancing act and hopefully tip it towards the benefit of the Bengal Tigers.

The Poster by rashif95

At the Rally by rashif95

The Team at the Conference by rashif95

The Team by rashif95

The Rally by rashif95

The Bus Ride by rashif95

Tiger Day Conference by rashif95

The International Wildlife Day

Tomorrow is the International Wildlife Day. On this occasion, the Ministry of Forest has invited our school to join their rally. The rally will end in the Osmani Auditorium. Executive members, who are interested to participate in this program, are requested to report in the school tomorrow by 8:00 am.

Environmentalism: A Global History, by Ramachandra Guha. New York: Longman (2000), xiii, 161 pp. [Reviewed by Kathryn Hochstetler, Department of Political Science, Colorado State University]

Environmentalism: A Global History is best read as a short but ambitious text that will introduce readers to a series of environmental thinkers from across the globe.  In Guha’s own explanation of the book, “this is a historical account and analysis of the origins and expressions of environmental concern, of how individuals and institutions have perceived, propagated, and acted upon their experience of environmental decay” (p. 2).  As such, it is not a history of the environment itself, which he leaves to scientists, but a history of environmental ideas.  In just 145 pages of text, Guha covers many of the most prominent environmental thinkers over the last two centuries, and adds a few lesser known as well.  The thinkers are placed in their social contexts, with particular attention to the unfolding of industrial and colonial (and post-) processes.  Taken as a whole, the book is well written and engaging; I think it would be successful as a text chosen to instigate discussion of global and historical varieties of environmentalism.

Guha divides the book into two halves, one for each of two waves of global environmentalism.  In the first wave, which began in the 1860s and continued through the interwar period, three varieties of environmental thought competed to construct a diagnosis of environmental degradation and an alternative vision to it: the “back to the land” movement, the scientific conservation movement, and the wilderness movement.  The “back to the land” movement found strong adherents in England and Germany, as industrialization brought a revival of agrarian sentiment.  Pre-industrialized India also contributed a more practical agrarian thinker in Mahatma Gandhi, who read Carpenter and Ruskin while studying in England.  Scientific conservation, characterized by a concern with environmental degradation and confidence in science’s ability to reverse that degradation, also took root in Britain and Germany before spreading elsewhere.  Global transmission of the ideas of scientific conservation was more direct and custodial, as colonial powers established state-run departments to manage their colonies’ forests, soil, water, wildlife, and fisheries.  Guha strongly criticizes these management efforts on both social and environmental grounds, preferring Japan’s indigenous forest science.  Similarly, colonial rule spread the wilderness idea to Europe’s colonies, with protection of native wildlife often taking priority over native peoples.  The wilderness thinking of the Americans John Muir and Aldo Leopold (born in Germany) is presented more sympathetically, with attention to their differences as well as their shared appreciation for non-human species.

The first wave of environmentalism ended with an interlude of  “ecological innocence” after World War II, when both North and South were committed to economic growth through technology.  Dissenters from technological optimism ­ Sauer, Mumford, Schumacher, Mira Behn (in India) ­ were easily ignored in the industrialized world, and the newly independent countries sought economic liftoff on the western path, not a renewed village economy.

With numerous others, Guha dates the beginning of the second wave of environmentalism to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), which he extols for its impact and quality.  Across the globe, the second wave added an environmentally engaged public to the previously expert arena of environmental thought.  Guha organizes his discussion of the second wave with three chapters on what would once have been called the first, second, and third worlds.  Among the affluent, both the threat of impending doom and the desire to consume nature as another good drove the steady growth of the environmental movement after 1962 (Guha’s data end with 1991).  Guha differentiates deep ecologists from environmental justice activists in American radical environmentalism.  A section on the German Greens, “the finest achievement of the second wave of environmentalism” (p. 97), completes this chapter.  Guha cites Gandhian influences in all of these branches of modern environmentalism, but still sees a strong polarization between this environmentalism of the affluent and the environmentalism of the poor of the next chapter.  He rejects the hypothesis of Inglehart and others that environmental concern belongs to the wealthy, but notes a change in its concerns.  When peasants and indigenous peoples of Malaysia, India, Thailand, and Brazil mobilize on environmental issues, they link environmentalism to social justice and livelihood concerns.  Sections comparing Brazil to India and Chico Mendes’ rubber tappers to the Chipko movement offer some rare extended concrete examples of environmental thought in action.  Finally, a brief chapter on environmentalism (or the lack thereof) in the Soviet Union and in China serves mostly to underline that the strongest debate of the second wave is that between North and South.

A concluding chapter argues that a shared global common future would have to be based on a genuinely equitable and participatory global democracy.  In the absence of that democracy, concrete environmental debates will be conflict-ridden.  Yet Guha’s final word is that two ideas unite all the kinds of environmentalists he has discussed: restraint, in the sense of limits on behavior toward both the environment and other humans, and farsightedness, looking toward “a common future ­ and the multiple paths to get to it” (p. 145).

As should be clear from this summary, this global environmental history synthesizes a very broad array of environmental ideas, across both time and space.  As Guha himself says, this requires him to be “savagely selective” (p. 7).  Fitting the introductory nature of this book, the selection criteria favor the better-known thinkers and movements, but there are plenty of lesser-known stories to send the more experienced reader to the bibliographic essay at the end.  (This is especially useful since there are few citations in the text, and no conventional bibliography.)

The first part of the book, on the first wave of environmentalism, best achieves Guha’s two aims:  to present a “trans-national perspective on the environmental debate” and “to document the flow of ideas across cultures” (p. 8).  In this section, we see clear linkages across cultures as travel, reading, and colonial institutions moved ideas around the world both freely and by force.  These chapters show at once the global relevance of certain environmental ideas, such as wilderness, and their very different local meanings depending on where, how, and by whom they are put into practice.

In the second section, on the second wave, there is much less attention to the transnational flow of environmental ideas, despite the fact that global news reports, the internet, and international travel and meetings have shrunk the effective distance between peoples.  This is especially noteworthy in the chapter on the southern challenge, where several of the examples Guha uses are commonly cited as classic instances of international advocacy networks (see Keck and Sikkink 1998).  Guha stresses their domestic origins, which are certainly also a part of the story, but his references to the “prolific misrepresentations...by the international media” (p. 119) do not do justice to the transnational flow of ideas, perspectives, and activists at work.  Similarly, he misses the ways that at least parts of the environmental justice movements of the north were inspired by their southern counterparts.  I would have liked to see a fuller analysis of transnational environmentalism as we turn into the 21^st century.  Is it, as some have argued, a new variant of the 19^th century’s colonial relations?  Could it be, in contrast, a manifestation of the more equitable and participatory global democracy Guha seeks?

Throughout the book, Guha’s characteristic post-colonial critiques give the book a consistent perspective, which will challenge the northern students who are likely to be among the book’s readers.  Because of its focus on environmental thinkers across the globe, it is not the best presentation of the complexities of Guha’s own perspective, however.  For that, I prefer some of his other works, such as Ecology and Equity (with Madhav Gadgil, 1995) and Varieties of Environmentalism:  Essays North and South (with Juan Martinez Alier, 1997).

References Cited:

Gadgil, Madhav, and Ramachandra Guha. 1995. Ecology and Equity: The Use of Abuse of Nature in Contemporary India.  New Delhi: Penguin Books India.

Guha, Ramachandra, and Juan Martinez-Alier. 1997. Varieties of Environmentalism:  Essays North and South.  London: Earthscan.

Keck, Margaret E., and Kathryn Sikkink. 1998. Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

A notice for the participants

Registered GWEC members for the 1^st International Nature Summit called "Green Inspiration" of Notre Dame College Nature Study Club, are requested to report at school by 7:00 a.m. tomorrow.

A call for "Green Inspiration"

This is to attract interested students and GWEC members to register for the 1^st International Nature Summit called "Green Inspiration" of Notre Dame College, Nature Study Club. It is a two day event, which will be held on 23^rd and 24^th of January in Notre Dame College.

The summit also holds a range of competitions, which are suited for the following participants.

>For University Category (Graduates and Undergraduates): Confab seminar (Power Point Presentation), Nature Olympiad and Photography

>>For Higher Secondary Category (aged 15-18 yrs or Classes XI & XII): Transformation (Turn Coat), Confab Seminar (Power Point Presentation), Nature Olympiad, Eco-Friendly Project, Wall Magazine & Photography

>>>For Junior Category (aged 12-15 or Classes VII to X): Nature Olympiad, Eco-Friendly Project, Wall Magazine & Photography

For registration and more info: www.greeninspiration.weebly.com

The GWEC team wishes all of our regular readers a wonderful grace-filled Christmas and warm holidays. 

*Further notice of the club's activities will be posted as soon as school reopens. 

Reduce - Reuse - Recycle 

Gandhi and Ecological Marxism

The independent India witnessed several developmental policies which both protects and destructs the natural environment. Gadgil and Guha observed that the development policies of India created three kinds of people, the omnivores, ecosystem people and the ecological refugees. Omnivores comprise the elite group who are the real beneficiaries of the economic development. The ecological refugees encompass the displaced and environmentally exploited tribal and downtrodden while the ecosystem people depend the natural environment for their material needs. The independent India became “a cauldron of conflicts” between these groups, “triggered by the abuse of natural resources to benefit the narrow elite of the omnivores”. The environmental movements mushroomed in India as a response against this abuse. Guha identified three ideological trends in Indian environmental activism; crusading Gandhians, ecological Marxists and appropriate technologists. He argues that the crusading Gandhians upholds the pre-capitalist and pre-colonial village community as the exemplar of ecological and social harmony. The methods of action favoured by this group are squarely in the Gandhian tradition-or at least of one interpretation of that tradition-fasts, padayatras, and poojas, in which a traditional cultural idiom is used to further the strictly modern cause of environmentalism. The appropriate technologists strive for a working synthesis of agriculture and industry, big and small units, and western and eastern technological traditions. The ecological Marxists are hostile to traditions and rely heavily on the scientific facts. Guha mentions the works of KSSP as an instance of ecological Marxism.

While closely analyzing the movement one can see the elements of these three strands in Silent Valley movement. Like the crusading Gandhians, the movement adopted the Gandhian methodologies to protest against the environmental injustice. The activists of the movement include people from different strata of society, like students, teachers, intellectuals, journalists, social workers etc. They organized padayatras, prayer meetings etc to educate the public. KSSP (Ecological Marxists as explained by Guha) used science as a medium to analyze the facts that the present project is not enough to satisfy the existing power needs. They taught the people of how the Silent Valley forest contributed to the southern monsoon and blissful climate.  The grass root acceptability of KSSP and its wide audience helped the movement to achieve its objectives.

The ideological difference between the Gandhian and Marxian system of environmentalism is that Gandhi believed modern industrialization as the root cause of environmental degradation while Marxists think capitalism as the major element which deteriorates the environment. Marx suggests the development of science and technology as a tool for mastering nature while Gandhi considers science and technology as a hindrance to nature conservation. Gandhi advocates the limitation of human wants for the sake of nature while Marx stood for “each man according to his needs, and each man according to his ability”.  Among these differences, there are a number of similarities between these two groups. Both Gandhian and Marxian system seeks justice to the poor people who are living in tune with nature. They promoted the idea of self-sufficiency and sustainable economy and work for an egalitarian society.

The Silent Valley movement comprises both Gandhian and Marxian elements in methodologies and practices. The success of the movement reminds us the relevance of a “fourth world”, a concept put forward by Dr. M P Parameswaran, an active participant of KSSP. He proposed of a fourth world, his vision about a future world, which is a synthesis of Marxian, Gandhian, Environmentalists, Eco-feminists, Human right activists etc. It is an alternative world order which is based on the participative democracy, views on progress and approach towards the progress of productive forces and technology. M P argues that, today we are facing a challenge from the capitalist world. Certain capitalist’s countries disseminate the message that there is no alternative to capitalism. The socialist countries like China accept the fact that they too cannot escape from the capitalism in certain contextual basis. The remaining solution is the fourth world which comprises the ideologies of Marxism, Gandhism, Peace Studies, Environmentalism, eco feminism and human rights.

SOME THOUGHT ON THE DEEP ECOLOGY MOVEMENT - Arne Naess - by Alan Drengson

In 1973, Norwegian philosopher and mountaineer Arne Naess introduced the phrase “deep ecology” to environmental literature. Environmentalism had emerged as a popular grassroots political movement in the 1960s with the publication of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring. Those already involved in conservation and preservation efforts were now joined by many others concerned about the detrimental environmental effects of modern industrial technology. The longer-range, older originators of the movement included writers and activists like Henry David Thoreau, John Muir and Aldo Leopold; more mainstream awareness was closer to the “wise-use” conservation philosophy pioneered by Gifford Pinchot.
In 1972, Naess made a presentation in Bucharest at the Third World Future Research Conference. In his talk, he discussed the longer-range background of the ecology movement and its concern with an ethic respecting nature and the inherent worth of other beings. As a mountaineer who had climbed all over the world, Naess had enjoyed the opportunity to observe political and social activism in diverse cultures. Both historically and in the contemporary movement, Naess saw two different forms of environmentalism, not necessarily incompatible with each other. One he called the “long-range deep ecology movement” and the other, the “shallow ecology movement.” The word “deep” in part referred to the level of questioning of our purposes and values when arguing in environmental conflicts. The “deep” movement involves deep questioning, right down to fundamental root causes. The short-term, shallow approach stops before the ultimate level of fundamental change, often promoting technological fixes (e.g. recycling, increased automotive efficiency, export-driven monocultural organic agriculture) based on the same consumption-oriented values and methods of the industrial economy. The long-range deep approach involves redesigning our whole systems based on values and methods that truly preserve the ecological and cultural diversity of natural systems.
The distinguishing and original characteristics of the deep ecology movement were its recognition of the inherent value of all living beings and the use of this view in shaping environmental policies. Those who work for social changes based on this recognition are motivated by love of nature as well as for humans. They recognize that we cannot go on with industrialism's “business as usual.” Without changes in basic values and practices, we will destroy the diversity and beauty of the world, and its ability to support diverse human cultures.
In 1972, very few people appreciated that Naess was characterizing an existing grassroots movement, rather than simply stating his personal philosophy. In order to establish shared objectives, Naess proposed a set of eight principles to characterize the deep ecology movement as part of the general ecology movement. The platform can be endorsed by people from a diversity of religious and philosophical backgrounds as well as differing political affiliations. “Supporters of the deep ecology movement” (rather than being referred to as “deep ecologists”) are united by a long-range vision of what is necessary to protect the integrity of the Earth's ecological communities and ecocentric values.

Shocking Effects Of Deforestation Exposed In Brutal Print Ads

These images are gruesome and brutal, but they have to be shown because of their important message – they raise awareness of the often unseen casualties of deforestation around the world. Creative and art director Ganesh Prasad Acharya, together with copywriter Kaushik Katty Roy, created these social ads for Sanctuary Asia, one of the first and greatest environmental news magazines in India.

The slogan on these ads, “When the wood go, wildlife goes” drives home the point made by these macabre images – when you cut down habitats, you might as well kill the animals that live there as well. Rainforests contain as much as 80% of the world’s biodiversity, so their rapid destruction in South America and Asia is a serious problem.

Animal rights social ads call of the wild sanctuary Asia by rashif95

Hosting the NEO and more...

GWEC, besides its own annual programs, participates and plays host to programs hosted by other institutions working in the environment conservation sector. One such program is the National Earth Olympiad organized by Bangladesh Youth Environmental Initiative (BYEI).  GWEC has been a partner organization for the National Olympiad and Greenherald International School was the venue for the school rounds of the competition in 2012 and Dhaka Divisional Round for 2013 and 2014.

Below are some of the images of the event:

Registration for NEO at the School Ground by rashif95

Registration rounds of the event taking place at the school venue with the help of volunteers from GWEC 

The NEO Divisional Round at the Hall by rashif95

Divisional rounds of NEO 2014 taking place at one of the three exam halls/auditoriums of the school.  

Coincidentally, students from Greenherald have been doing exceptionally well at this particular Olympiad, we had numerous students ranked in the top 15^th positions in the national rounds of the event in 2012 and four of our current students and two ex-students made it to the top 15^th in 2013, who were selected to participate in a camp organized by the Dhaka University Geology department to prepare the students for the International Earth Science Olympiad that took place in Mysore, India. Much of these accomplishments can be attributed to the participation of our student in similar annual intra-school Olympiads that are organized on subjects such as geography, environmental management and earth science with the help of our ever-enthusiastic faculty members who act as mentors and supervisors for the event.

Six GWEC Members at the NEO National Round by rashif95

Six of the top fifteen candidates are former and current students of our school.

Dr. Sen Gupta, Dr Dilshad Begum and Ms. Amy Gonzalvez - Adjudicating the CONFAB Seminar by rashif95

Our faculty members adjudicating presentations for a confab seminar on ‘ Mitigation measures for effects of climate change.’

The Olympiad Exam at School Hall by rashif95

Intra-school environmental science Olympiad taking place at the school.

Compiled and Reported by:

ABHIJEET BALL AND RASHIF AL-MAHMOOD

Environmentalism and the Bicycle

Environmentalism continues a tradition of the bicycle playing an important role in social movements. During the 1890s the bicycle became symbolic of women’s push for greater freedoms; it enabled an escape from gendered norms in styles of dress, patterns of mobility, and types of leisure, such that ‘the movement it set in motion for re-evaluating social conventions of dress, manners, status and roles was irreversible’. Falling prices between the late nineteenth century and the outbreak of the First World War produced a democratic expansion in the accessibility of bicycles, which became an important aspect of the cultural and political worlds of socialists throughout north-western Europe and North America. In Britain, cycling was a key part of the Clarion movement, which ‘provided cultural support for socialists’, and which ‘was very much part of the socialist offensive in the Edwardian period’. Each weekend urban cyclists took to bicycles and rode into the countryside to spread what Stephen Yeo calls the new ‘religion of socialism’.
Feminists and socialists utilized a relatively novel technology to change their everyday lives and construct wider demands, for release from patriarchal constraints for women, and for a socialist society to liberate the working class. Thus in its early days the bicycle was caught up in the pursuit of greater freedoms; as an object of independent mobility it powerfully enabled the expansion of real and imaginative horizons. But by the 1960s, British society was accelerating towards mass motorization, and other modes of mobility were consequently being marginalized. A new critique of the negative side-effects of processes of modernization, and growing environmental awareness, began to take hold. An important issue for post-1960s progressive politics is the growing dominance of the system of motorized mobility and its effects; ever increasing speed, distance and dispersal alongside the erosion of ‘local community’, conviviality and ‘nature’. Mass automobility had already been a target of Situationist critiques. This tradition of thinking, in which the car symbolizes an inauthentic and alienated life, informs a contemporary anarchism which celebrates the bicycle as the car’s other.
But what of the bicycle’s relevance to environmentalism? The early 1970s were dominated by concerns over energy crises. In his hugely influential Small is Beautiful the economist E. F. Schumacher warned that ‘the inroads being made into the world’s non-renewable resources, particularly those of fossil fuels, are such that serious bottlenecks and virtual exhaustion loom ahead in the quite foreseeable future’. A range of influential writers also wrote out of this context, including André Gorz and, most significantly, Ivan Illich. In Energy and Equity, however, Illich moves beyond the energy crises to lament what he sees as a more fundamental ‘involuntary acceleration of personal rhythms’ which motorized traffic imposes.
During this period environmentalist concerns shifted away from the protection of particular sites and species and towards more explicit critique of specific environmentally damaging practices, such as use of the car. Before the 1960s, concerns about the car were largely the preserve of transport campaigners, and emphasized the damage cars cause to individual bodies, and especially to pedestrians and cyclists. As automobility accelerated, rising traffic and congestion, alongside the substantial reshaping of urban environments to accommodate the car, provoked widespread concern. Like the later anti-road campaigns of the 1990s, controversies around the destruction of neighborhoods and communities by rising car use and constant road building contributed to broader processes of the car’s politicization and vilification. So already during the 1960s and 1970s, influenced by new environmentalist discourses, the damage which cars in general do to society and the environment in general is coming much more into focus.
Aligned with this shift was the incorporation of various ‘green’ practices into new political repertoires. With regard to transport, what is needed is a vehicle able to negotiate the urban environment without leading to its degradation, suffocation or ceaseless expansion. With cars driving affluent societies towards the environmental apocalypse, bicycles become the route to ecological sanity. As the car becomes increasingly constructed as ‘the problem’, the car’s other, the bicycle, emerges as ‘the solution’. In Energy and Equity Illich insists that ‘free people must travel the road to productive social relations at the speed of a bicycle’. Illich also provides a set of figures still used by environmental transport campaigners. Based on a series of calculations of the amount of time it takes to pay for and run a car, Illich suggests that ‘The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: less than five miles per hour’.
With much in its favor and little to say against it, this vehicle takes center-stage in the virtuous materialities of environmentalism and, among environmental activists, cycling as a practice clearly embodies and performs environmental concern and commitment. It is no accident that symbolic green journeys, what we might call ‘green pilgrimages’, are frequently made by bicycle. Though not all activists are committed riders and outspoken advocates of the bicycle, they invariably recognize and respect this object as unambiguously good. It occupies a central role in the environmentalist imaginary even when absent from the mundane practices of everyday life.
To summarize, the bicycle’s very importance as a mode of mobility among environmental activists facilitates a way of life that is relatively ‘local’, ‘public’ and ‘healthy’. The centrality of a distinctive and ‘public’ form of mobility in a spatially compact everyday life results in a high degree of interconnectedness, keeping local environmentalists in touch with one another and thus contributing to the reproduction of their collective green culture. Environmentalists’ use of the bicycle, in other words, actively constructs a local green culture, and the distinctive green lifestyles which that culture tends to reproduce.

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.

"The Resource Basis of Human Activity" by Partha Dasgupta in 'The Economics of the Environment'

 All our activities are dependent ultimately on resources found in Nature. Whether it is consumption or production, or whether it is exchange, the commodities and services that are involved can be traced to constituents provided by Nature. Thus, the ingredients of a typical manufactured product are other manufactured products, labor time and skills, and resources found in Nature. Each of the constituent manufactured products is in turn a complex of yet other manufactured products, labor time and skills, and resources found in Nature. And so on. This means that the manufactured product with which we began is ultimately a combination of labor time and skills, and resources found in Nature. But labor, too, is a produced good. Even raw labor is an output, manufactured by those resources that sustain life; resources such as the multitude of nutrients we consume, the air we breathe, and the water we drink. It follows that all commodities are traceable to natural resources.

In many instances, natural resources are of direct value to us as needs or as consumption goods (e.g. breathable air, drinkable water, and fisheries); in others, they are of indirect value (e.g. plankton, which serve as food for fish, which we, in turn, consume); sometimes they are both (e.g. drinking and irrigation water). The "value" I am alluding to may be utilitarian (e.g. the resource may be a source of food, or a keystone species in an ecosystem), it may be aesthetic (e.g. the resource in question could be a landscape), or it may be intrinsic (e.g. a living animal); indeed, it may be all these things at once.

Resource stocks are measured in different ways, depending on their character: in mass units (e.g. biomass units for forests, cow dung, and crop residues), in numbers (e.g. size of an animal herd), in indices of "quality" (e.g. water- and air-quality indicators), in volume units (e.g. acre-feet for aquifers), and so forth.

There is a small tribe of economists, known as resource economists (I happen to belong to this tribe), who tend to view the natural environment through the lenses of population ecology. The focus in population ecology is the dynamics of interacting populations of different species; so it is customary there to take the background environmental processes as given and not subject to analysis. The most well-known illustration of this viewpoint is the use of the logistic function to chart the time path of the biomass of a single species of fish enjoying a constant flow of food. Predator-prey models (e.g. that of Volterra) provide another class of examples; as do the May-MacArthur models of competition among an arbitrary number of species. Depending on the context, the flow of value we derive from a resource stock could be dependent on the rate at which it is harvested, or on the size of the stock; in many cases, it would be dependent on both. For example, annual commercial profits from a fishery depend not only on the rate at which it is harvested, but also on the stock of the fishery, because unit harvesting costs are typically low when stocks are large and high when stocks are low. The valuation of resources and the rates at which populations are harvested in different institutional settings are among the resource economist's objects of inquiry (Dasgupta and Heal, 1979; Dasgupta, 1982).

There is another small tribe of economists, known as environmental economists (I happen to belong to this tribe as well), who, in seeming contrast to resource economists, base their studies on ecosystem ecology.

There, the focus is on such objects as energy at different trophic levels and its rate of flow among them, and the distribution and flows of biochemical substances in soils and bodies of water, and of gases and particulates in the atmosphere. The motivation is to study both the biotic and abiotic processes underlying the services ecosystems provide for us. As is now well known, these services are generated by interactions among organisms, populations of organisms, communities of populations, and the physical and chemical environment in which they reside. Ecosystems are the sources of water, of animal and plant food, and of other renewable resources. In this way, ecosystems maintain a genetic library, sustain the processes that preserve and regenerate soil, recycle nutrients, control floods, filter pollutants, assimilate waste, pollinate crops, operate the hydrological cycle, and maintain the gaseous composition of the atmosphere.

The totality of all the ecosystems of the world represents a large part of our natural capital-base, which, for vividness, I will refer to as our environmental resource-base.

Environmental problems are thus almost always associated with resources that are regenerative, but that are in danger of exhaustion from excessive use. It makes sense then to identify environmental resources with renewable natural resources.

The valuation of ecological services and the patterns in which they are available under different institutional settings are among the environmental economist's objects of inquiry. Economic studies of global warming, eutrophication of lakes, the management of rangelands, and the pollution of estuaries are examples of such endeavor (Costanza, 1991; Mäler et al., 1992; Walker, 1993; Nordhaus, 1994).

In a formal sense, population and ecosystem ecology differ only by way of the variables ("state variables", as they are called) that are taken to characterize complex systems. In the former, the typical variables are population sizes (or, alternatively, tonnage) of different species; in the latter, they are indices of various services. As noted earlier, it is often possible to summarize the latter in terms of indices of "quality", such as those for air, soil, or water. Each such index should be taken to be a summary statistic (reflecting a particular form of aggregation) that enables the analyst to study complex systems by means of a few strategically chosen variables.

The viewpoint just offered, that of distinguishing population and ecosystem ecology in terms of the state variables that summarize complex systems, allows us to integrate problems of resource management with problems of environmental pollution and degradation. It reminds us that resource economics and environmental economics are the same subject. It also suggests that the environmental resource-base should be seen as a gigantic capital stock. Animal, bird, and fish populations (including the vast array of micro-organisms), water, soil, forest cover, and the atmosphere are among the components of this stock. Hence, it would be convenient to refer to both resource and environmental economics by the overarching name, ecological economics.

Environmental Awareness Campaign - Walking Green....

In this academic year GWEC has taken the initiative to give a presentation/lecture on current environmental and ecological issues. This project is an extension of the award winning project of GWEC at the environmental awareness competition organized by ECA Alumni Project of Department of State USA. GWEC members will visit each class starting from KG-1 to Class-10.

Students will be shown an animated satire cartoon video aimed to raise awareness of how the modern man exploits the environment in his day to day activities and bring about in them, a self-realization of sorts.



The lecture succeeding the video will encompass issues raging from air pollution, ecological imbalance, environmental economics etc. The content of the lecture may be modified depending upon the age of the audience. The lectures will end with the distribution of leaflets, designed by the current members of GWEC, containing details of how the students as individuals/future citizens may live a life within the whim of sustainable means and act to solve some common problems. The contents of the leaflet are given below:

WALKING GREEN...

Littering and Hygiene:

1. Increase the number of bins at every possible public location and public transports.
2. Enhance proper dumping sites 
3. Do not litter in water bodies
4. Increase the number of public toilets with proper maintenance
5. Clean up stagnant water bodies
6. Discourage smokers from smoking in public areas

  Multiform Apprehensions:

1. Save electricity. 
2. Save energy resources
3. Sound pollution:

• Reduce use of motor driven vehicles and move to alternatives like cycles
• Use of public over private transport
• Locating power generators effectively in private and public properties 

      4. Promote decentralization
      5. Prevent food adulteration- Giving more preference to food quality over profits

Rural Pollution:

1. Ensuring proper domestic and personal hygiene
2. Ensuring proper disposal system; Disposal of domestic and industrial wastes
3. Provide better sanitation systems