Say No to Western Rejects

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Vandana Shiva

I became a volunteer as a young student in the Chipko movement of the 1970s which I think shaped our contemporary history very strongly. But Chipko wasn't the first. Centuries ago, there had been another such movement in Rajasthan where Amrita Devi refused to let her Khejarli trees be cut by the king's army because they are sacred and are key to avoiding famine in the desert. Everything going on in the Durban negotiations on climate change eventually touches on this issue of ecological justice. And we had cracked it thousands of years ago.
The Chipko movement gave us the environment department initially and then the environment ministry. It also gave us a whole new set of laws, the Environment Protection Act, the Forest Conservation Act, the entire legacy that governs us today. I always tell people that I learnt my quantum theory in the University of Western Ontario in Canada and I learnt my ecology in the university of Chipko in Uttarakhand. Unfortunately, our leaders are stuck in the dinosaur age-they think big is better. But we are a civilisation that worships small. Researches by my NGO Navdanya and the United Nations has shown that small farms produce more food. Our leaders are picking up the filth of the West's yesterday. The West today is going solar and we continue to say that coal is modern. People are fighting Walmart around the world and we are saying it's modern.
Our Planning Commission needs to be redone in the footsteps of Bhutan. The Bhutanese Government measures growth not as gross domestic product but focuses on gross national happiness of their people. Their planning commission is called the happiness commission. I think Montek Singh Ahluwalia should go for an internship there.

The Chipko movement gave us the environment department initially and then the environment ministry.

Most of our environmental struggles have been based where nature's gifts are, in the mountains of the Himalayas, in the tribal forests in Niyamgiri and Jharkhand. The cities have also had their share of struggles. Bhopal, after all, was an urban movement. But because cities have this false prosperity that comes with higher incomes, there is, for a short while, the sense that it doesn't matter if the air is getting polluted. It is when their child gets asthma that they realise that taking home Rs.2 lakh is not worth it if their child is being tortured every day. Our privileged urban middle class needs to catch up with the rural excluded: women, tribals and peasants who are leaders of the environment movement.
Nevertheless, there is a lot of awakening of the privileged urban people. We work with schools in a programme called the Gardens of Hope and I can see the enthusiasm among the young. So while we have the total blindness of the executive in Delhi, I can see India is not going to go into sleepwalk mode vis-a-vis the environment. The India of the people will continue to struggle to defend the land, water, soil, biodiversity, the seas.
- As told to Shravya Jain

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