Varieties of Environmentalism

Essays North and South

Ramachandra Guha, Joan Martínez Alier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134173419
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Conservation & Protection
• Index: Biological Sciences

Until very recently, studies of the environmental movement have been heavily biased towards the North Atlantic worlds. There was a common assumption amongst historians and sociologists that concerns over such issues as conservation or biodiversity were the exclusive preserve of the affluent westerner: the ultimate luxury of the consumer society. Citizens of the world's poorest countries, ran the conventional wisdom, had nothing to gain from environmental concerns; they were 'too poor to be green', and were attending to the more urgent business of survival. Yet strong environmental movements have sprung up over recent decades in some of the poorest countries in Asia and Latin America, albeit with origins and forms of expression quite distinct from their western counterparts. In Varieties of Environmentalism, Guha and Matinez-Alier seek to articulate the values and orientation of the environmentalism of the poor, and to explore the conflicting priorities of South and North that were so dramatically highlighted at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. Essays on the 'ecology of affluence' are also included, placing ion context such uniquely western phenomena as the 'cult of wilderness' and the environmental justice movement. Using a combination of archival and field data,. The book presents analyses of environmental conflicts and ideologies in four continents: North and South America, Asia and Europe. The authors present the nature and history of environmental movements in quite a new light, one which clarifies the issues and the processes behind them. They also provide reappraisals for three seminal figures, Gandhi, Georgescu-Roegen and Mumford, whose legacy may yet contribute to a greater cross-cultural understanding within the environmental movements.

PART ONE

Chapter 1

The Environmentalism of the Poor¹

The environmentalists in any area seemed very easy to identify. They were, quite simply, members of the local aristocracy… The environmental vision is an aristocratic one… It can only be sustained by people who have never had to worry about security.

(US journalist William Tucker, 1977)

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.

(Indian journalist Anil Agarwal, 1986)

THE ORIGINS OF CONFLICT

When India played South Africa in a cricket international in Calcutta, the great Indian cricketer, Sunil Gavaskar, was asked by a fellow television commentator to predict the likely winner. ‘I tried to look into my crystal ball,’, answered Gavaskar ‘but it is clouded up by the Calcutta smog.’ He might well have added: ‘To clear it I then dipped my crystal ball in the river Hooghly [which flows alongside the city’s cricket stadium], but it came up even dirtier than before.’

The quality of air and water in Calcutta is representative of conditions in all Indian cities; small wonder that foreign visitors come equipped with masks and bottles of Perrier. Less visible to the tourist, and to urban Indians themselves, is the continuing environmental degradation in the countryside. Over 100 million hectares, or one-third of India’s land area, has been classed as unproductive wasteland. Much of this was once forest and land ground; the rest, farmland destroyed by erosion and salinisation. The uncontrolled exploitation of groundwater has led to an alarming drop in the water table, in some areas by more than five metres. There is an acute shortage of safe water for drinking and domestic use. As the ecologist Jayanta Bandyopadhyay has remarked, water rather than oil will be the liquid whose availability (or lack of it) will have a determining influence on India’s economic future.²

The bare physical facts of the deterioration of India’s environment are by now well established.³ But more serious still are its human consequences, the chronic shortages of natural resources in the daily life of most Indians. Peasant women have to trudge further and further for fuelwood for their hearth. Their menfolk, meanwhile, are digging deeeper and deeper for a trickle of water to irrigate their fields. Forms of livelihood crucially dependent on the bounty of nature, such as fishing, sheep-rearing or basketweaving, are being abandoned all over India. Those who once subsisted on these occupations are joining the band of ‘ecological refugees’, flocking to the cities in search of employment. The urban population itself complains of shortages of water, power, construction material and (for industrial units) of raw material.

Such shortages flow directly from the abuse of the environment in contemporary India, the too rapid exhaustion of the resource base without a thought to its replenishment. Shortages lead, in turn, to sharp conflicts between competing groups of resource users. These conflicts often pit poor against poor, as when neighbouring villages fight over a single patch of forest and its produce, or when slum dwellers come to blows over the trickle of water that reaches them, one hour each day from a solitary municipal tap. Occasionally they pit rich against rich, as when the wealthy farmers of the adjoining states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu quarrel over the water of the river Kaveri. However, the most dramatic environmental conflicts set rich against poor. This, for instance, is the case with the Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada river in central India. The benefits from this project will flow primarily to already pampered and prosperous areas of the state of Gujarat, while the costs will be disproportionately borne by poorer peasants and tribal communities in the upstream states of Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. These latter groups, who are to be displaced by the dam, are being organised by the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement), which is indisputably the most significant environmental initiative in India today.

The ‘Indian environmental movement’ is an umbrella term that covers a multitude of these local conflicts, initiatives and struggles. The movement’s origins can be dated to the Chipko movement, which started in the Garhwal Himalaya in April 1973. Between 1973 and 1980, over a dozen instances were recorded where, through an innovative technique of protest, illiterate peasants – men, women and children – threatened to hug forest trees rather than allow them to be logged for export. Notably, the peasants were not interested in saving the trees per se, but in using their produce for agricultural and household requirements. In later years, however, the movement turned its attention to broader ecological concerns, such as the collective protection and management of forests, and the diffusion of renewable energy technologies.⁴

The Chipko movement was the forerunner of and in some cases the direct inspiration for a series of popular movements in defence of community rights to natural resources. Sometimes these struggles revolved around forests; in other instances, around the control and use of pasture, and mineral or fish resources. Most of these conflicts have pitted rich against poor: logging companies against hill villagers, dam builders against forest tribal communities, multinational corporations deploying trawlers against traditional fisherfolk in small boats. Here one party (e.g. loggers or trawlers) seeks to step up the pace of resource exploitation to service an expanding commercial-industrial economy, a process which often involves the partial or total dispossession of those communities who earlier had control over the resource in question, and whose own patterns of utilisation were (and are) less destructive of the environment.

More often than not, the agents of resource-intensification are given preferential treatment by the state, through the grant of generous long leases over mineral or fish stocks, for example, or the provision of raw material at an enormously subsidised price. With the injustice so compounded, local communities at the receiving end of this process have no recourse except direct action, resisting both the state and outside exploiters through a variety of protest techniques. These struggles might perhaps be seen as the manifestation of a new kind of class conflict. Where ‘traditional’ class conflicts were fought in the cultivated field or in the factory, these new struggles are waged over gifts of nature such as forests and water, gifts that are coveted by all but increasingly monopolised by a few.

There is, then, an unmistakable material context to the upsurge of environmental conflict in India; the shortages of, threats to and struggles over natural resources. No one could even suggest, with regard to India, what two distinguished scholars claimed some years ago with regard to American environmentalism, namely that it had exaggerated or imagined the risk posed by ecological degradation.⁵ All the same, the environmentalism of the poor is neither universal nor pre-given – there are many parts of India (and the South more generally) where the destruction of the environment has generated little or no popular response. To understand where, how and in what manner environmental conflict articulates itself requires the kind of location-specific work, bounded in time and space, that social scientists have thus far reserved for studies of worker and peasant struggles.

This chapter focuses on an environmental conflict that was played out between 1984 and 1991 in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. This conflict is perhaps not as well known outside India as the Chipko or Narmada movements. But its unfolding powerfully illustrates the same, countrywide processes of resource deprivation and local resistance.

CLAIMING THE COMMONS IN KARNATAKA

On 14 November 1984, the government of Karnataka entered into an agreement with Harihar Polyfibres, a rayon-producing unit located in the north of the state; the company forms part of the great Indian industrial conglomerate owned by the Birla family. By this agreement a new company was formed, called the Karnataka Pulpwoods Limited (KPL), in which the government had a holding of 51 per cent and Harihar Polyfibres held 49 per cent. KPL was charged with growing eucalyptus and other fast-growing species of trees for the use by Harihar Polyfibres. For this purpose, the state had identified 30,000 hectares of common land, spread over four districts in the northern part of Karnataka. This land was nominally owned by the state (following precedents set under British colonial rule, when the state had arbitrarily asserted its rights of ownership over non-cultivated land all over India), but the grass, trees and shrubs standing on it were extensively used in surrounding villages for fuel, fodder and other materials.⁶

The land was granted by the state to KPL on a long lease of 40 years, and for a ridiculously low annual rent of one rupee per acre. As much as 87. 5 per cent of the produce was to go directly to Harihar Polyfibres; the private sector company also had the option of buying the remaining 12.5 per cent. All in all, this was an extraordinarily advantageous arrangement for the Birla-owned firm. The government of Karnataka was even willing to stand guarantee for the loans that were to finance KPL’s operations: loans to be obtained from several nationalised banks, one of which was, ironically, the National Bank of Agriculture and Rural Development.

For years before the formation of KPL the wood-based industry, faced with chronic shortages of raw material, had been clamouring for captive plantations. Forests were being depleted all over India; in fact, this deforestation had itself been caused primarily by over-exploitation of trees to meet industrial demand. Although the state had granted them handsome subsidies in the provision of timber from government forests, paper, rayon and plywood companies were keen to acquire firmer control over their sources of supply. Indian law prohibited large-scale ownership of land by private companies: in the circumstances, joint-sector companies (i.e., units jointly owned by the state and private capital) provided the most feasible option. Indeed, no sooner had KPL been formed then industrialists in other parts of India began pressing state governments to start similar units with their participation and for their benefit.

But, of course, paper and rayon factories were not alone in complaining about shortages of woody biomass. A decade earlier, the Chipko movement had highlighted the difficulties faced by villagers in gaining access to the produce of the forests. In the wake of Chipko had arisen a wide-ranging debate on forest policy, with scholars and activists arguing that state forest policies had consistently discriminated against the rights of peasants, tribals and pastoralists, while unduly favouring the urban-industrial sector.⁷

There was little question that, as a result of these policies, shortages of fuel and fodder had become pervasive throughout rural India. In Karnataka itself, one study estimated that while the annual demand for fuelwood in the state was 12. 4 million tonnes (mt), the annual production was 10.4 mt – a shortfall of 16 per cent. In the case of fodder, the corresponding figures were 35.7 and 23 mt, respectively – a deficit of as much as 33 per cent.⁸

The fodder crisis in turn illustrated the crucial importance of species choice in programmes of reforestation. From the early 1960s, the government’s Forest Department had enthusiastically promoted the plantation of eucalyptus on state-owned land. In many parts of India, rich, diverse natural forests were felled to make way for single-species plantations of this tree of Australian origin. As in the Thai district of Pakham (discussed in the Introduction), this choice was clearly dictated by industry, for eucalyptus is a quick growing species sought after by both paper and rayon mills. But it is totally unsuitable as fodder – indeed, one reason eucalyptus was planted by the Forest Department was that it is not browsed by cattle and goats, thus making regeneration that much easier to achieve. Environmentalists deplored this preference for eucalyptus, which was known to have negative effects on soil fertility, water retention and on biological diversity generally. Eucalyptus was, moreover, a ‘plant which socially speaking has all the characteristics of a weed’, in that it benefited industry at the expense of the rural poor, themselves hard hit by biomass shortages. These critics advocated the plantation and protection instead of multi-purpose, indigenous tree species more suited for meeting village requirements of fuel, fodder, fruit and fibre.⁹

In the context of this wider, all-India debate, the formation of KPL seemed a clearly partisan move in favour of industry, as the lands it took over constituted a vital, and often irreplaceable, source of biomass for small peasants, herdsmen and wood-working artisans. Within months of its establishment, the new company became the object of severe criticism. In December 1984, the state’s pre-eminent writer and man of letters, Dr Kota Shivram Karanth, wrote an essay in the most popular Kannada daily, calling on the people of Karnataka to totally oppose ‘this friendship between Birlas and the government and the resulting joint-sector company’.

The opposition to KPL grew after 15 July 1986, the date on which the state actually transferred the first instalment of land (3,590 hectares) to KPL. Even as the company was preparing the ground for planting eucalyptus, petitions and representations were flying thick and fast between the villages of north Karnataka (where the land was located) and the state capital of Bangalore, 250 miles to the south. The Chief Minister of Karnataka, Ramkrishna Hegde, was deluged with letters from individuals and organisations protesting against the formation of KPL; one letter, given wide prominence, was signed by a former Chief Minister, a former Chief Justice and a former Minister, respectively. Meanwhile, protest meetings were organised at several villages in the region. The matter was also raised in the state legislature.¹⁰

In the forefront of the movement against KPL was the Samaj Parivartan Samudaya (Association for Social Change, SPS), a voluntary organisation working in the Dharwad district of Karnataka. The SPS had in fact cut its teeth in a previous campaign against Harihar Polyfibres. It had organised a movement against the pollution of the Tungabhadra river by the rayon factory, whose untreated effluents were killing fish and undermining the health and livelihood of villagers living downstream. On 2 October 1984 (Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary), SPS held a large demonstration outside the production unit of Harihar Polyfibres; then in December 1985, it filed a public interest litigation in the High Court of Karnataka against the State Pollution Control Board for its failure to check the pollution of the Tungabhadra by the Birla factory.¹¹

Before that petition could come up for hearing, SPS filed a public interest writ against Karnataka Pulpwoods Limited, this time in the Supreme Court of India in New Delhi. SPS was motivated to do so by a similar wri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART 1
• PART 2
• Notes
• Index