Environmentalist of the Poor

The Berkeley Nobel Laureate George Akerlof once remarked of his fellow economists that if you showed them something that worked in practice, they would not be satisfied unless it was also shown to work in theory. This insight explains much about the dismal science, including why, as late as 1980, the M I T economist Lester Thurow could magisterially write: “If you look at the countries that are interested in environmentalism, or at the individuals who support environmentalism within each country, one is struck by the extent to which environmentalism is an interest of the upper middle class. Poor countries and poor individuals simply aren’t interested.” It does not appear that Thurow looked very closely around the globe. For, seven years before he wrote his lines, the Chipko Andolan had decisively announced the poor’s entry into the domain of environmentalism. Nor was Chipko unique: the decade of the 1970s saw a whole slew of movements in defence of local rights to forest, fish and water resources, as well as protests against large dams. These movements took place in India, Brazil, Malaysia, Ecuador and Kenya, and among peasants, pastoralists, and fisherfolk: that is, among communities even economists could identify as being poor. Lester Thurow could write as he did because of the theory that environmentalism was a full stomach phenomenon. In the west, the rise of the green movement in the 1960s was widely interpreted as a manifestation of what was called ‘postmaterialism’. The consumer societies of the North Atlantic world, wrote the political scientist Ronald Inglehart, had collectively shifted “from giving top priority to physical sustenance and safety toward heavier emphasis on belonging, self-expression, and the quality of life”. It was thought – or rather, theorised – that a cultivated interest in the protection of nature was possible only when the necessities of life could be taken for granted. From this perspective, the poor were, quite simply, too poor to be green. Their waking hours were spent foraging for food, water, housing, energy: how could they be concerned with something as elevated as the environment? Movements such as Chipko challenged the post-materialist hypothesis, in practice. But its decisive theoretical refutation was the work of the campaigning journalist Anil Agarwal, who died in Dehradun on the January 2, aged 54. Agarwal was a man of ferocious energy, intelligence, and commitment, these traits displayed early. At the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, where he studied mechanical engineering, he was elected president of the Students’ Gymkhana. After he graduated, he joined the Hindustan Times as a science reporter, this when his classmates were taking the already well trodden route to the US. His flair for communicating complex ideas in accessible language was recognised by the New Scientist, for whom he also began to write. The story that changed Agarwal’s life originated in a visit to the Alakananda Valley sometime in early 1975. The Chipko Andolan was then less than two years old. But Agarwal was impressed by what it had already done, and more impressed still by its leader, Chandi Prasad Bhatt. Bhatt was an organic intellectual who had sensed that protest was not enough; it must be followed by reconstruction, by the willed action of villagers in reclaiming and revegating hillsides made barren by decades of commercial forestry. Chandi Prasad Bhatt was, and is, shy and soft spoken, comfortable only in Hindi and Garhwali. It is for this reason that he remains less celebrated than is his due; insufficiently recognised as the true founder of Indian environmentalism. He can never make it to the colour pages of the English press; but, met in his native lair, he has transformed and reshaped many lives. These include the village women whom he has inspired to plant and protect trees: and these also include numerous city dwellers who, following him, have come to bend their science and scholarship to the public weal. Anil Agarwal returned from Garhwal with a story which, with a key word misspelt, was printed in the New Scientist under the title ‘Ghandi’s Ghost Protects the Himalayan Trees’. It might have been the first account of the Chipko movement in the international press. It was certainly a definitive moment in the career of its author. It was through Chipko that he came to understand that the poor had, if anything, a greater stake in the responsible management of the environment. That insight became the driving force of his work over the next 25 years. In the mid-1970s Agarwal moved to London to work with the International Institute for Environment and Development. There he came under the caring tutelage of Barbara Ward, the author with René Dubos of Only One Earth, the ‘official’ text of the first United Nations Symposium on the Environment. Then, encouraged by that remarkable civil servant Lovraj Kumar, he decided to return to India, to found the Centre for Science and Environment in New Delhi. Not long after founding CSE, Agarwal went for a meeting in Malaysia, a trip that was as definitive as his earlier trek to Garhwal. For his hosts in Penang, had just published a report on the ‘State of Malaysia’s Environment’. It was a slim document, but truly suggestive. No sooner had he read it did Agarwal start planning a more ambitious Indian version. The material was at hand, if one cared to look for it. For the natural resource conflicts of the 1970s had been attentively and sympathetically documented by our journalists, writing in English as well as in the Indian languages. The academic community was by and large blind to the degradation of nature, but here too there were exceptions, most notably the partnership of the ecologist Madhav Gadgil and the anthropologist Kailash Malhotra. These two had just completed an extended study on behalf of the newly instituted department of environment, which documented the shrinking access to nature in the villages and hamlets of India. And there was Environmentalist of the Poor