A Headline that You Missed?

If 1800 and the steam engine stirred the first signs of what we call the City today, we saw a significant watershed on May 23 this year. Newspapers reported, quietly, a statistic that is already forgotten in the debris of news we read every day: that week of May 2008 saw a major tilting of numbers in the world: the world's urban population, for the first time ever in all of time, outnumbered the rural population.

There is a scary thought that lurks in the hurtle of development we are seeing today: less than 1.8% of India's land mass represents our cities and they account for 62% of our GDP. So why should it raise fears? Well, our people, our governments cannot find a way out of a situation that is, forever, upon us, of our cities relentlessly marching into what is left of the vestiges of our natural ecosystems. It is not hard to see what is upon us already: the rural countryside has become part of our images of romanticism. 'Rural' will in the future only be spoken, if it is not already, in terms of our functional need for food and cultivation. The engine of growth can never, ever be rural India. Gandhiji's eloquent expression of how India's heart lies in its villages is now proven completely wrong. At the time he said it, it was not just an ideal: back-to-the-land was still a possibility. From here on, back-to-the-land can be only an 'act of defiance', as one environmental writer notes.

If you go by another recent report of our business leaders and IT Czars picking up real estate in what is left of our picturesque hills, you can't but reflect on the obscenity of how money can buy and destroy lands that have belonged for centuries to people who never thought of owning them. Such mountain lands were seen as an heritage given to Man by nature, not for personal possession, but to be reverently honoured. About a 150 years ago, well before ecology even came to be used as a term, one anguished writer said, "Man has forgotten that the earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste," he wrote. Look at what this urbanisation can mean. If we don't change the way we look at the growth of the city and the complete one-sided exploitation of the rural countryside, it will sound the death knell of urban India, of people like you and I who inhabit these cities. Gandhiji was prescient, when he said in 1946, that 'the blood of our villages is the cement with which our cities are built'. He wished to see 'the blood that is today circulating the arteries of the cities, runs once again in the blood vessels, villages'.

What we see today, is a play-out of a grim scenario quite the opposite of what he painted then. The consumerist city has proven to be the main generator of ecological degradation. And the bad news is that much of the burden of this degradation is felt in the countryside. More urbanizing should have us look differently, and quickly, at the way we use chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Soil is about the only asset of our nation. To trade soil fertility for quick returns as we have done in the last 50 years, will lead to slow death of us as a civilization. How do we use organic manure that enriches soil? How do we improve village hygiene with effective water distribution and responsible waste disposal?

How do we encourage our handicrafts and artisanal skills that can lend to the country's trade, revive traditions and offer new livelihoods for ancient skills? What this bit of news in May this year, on the urban numbers outgrowing the rural people, signifies is, there will be nothing into the future that can be called 'rural development'. Development of any kind will inevitably mean urbanization. Doesn't it seem like a lost cause when you read of the visions of some of our best thinkers of the last century? One of them said that any "economy of permanence" can be established only with agriculture. He said that there can be no industrialization that does not prey on lives and livelihoods. Agriculture, these early thinkers clearly saw, ought to be the greatest among occupations in which man attempts to control nature and his own environment in a way that produces the best results.

During his lifetime of 80 years, William Wordsworth, the 19th century poet, walked some 175,000 miles, and taught his readers 'how to walk with Nature'. He saw, even at that time in the 1830's, the 'outrage done to Nature' by the cities and factories such that common people were no longer 'breathing fresh air' or 'treading the green earth'. 150 years later, what can you say, of the legacy we have inherited and of the future we will live with?
When our ancients entered a forest, they expected to meet the Spirits or the Gods. When we enter the woods today, we think of what we can earn from it. When our forefathers looked at the clouds, they sang paeans of praise at the power of the mighty elements. When we look at those clouds today, we think of how many inches of rainfall we can get. Is there a life and living we can offer as legacy to our children?

- Chandrashekar Hariharan
The writer is head of Biodiversity Conservation [India] Limited, and can be reached at hariharan@ecobcil.com.