Thoughts by eminent followers of Mahatma Gandhi
ENVIRONMENTALISM
Lester Thurow (1980), MIT Economist: “Environmentalism is an interest of the upper middle class. Poor countries and poor individuals simply aren’t interested”.
But Indian scholars posited
“Livelihood environmentalism v/s Full stomach environmentalism”.
It is a modern phenomenon which came into being after their occurred with an increase in
- Speed of Industrial Revolution
- Fossil Fuels
- New Transport
- Urbanisation
- Synthetic chemicals
- Industrial scale mining
- Human population.
Indian Scholars:
Scientists: Madhav Gadgil
AKN Reddy
Journalists: Anil Agarwal
Sunita Narain.
Activists: Medha Patkar
Ashish Kothari
Vandana Shiva.
Scholars: Patrick Geddes
Rabindranath Tagore
Western scholars:
John McNeil: Environmentalism is a view that humankind ought to seek peaceful coexistence with, rather than mastery of nature.
A post materialist phenomenon after reaching material prosperity.
Rachel Carson
Roderick Nash
John Muir
Aldo Leopold
Henry David Thoreau
Alexander von Humboldt
Ecological Town Planner of India : Patrick Geddes
Followed MK Gandhi’s thought: India lives in her villages. In agriculture and animal husbandry after sensing urbanization in India.
Met Vivekananda 1in 1900, in contact with his Irish disciple Margaret Noble (Sister Nivedita) who suggested the IISc, TISS model through Jamshed Tata.
Educated and worked in London, Mexico, Scotland, Edinburgh and Dundee as a Zoologist, Botanist and Economist.
His concepts on Politography and Politogenics —forgotten
Metropolis, Megalopolis and Conurbation remembered.
Energy utility through Paletechnic, Neotechnic and Techno culture.
Coined Carboniferous Capitalism (1915): Dominance of man by machine, finance and military.
1915 to 1924 – Went around 20 Indian cities to make an urban plan. Worked in winter and spring but moved to Europe and Scotland for the summer.
Town planning: Respect for Nature, Tradition and Democracy.
Ecological concerns:
Water – Rivers are sacred
Spaces – for tress, gardens and parks
Resources – Conservation tanks and wells
Recycle – Night soil as manure.
TO POSTPONE IS TO CONSERVE…
Small cities are better:
- Easy reach of nature
- Family and neighborhood life richer
- Administrators are less impersonal
- Deep sense of local patriotism
- Biocentric than mechano centric
- Safe, pleasant and secure housing for different classes
- Transport to work place
- Water and energy for commons
- Environmental sustainability
- Aesthetics
JC Kumarappa
J.C.Cornelius (1892) renamed himself as J.C.Kumarappa in 1929. Deputed as Professor of Economics in Gujarat Vidyapeeth by Gandhi after his letter on rural development. Published a survey of Matar Village (Ahmedabad) in 1931 – “Irrigation for farmers and drinking water for untouchables”.
Gandhi started All India Village Industries Association (AIVIA) in 1933 to hold his political struggle and get into constructive work. JCK was the Secretary General with JC Bose & C.V.Raman in the advisory board. Constructed his own 12×14 room. In 1938 Subash Chandra Bose, President of Congress invited him for the National Planning Committee chaired by Jawaharlal Nehru. But lasted only a year as he was irked by the Soviet model. In 1941 he organized a Khadi exhibition at Bombay after his friends started ignoring his radical thoughts. Against machine driven paper factories, weaving mills and sugar mills. Innovated Magan Deep and Magan Choola.
Like Gandhi, believed in “No industrialization without predation”. Violent, Large supply of goods, irrespective of use, Clever advertisements create demand, Economy of transience”. Agriculture “Greatest among all occupation” – Natural mutation with the environment, Economy of permanence.
Progress – Pull along nature’s dictates not creating violence and destruction.
Produce everything, we want from a limited area, we are in a position to supervise the method of production. Else, if we draw our requirement from ends of the earth, its impossible to guarantee the conditions of production.
Wrote in Harijan (Jan 24, 1948) – Swaraj to the masses – Gandhiji himself confessed – we do not have the requisite number of selfless workers. After 5 days, Gandhi suggested that Congress be disbanded and reconstituted as a body of constructive workers named Lok Sevak Sangh. Work on Untouchability, religious harmony, renewal of rural economic life, education, sanitation etc., The Next day he was assassinated.
He even blamed Nehru for moving into the Commander in Chief’s palace.
Mahadev Desai – Secretary of Gandhi referred him as “The violent exponent of the non-violence”.
Rastrapathi Bhavan signage in 1951 – “Bullock carts not allowed”. JCK told Nehru “When there are two persons in public and the presence of one is likely to be a menace to the other, my common sense would lead me to restrain the source of danger rather than the possible victim”.
Preferred Kaveri, Godavari, Krishna, Mahanadhi states rather than their division on linguistics.
Vinobha Bhave – Bhoodhan Movement – Proper utilization of land is important than distribution.
His last(ing) statements from the hospital in Madras
“Bapu is better dead than alive”
for there is a no trace of him within a decade after his death”.
RABINDRANATH TAGORE. D (1861 – 1941)
“Modern machinery has encouraged humans to embark on a career of plunder that entirely outstripped nature’s power for recuperation. Their profit makers dig big holes in the stored capital of the planet”.
“Humans created wants which are un natural and provisions for these wants are forcibly extracted from nature”.
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“Take a man from his natural surroundings, from his fullness of his community life, with all its living associations of beauty and love and social obligations, and you will be able to turn him into so many fragments of a machine for the production of wealth on gigantic scale”.
“TURN A TREE INTO A LOG. IT WILL BURN FOR YOU, BUT IT WILL NEVER BEAR LIVING FLOWERS AND FRUITS”.
ALBERT HOWARD (1873 – 1947)
Son of a 550 acres land owner – farmer. Cambridge educated. Indian assignment in 1905 as Inperial 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.
Ref: Ramachandra Guha, Speaking with Nature, Fourth Estate, Gurugram, 2024.
More to come about the works of India’s eminent environmentalists…