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Environmentalists of India: Albert Howard

ALBERT HOWARD (1873 – 1947)

Son of a 550 acres land owner – farmer. Cambridge educated. Indian assignment in 1905 as Imperial Economic Botanist in Imperial Agricultural Research Institute (IARI, Pune, Bihar). With her love Gabrielle Matthaei, a German.

After two decades and confronting with the British, they moved to Indore, Capital of Holkar. Established Institute of Plant Industry in a 300 acres plot and highlighted Indore Method of Composting to the world.

Garbrielle died of Cancer in 1930 and hence he moved out of India, married and stayed with her sister Louise in England. Became the most influential figure in the history of British Organic movement. After Howard’s death, Louise published his works. Gabrielle’s The Wheats of Baluchisthan, Khorasan and the Kurram Valley (1916) elevated her as the president of Botany section of the Indian Science Congress after seven years.

Howards and Gabrielle saw India as a land of villages. But they approached in a scientist perspective unlike Radhakamal Mukerjee (sociological analyst), JC Kumarappa (Gandhian constructive worker) as analytical sociologists.

Propagated Soil aeration, Limited/adequate water supply, improvement of fodder and forage, ill effects of soil erosion, Fermenting animal and vegetable wastes in a plot.

Believed in

Better research through agriculture rather than Better Agriculture through Research.

Wanted

Inter-disciplinary, trans disciplinary research rather than departmentalization.

Considered

Plant to be a joint system with soil.

Book on Crop production in India:

(a) Loss of fertility because of lack of drainage.

 (b) Sceptical on exotic crop.

 (c) Study all branches of botanical science to learn plant in relation to environment (92% Indians could not read/write at that time).

Next book,

The Development of Indian Agriculture (1924) by both said

 (i) Misconception that science can teach the cultivator nothing.

(ii) Even if the villager is helped, he will never alter his present practices.

OUP published An Agricultural Testament (1940) followed by

 Farming and Gardening for Health or Disease ( UK – 1945) and The Soil and Health in US – 1947) cites

(i) Nature manages land and conducts her water culture.

(ii) No to mono culture as forests thrive in mixed growth.

 (iii) Sunlight energy is used through foliage of the forest canopy falling down as litter.

(iv) Nature has never found it necessary to design the equivalent of spraying machine and the poison spray for the control of insect and fungus pests.

Chemicals can do nothing to keep the soil in good health.

All that they can accomplish is the transfer of the soil’s

CAPITAL to CURRENT account.

Approach to the problems of farming must be made from the field, not the laboratory.

Pensylvanian Jerome Rodale started a magazine Organic Farming and Gardening with the guidance of Howard and even commented Carson’s Silent Spring to analyse what commercial fertilizers are doing as far as disease and infestations are concerned.

Wendell Berry, author of The Unsettling of America, a searing critique of agro-business and its destruction of human community and of the land itself too believed in Howard’s works as systematic, coherent and inexhaustible.

In 1990 – Organic Farming entered the official statute book of US Department of Agriculture specifying the standards.

MK Gandhi too wrote in Harijan about Howard’s mixture of cow dung, farm waste, wood ash and urine into an invaluable fertilizer.

“Hands to go hand in hands with (one’s) heads” – Gandhi

will place science in the service of humanity.

Source: Source: Guha, Ramachandra., (2024), Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism, Fourth Estate, New Delhi, p 143- 148.

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