Why I Should be tolerant : on environment and environmentalism in 21st century

INDIA'S ENVIRONMENTAL movement, like so much else in the country, is about managing contradictions and complexities-between rich and poor; between people and nature.

But the movement in India has one key distinction, which holds the key to its future. The environmental movements in the rich world emerged after periods of wealth creation, and during their periods of waste generation. So, they argued for containment of waste, but did not have the ability to argue for the reinvention of the paradigm of waste generation itself. However, the environmental movement in India has grown in the midst of enormous inequity and poverty. In this envi ronmentalism of the relatively poor, the answers to change are intractable and impossible, unless the question itself is reinvented.

Just consider the birth and evolution of the green movement. Its inception dates back to the early 1970s with the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi made that now fabled statement at the Stockholm conference on environment: "Poverty is the biggest polluter." But in this same period, the women of the Chipko move ment in the Himalaya showed that the poor, in fact, cared more about their environment. In 1974, years before environment became fashionable fad, the women of Mandal, a poor, remote village in the upper Alaknanda valley, stopped loggers from cutting down their forests. This movement of poor women was not a conservation movement per se, but a movement to demand the rights of local communities to their local resources. The women wanted rights over the trees, which they said were the basis for their daily survival. Their movement explained to the people of India that it was not poverty, but rather extractive and exploita tive economies that were the biggest polluters.