From Eco-hostile to Eco-friendly

While we thank the few who have struggled to make for a world of buildings, products and lifestyles that are 'eco-friendly', a friend I met recently wondered aloud, how we got to becoming as eco-hostile as the world has.

The first World War and the massive arms build-up of the next 20 years to the II World War was a time when major breakthroughs in mass manufacture was encouraged by war treasuries of half-a-dozen countries. From 1945, these battle-scarred nations got busy creating prosperity for their people, and the boom in business offered much more jobs, more money to spend, and therefore even more new industrial activity.

Over 30 years, till the mid-70's, this tidal wave of damage to environment and indiscriminate plunder of our rivers, our forests and of other natural resources, continued without even an awareness of the destruction these were causing.

Whether it was Rachel Carlson's Silent Spring of the early 60's, or Schumacher and his Small is Beautiful in the Seventies, it is not quite clear who and what stirred the change such that we looked at the environment in a way that people could be enrolled into being less hostile, and more eco-sensitive.

In India, the Chipko Movement of the early 70's, saw for the first time, such people action. Well, it was a combination of work that those two heroes, Joshi and Bahuguna, did in the hills with a massive groundswell of anger and indignation from the womenfolk of those timeless hills. This was perhaps the first time that we had anything as a large, concerted action that secured media attention and caused a change in the hills, echoing across India. By the 1990's, there was more talk of ecology, even if there was no conscious reflection of change in the way government, industry or people built things, ran
their corporations, or lived life. The massive engine of development could not do a U-turn. It has taken us the next 15 years for the first major signs of our recognizing threats to our own lives, if not to the Planet. The move to green buildings, or the move toward proactive measures on our sanctuaries and tiger reserves, the recognition of the good that our tribal knowledge and systems can do to forests, are all signs of an entire nation being and becoming less eco-hostile. A young IAS officer said recently at a meeting, 'Our seniors disapprove of us not coming up with directions and decisions that are not pro-people!' That's a change that came about with the previous generation of such officers.

Not that such eco-hostility has abated. The few pockets of "eco-friendly" approaches still remain just that – isolated efforts which really have no impact yet on the way we build, we commute or we live - the three parts of human living that proves as expensive to the
planet. If we went back to the last 400 years, and looked at Spanish, Dutch, French and British ships that that were built of Burmese teak, or those European sailors who wore clothes made of cotton grown in India, drank Kenyan coffee, with sugar that came from the West Indies, you will see the beginnings of such eco-hostility. Even to this day, nearly all of the foods, except for a few legumes, are by and large imported by the French, the Spanish or the Britons in their homes. Rice from Sri Lanka, chillies from Kenya, green pepper from Nigeria, broccoli from northeast China... You can walk into any shopping mall today and find apples from Russia, pears from Australia on these shelves, right here at home, and that is dismaying. Why would you want to buy these fruits from distant lands when a biomass-rich India can offer such succulent fruits?

I sometimes wonder if some of us are right in wishing that we had perhaps lived in a distant past, well before 1800 when the destruction actually took serious proportions. How can we restore our belief in the importance of fresh and open air, of larks singing, of streams coarsing young and chirpy, of the sun shining on pretty landscapes? How can we establish green and congenial dwellings for the urban poor? Even a simple, pretty-looking tea garden in the hills, is eco-hostile, for what you see in such greenscapes is at least a half-century of massive environmental degradation, with soils poisoned by many decades of pesticides, and the felling of trees that once covered hillsides to make for these plantation lands. By continuing to fell our residual forest patches, we risk inviting two potential disasters for the future: the want of fuel and the scarcity of water.

So what is eco-friendly? By protecting our forests, you prevent waste of soil; you save streams which make for rivers; you protect climate in our lands. By building our homes and offices in a way that we respond to the climate outside, we become less hostile to the elements outside. By feeding nutrient-rich wastes into our own backyard, we let the land around us breathe better and create the right balance. Just being co-workers with nature can in itself help us be less hostile and more friendly.