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
47 comments
Read more

The Veiled Women

One of the controversies that has been raging in Kerala for quite some time now is about a girl student’s decision to wear the hijab to school. The school run by Christian nuns did not appreciate the girl’s choice of religious identity over the school uniform and punished her by making her stand outside the classroom. The matter was taken up immediately by a fundamentalist Muslim organisation (SDPI) which created the usual sound and fury on the campus as well as outside. Kerala is a liberal state in which Hindus (55%), Muslims (27%), and Christians (18%) have been living in fair though superficial harmony even after Modi’s BJP with its cantankerous exclusivism assumed power in Delhi. Maybe, Modi created much insecurity feeling among the Muslims in Kerala too resulting in some reactionary moves like the hijab mentioned above. The school could have handled it diplomatically given the general nature of Muslims which is not quite amenable to sense and sensibility. From the time I shi...
13 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more

You Don’t Know the Sky

I asked the bird to lend me wings. I longed to fly like her. Gracefully. She tilted her head and said, “Wings won’t be of any use to you because you don’t know the sky.” And she flew away. Into the sky. For a moment, I was offended. What arrogance! Does she think she owns the sky? As I watched the bird soar effortlessly into the blue vastness, I began to see what she meant. I wanted wings, not the flight. Like wanting freedom without the responsibility that comes with it. The bird had earned her wings. Through storms, through hunger, through braving the odds. She manoeuvred her way among the missiles that flew between invisible borders erected by us humans. She witnessed the macabre dance of death that brought down cities, laid waste a whole country. Wings are about more than flights. How often have you perched on the stump of a massive tree brought down by a falling warhead and wept looking at the debris of civilisations? The language of the sky is different from tha...
13 comments
Read more