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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.