TRANSLATING grave environmental issues into ecological democracy movement is an enormous task before us all in the globalised world and chosen globalised warming. In fact, the subject looks a dried-out recipe of the tech-savvy modern world even as we wish to move forward in search of ecological sustainability that has been the object of fierce debate in the midst of emblematic North seeing nature as an indiscriminately exploitable resource for their consumption. On top of that, their institutions — which have the responsibility to produce right thinking planners and decision-makers — are busy in reinforcing the elite Northern self-centredness.
The result is that the problems related to the ecological sustainability are neither limited to the specific areas not related to the specific local issues. They have huge dimensions spreading out to larger part of the world in different forms and with differing levels of gravity.
MK Gandhi visualised such a scenario decades ago, and eminent naturalist writer-philosopher, Henry David Thoreau — who had moved from 1845 to 1847 to a hut on the edge of Walden Pond, a small glacial lake near Concord, guided by the maxim “Simplify, simplify” — had foreseen the grim scenario long back.
Now, like Thoreau and Gandhi, ecologists too are expressing alarm regarding the survival of the Planet Earth. But the reality is different. No rich nation has any regards for exercising ecological austerity. More than a decade back, I had read in an Indian newspaper that Japan, the host of the Kyoto Protocol, was unable to cut emission of its greenhouse gases as promised under the Kyoto Protocol. And, the US brazenly did not even bother for the Protocol in the first place. The concept of the carbon crediting has already shown that it ultimately served the designs of North and was only adding to the environmental woes.
According to the OSPAR Assessment Portal, the total inputs of the heavy metals like mercury, cadmium and lead to the Greater North Sea have reduced, since 1990. However, improved analytical procedures for mercury and cadmium since 1990 make it difficult to be certain what proportion of observed changes are due to reduced discharges and emissions.
Actually, there is an inbuilt violence in the very manner of North’s progress and also in the manner in which it has been paid for by the developing world. The “Third World” continues to be a dumping ground for the toxic wastes of the technologised “First World”. The issue is so huge that the West would even agree to the argument of ecological compensation demanded by the global South. Yet, none knows who is going to own the responsibility of causing irreparable damages to the South and Mother Earth as a whole, particularly, after the Industrial Revolution in late eighteenth century.
The revolution gave major shift to technological, socio-economic, and cultural conditions first in some western countries and later in the rest of the world. And as for the enormity of this, the least cost of damages that can be done is to give up the path dominated by high (destructive!) technology that most of the times generates only non-degradable and hazardous junk including nuclear waste.
In the face of such a threat, Gandhi would have warned against following the destructive technological path. His firm belief was that if India were to attain real freedom, the people had no way but to live in villages and simple houses made of the cheap natural materials available locally, and not in urban enclaves strewn around a palace of authority and opulence. This principle applies to the whole humanity, even today.
And, we, perhaps, can realise this goal by not surrendering to meaningless greed. Instead, by leading simple life with dignity. Several communities in forest and rural areas of the developing world like the indigenous or Adivasi people, subsistence farmers, fisher communities, artisans or local service providers do exist in the South, and certainly a few in the North.
In all humility, these communities remain content with simple, dignified and natural life-styles. The richness of life has also inculcated in them the sense of belonging to Nature without disturbing the local ecology. The Muslim indigenous Gujjars, mostly vegetarians, in the Central Himalayan Region of Uttarakhand are just an example. They, with their cattle, live in the forest areas and do not disturb the ecology. Instead, they conserve and strengthen it in their own way. So, Gandhi was right in saying, “… the Nature has enough for every human’s need but not for somebody’s greed…”
If we followed Gandhi, simple and stress-free life could have been our natural motto in our respective places or maybe this could have made the world more beautiful, peaceful and ecologically more democratic, diverse and sound.
But sadly, we find ourselves stranded at crossroads if we look at the damages we have done to the Mother Earth – the damages that have been done carelessly, recklessly and indiscriminately since we think more about our greed, and do not mind unthoughtful consumption hardly thinking about protecting the scarce and non-renewable natural bounties that selflessly provide us everything.
We seem to have forgotten that the natural bounties are not resources, and are not infinite. Most of them are depleting or disappearing very fast, like once perennial glaciers. Gandhi had warned against destruction and violence. He also spoke against technology without a human face as he saw modern technology merely as a tool for increasing bodily comforts and consequently decreasing attention to the inner being and the conscience and soul of man.
A lot of enlightened people in the North too are concerned about saving their environment or ecology of the world as a whole. But, can they do it without doing away with too much of possessiveness, vulgar consumerism, and by not sharing the bounties with others? Could they listen to what Thoreau had conveyed to the people finding the contemporary life irresistible?
Thoreau’s goal was actually to simplify his life by living simply. He did that by facing the world with bare essentials of life, by strictly limiting his expenditures, his possessions, and his contact with the outside world. Even a century later, in 1954, EB White wrote about the relevance of Thoreau’s philosophy in the Yale Review: “Thoreau, very likely without quite knowing what he was up to, took man’s relation to nature and man’s dilemma in society and man’s capacity for elevating his spirit and he beat all these matters together, in a wild free interval of self-justification and delight, and produced an original omelette from which people can draw nourishment in a hungry day.”
Today, the simple philosophy of Thoreau and Gandhi is most relevant as human’s symbiotic relationship with nature is extremely threatened. And if the symbiotic relationship is strained, ecological sustainability would not be guaranteed as these two terms ‘symbiotic relationship’ and ‘ecological sustainability’ are synonymous to each other. And unfortunately, we have conveniently forgotten Thoreau as well as Gandhi. Don’t we need ecological sustainability anymore?
