Skip to main content

Sustainability and relationships

Atop development - pic from Delhi's outskirts (c2010)


Every ecosystem has its own ways of survival. No, not just survival but flourishing. Leave ecosystems to themselves and you will see how they flourish without any problem. Bring a ‘civilised’ human being there and their doom will begin.

The tribal people and Adivasis and other communities like them understood ecosystems and respected their needs. They are not allowed to survive, however. Our craze for development drives out the tribals and the Adivasis from their dwelling places and we impose our degenerative ‘civilisation’ on their healthy systems.

In an interview to The National Geographic Traveller [July-Aug 2022], Amitav Ghosh points out the example of the Massai people who have lived in the Ngorongora crater for thousands of years in harmony with the ecosystem of the place. These people are now being thrust out at gunpoint, says Ghosh, by the advocates of development. These ‘developers’ are “using conservation groups under the guise of ecology and conservation, using weaponry to shoot at these people and thrust them out…” Why? Ghosh tells us that “some sort of a company in the UAE, which I bet if you look close enough you’ll see that it’s owned not by an Arab but very likely by an Indian or someone. What they’re doing is that they’re throwing these people out, and they’re going to bring in huge tourism conglomerates, who will bring in urban Africans, urban Asians, and Europeans and Americans.”

Tilting the system in favour of one species is precisely what non-sustainability is about. This is just what human beings have been doing for centuries. Assuming that we are some sort of divine entities or at least creatures with divine sanctions, we lorded over the planet. And imperilled most ecosystems.

Ghosh cites the example of Ranthambore tiger reserve. Earlier people lived in perfect peace with their surroundings there. Now it’s a Disneyfied tourist centre where tigers obviously can’t survive. Human greed has led to the deterioration of many such ecosystems. The recent collapse of a dam near Uttarkashi is yet another reminder to us that we need to check our attitudes towards our planet.

Ghosh shows us a way, an alternative from Botswana. There the agencies of development work with local people. They leave the local people in the forest instead of throwing them out in the name of development. These local people are given the power to decide how others will visit the forest and see their ways of life. Consequently, there are no safari raiders in the forests of Botswana.

The plain truth is that we cannot invent sustainable human communities from the scratch. We need to model them after nature’s ecosystems. How do we do it? We have to make our businesses, economy, physical structures and technologies in harmony with nature’s inherent ability to sustain life. “Sustainable communities evolve their patters of living over time in continual interaction with other living systems, both human and nonhuman,” as Fritjof Capra puts it in his book, The Hidden Connections. Relationships and interactions – that’s the fundamental secret of sustainability.

PS. This post is part of Blogchatter’s CauseAChatter.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
44 comments
Read more

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The
62 comments
Read more

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so
39 comments
Read more

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let
36 comments
Read more

Octlantis

I was reading an essay on octopuses when friend John walked in. When he is bored of his usual activities – babysitting and gardening – he would come over. Politics was the favourite concern of our conversations. We discussed politics so earnestly that any observer might think that we were running the world through the politicians quite like the gods running it through their devotees. “Octopuses are quite queer creatures,” I said. The essay I was reading had got all my attention. Moreover, I was getting bored of politics which is irredeemable anyway. “They have too many brains and a lot of hearts.” “That’s queer indeed,” John agreed. “Each arm has a mind of its own. Two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are found in their arms. The arms can taste, touch, feel and act on their own without any input from the brain.” “They are quite like our politicians,” John observed. Everything is linked to politics in John’s mind. I was impressed with his analogy, however. “Perhaps, you’re r
34 comments
Read more