How do you protect fragile eco-systems? You change the incentive structure. In particular, if population growth is the main causative factor in environmental degradations, you get girls out of the place and into big factory dormitories so demographic transition can occur. Mountains and jungles are 'marginal land'. De-populate the fuck out of them. Seriously, nobody really wants to live there unless they are running a fucking eco-tourist resort for sexually molested aardvarks.
What you don't do is rely on very poor women hugging trees and then limp-wristed libtards prosing on about 'empowerment' or 'popular sovereignty'. This is because the outcome, quite predictably, is that local men will wait till local women stop hugging the trees and then cut them down and sell the timber.
The plain fact is the 'livelihood' aspect of a popular struggle will always conflict with the environmental aspect.
Ram Guha disagrees. In an article for Scroll he suggests that '50 years after Chipko environmental movement, India is ignoring its vital lessons''.
No. India ignored the environmental aspect of Chipko because it was obvious bullshit. The thing was purely political and part and parcel of the movement to create a separate Uttarakhand state. But creating a state means more roads and more demands for electricity and thus more hydro-power- e.g. from Tehri dam.
The only vital lesson here is that if jhollawallahs wax lyrical about some 'popular movement' then it is utterly worthless- be it tree-huggers of 'gulabi gang' vigilantes or naked ladies demanding the Army come and rape them.
Mechanism design- i.e. incentives- matter. Urbanization and industrialization is the only way you can protect fragile- i.e. marginal- land. Talking high falutin' bollocks is actively mischievous.
On March 27, 1973, a group of peasants in Mandal, a village in the upper Alaknanda Valley,
a geological disaster zone and hotspot for landslides because of road building.
stopped a group of commercial loggers from felling a patch of ash trees by threatening to hug them.
The trees, not the loggers.
These innovatively non-violent methods used in Mandal were emulated by villages in other parts of the Uttarakhand Himalaya, likewise seeking to protect forests in their locality.
They failed. Get over it.
It is now 50 years since the birth of what we know as the Chipko Andolan.
It is 25 years since the creation of Uttarakhand State whose population growth remains higher than the national average. The 'carrying capacity' of a fragile eco-system militates against this outcome.
Chipko was followed by a series of other grassroots initiatives claiming community control of forests, pasture, and water.
Not to mention grassroots initiatives featuring gang-rape, kidnapping and ethnic cleansing.
Analysing these conflicts, scholars argued that they showed the way to reconfigure India’s development path.
It was shit but could always get shittier.
Given the country’s population densities and the fragility of tropical ecologies, India – so the argument went – had erred in following the energy-intensive, capital-intensive, resource-intensive model of economic development pioneered by the West. When the country got its freedom from British rule in 1947, it should have instead adopted a more bottom-up, community-oriented, and environmentally-responsible pattern of development.
The Mahatma said 'give up sex.' The alternative is a Malthusian disaster. What rural communities can't do is set up big factory dormitories in places which have a comparative advantage for light manufacturing. But you have to scrap all sorts of labor regulations and the compliance burden on employers.
However, the argument further proceeded, one could still make amends. The state and the citizen should both heed the lesson of Chipko and modify public policies and social behaviour accordingly.
Also everybody could stuff a radish up their bum and run around naked.
A new model of economic development was required, which could lift the masses of people out of poverty without undermining the interests and needs of future generations.
Also a new super-model was required with massive boobs and no waist whatsoever so everybody who running around naked with a radish up their bum could get a really impressive hard-on.
A multi-level debate
The environmental debate in India was at its most intense in the 1980s.
But nobody noticed coz all those involved were useless tossers. Indira had previously said impoverished peasants, not evil capitalists, were fucking up the environment in India. The solution was obvious. Let poor rustic women quit it with the tree hugging and bush kissing and just shift to living in big factory dormitories while earning nice shiny Rupees which they get to spend on cool, shiny, stuff.
The debate operated at many levels. It touched on the moral questions raised by the environmental crisis;
Moral questions like how many times can you a hug a tree before you have to put a ring on it?
on the changes required in the distribution of political power to promote environmental sustainability;
why not speak of the changes required in height and weight to promote a human species some of whose members are bigger than whales while others are smaller than mice?
What is the fucking point of debating what changes need to be made with tossers who have no fucking power to change anything whatsoever?
on the design of appropriate technologies that could simultaneously meet economic as well as ecological objectives.
why not erotic objectives as well? But why stop there? A truly appropriate technology would not just meet economic, ecological, erotic and aesthetic objectives. It would also comfort the sick and provide bereavement counselling to poets whose inspiration has died.
The debate embraced all resource sectors – forests, water, transport, energy, land, biodiversity.
not to mention sodomy for seniors and lipstick for pigs
The government was forced to respond, by creating, for the first time, a ministry of environment at the Centre and in the states as well.
Indira stuck section 48 (a) into the Constitution during the Emergency. No doubt this was because tree-huggers intimidated her.
New laws and new regulatory bodies were forged. For the first time, scientific research on environmental questions found a place in our leading centres of learning.
Which were already shit.
The environmental gains of the 1980s
were of a purely bureaucratic nature. You can pass laws and create Government departments while the underlying policy objective goes a begging.
were undone in later decades, largely because of the policy of economic liberalisation adopted in 1991. In many ways, liberalisation was both necessary and overdue. The license-permit-quota raj of the Nehru and Indira years had stifled entrepreneurship and stalled growth. However, while market freedoms enhanced productivity and incomes, one area which still needed regulation was environmental health and safety.
Guha is a cretin. He knows very well that license permit Raj had killed off industrial growth. Did he not understand that 'Environmental health and safety' regulations would keep out responsible corporates and bring in cowboy operators with local connections?
This was particularly true in the case of chemical industries, which pollute the air and the waters, and even more so of mining, which, if unregulated (as in India it usually is), could have a devastating effect on air, water, soil, and forests.
Keep out tech savvy corporates and you get 'Ninja' miners. That means more rapid environmental degradation which no judicial authority can check. Once a couple of policemen are killed, they will turn a blind eye. A hierarchical Mafia may evolve but it then captures political power.
Meanwhile, the expansion of the middle class under liberalisation spurred a massive boom in private transport, adding enormously to the consumption of fossil fuels as well as to atmospheric pollution.
Middle class is very naughty. It should fuck off and die.
Through the 1990s and beyond, the pace of environmental degradation rapidly intensified;
Due to Middle Class is not hugging trees. It is doing 'consumerism'. That is very naughty. It should just very kindly fuck off and fucking die already.
and so, ironically, did the attacks on environmentalists.
They were beaten and sodomized by imaginary people.
As mining companies devastated forests and displaced tribals across a wide swathe of Central India, those who protested against these crimes were demonised as Naxalites and often incarcerated for long periods, sometimes (as in the case of Stan Swamy) dying in prison.
The Naxal's levied tax at a lower rate than the Government and the compliance costs were non-existent. Corporates would rather have dealt with them. Sadly, greedy Manmohan threw a spanner in the works. Stan Swamy, a Jesuit priest, died in a private hospital in Mumbai.
Companies involved in mining and other forms of resource extraction cultivated close partnerships with politicians in all parties, greasing their palms in exchange for contracts and immunity from public scrutiny. Pro-business columnists in the mainstream press energetically joined the scapegoating of environmental activists, dismissing their concerns out of hand.
All this was entirely predictable. If you make it impossible to have World Bank funding and top tier Infrastructure providers, then you have cowboy operators some of whom, however, may go legit once they have made their pile. But their legit operations are abroad where the compliance cost is lower and activists can't fuck things up with PILs.
Fifty years after Chipko, if environmental concerns do at all figure in public debates, they have to do with climate change. With every unanticipated drought, cyclone, flood or forest fire, the number of climate change sceptics declines further. The awareness of the climate crisis that confronts us is particularly acute among the young, the majority of whose lifespan still lies ahead of them.
Will the young learn the lesson that hugging trees and mindless activism only empowers gangster politicians? Will they understand that there is no magic money tree or 'appropriate technology' which will provide good livelihoods while protecting the environment and giving the Cosmos a blow job?
The consequences of the human-induced accumulation of gases in the atmosphere may constitute perhaps the greatest environmental challenge today. However, it is by no means the only one. In truth, India would be an environmental disaster zone even if climate change did not exist.
Because India didn't start shifting rural girls into giant factory dormitories a hundred years ago. Instead, it feather bedded organized labor and instituted a license permit Raj and then had a whole bunch of crazy activists who chased away the World Bank or any Corporation with a reputation to lose.
It wasn't tree-hugging villagers who did this. It was cretins like Guha.
The highest rates of air pollution worldwide are found in the cities of northern India. Water pollution is scarcely less serious – indeed, the great rivers on which these cities were historically located are biologically dead. Groundwater aquifers are depleting everywhere. Chemical contamination of the soil is at very high levels. Fragile coastal ecosystems are being ravaged by haphazard and unregulated building construction. Large areas of mixed tropical forests are being destroyed by coal mines. Forests that do not have valuable ores underneath them are nonetheless being felled and/or invaded by destructive weeds, these usually exotic to India.
So, the Indian environmental movement was utterly shit. Fifty wasted years of paranoid gesture politics and what do we have? A worse outcome than what the unfettered market would have produced.
Economic impact
The manifold forms of environmental degradation outlined in the previous paragraph do not merely have aesthetic effects. They impose profound economic costs as well.
Which is why it is important that property rights be properly vested so a Coasian solution can prevail. Guha studied Econ. He should know this. He preferred to serve a middle brow market for virtue signaling shite.
Air and water pollution makes people sick and puts them out of work. When soils become too toxic, previously productive lands go out of cultivation. When forests and pastures are depleted, rural livelihoods become less secure.
These are Malthusian checks on population. The alternative is to get rural girls into factory dormitories and let marginal land become depopulated.
The economic consequences of environmental abuse have largely escaped the attention of India’s most celebrated economists – Nobel laureates among them.
Fuck off! Partha Dasgupta has been banging on about it for ages. To their credit, India's most celebrated economists are careful to get the fuck out of the country as soon as possible.
However, some of their less well-known – but more grounded – colleagues have been more alert to the question. A decade ago, a group of economists estimated that the annual cost of environmental degradation in India was about Rs 3.75 trillion, equivalent to 5.7% of GDP (see Muthukumara Mani, editor, Greening India’s Growth: Costs, Valuations, and Trade-Offs, Routledge, 2013). Given how much more polluted the air and water now are, how much more toxic the soil and so on, the economic costs today are probably even greater.
The money spent on that exercise was wasted. Anybody can make up numbers. The fact is, only budgets matter. Governments do things which will increase their revenue so as to buy votes. Either this is above board- i.e. is part of fiscal policy- or else back money finds its way into party coffers, unless Mining barons or 'Sand mafia' dons or whatever simply disintermediate the politicians and hold office themselves.
I suppose the book in question came out when Manmohan was still in power. No doubt, these cretins thought Soniaji would read it and beat Jairam Ramesh with her chappal till he promised to clean up the Environment and stop dressing up like Sophia Loren.
It is important to recognise that in India, the burden of environmental degradation falls principally on the poor.
It is also important to recognize that, if you are rich, you get the fuck out of India.
The rural residents of the Singrauli area, which supplies a large share of Delhi’s electricity requirements, are themselves largely without power while confronted with life-threatening pollution as a result of coal mining (see AVasudha, “Dark and Toxic Under the Lamp: Industrial Pollution and Health Damage in Singrauli”, Economic and Political Weekly, March 4, 2023).
Delhi pays plenty of tax to the Government. The rural residents of Singrauli may be net beneficiaries. Guess who gets the electricity? This is not to say pollution in Delhi isn't intolerable. But you can make enough money in Delhi to shift your family to Europe or America.
In the capital itself, the rich insulate themselves by using indoor purifiers, these out of reach for the working population.
Also the rich have more money than the poor. How do you explain that? It's not like rich people do any work. They spend their time begging in between taking very long naps.
Chipko’s lesson, that
hugging trees won't make things better. You must French kiss shrubbery if you want to achieve anything of note.
humans need to respect nature and live within its boundaries if they wish to survive and indeed prosper, is being violated everywhere in India today.
In which case it isn't really true that humans have to respect shite. Twice as many people live on the same area of land. Some may have lost their houses to landslides but then most had no houses to lose till recently.
And nowhere as brutally as in Chipko’s own Himalayan homeland.
Which is way more prosperous now than it was when hugging trees seemed a good way to pass the time.
The tragedy of Joshimath is symptomatic here. From the 1970s, scientists and activists (including the Chipko leader, Chandi Prasad Bhatt) issued a series of cautionary warnings against the reckless expansion of roads and hotels, the blasting of tunnels, and the building of hydroelectric projects in this ecologically fragile mountain region.
So, the locals had plenty of notice to sell up and get out. Did Bhatt, the son of a priest, want more religious tourism or less? I suppose he would have wanted more pilgrims but less pollution just as I want more cake but also less tummy fat.
Successive governments have disregarded these warnings –
only in the sense that people disregard the warning that they will drop dead one of these days. The point is, you have to keep living till the day you die.
and so has the Supreme Court, which rejected the closely argued and massively documented report by a committee it had itself appointed and gave the green signal to the ill-conceived and potentially very destructive Char Dham Highway project.
which is very beneficial. The benefit outweighs the cost. There is such a thing as time preference.
The sinking of Joshimath presages further such calamities – yet the state and its contractor allies shall not be deterred in continuing their assault on the people and environment of the Himalaya in the name of so-called development. (See Ravi Chopra, “Joshimath: An Avoidable Disaster”,The India Forum, March 7, 2023, accessible here.)
Very true. People are being viciously beaten by contractors. Environment, previously hugged by nice village women, is not being brutally sodomized by the engorged organ of the Government of Uttarakhand. BTW, Development was actually a school chum of the Environment and is feeling very bad that Environment is having to take it up the arse in its name.
The other side to the question of what the sinking of Joshimath presages has to do with further precipitated by Guha and his allies fisting themselves incessantly while saying 'Boo to the Middle Class! Why can't if just fuck off and die already?!'
What makes our current predicament particularly tragic is that we now have plenty of scientific expertise to aid us in carving out a more sustainable path.
This was also available 50 years back. India should have bought first class infrastructure by exporting labor intensive goods.
In the IITs, in the Indian Institute of Science, in non-governmental research centres, India has a cadre of outstanding professionals who can help Central and state governments design and implement, for example, more efficient transport and energy policies without necessarily damaging the environment.
Also aeronautical capacity of pigs can be greatly enhanced. Moreover, in the toilets of our great Universities, turds can be found which are actually transport and energy policies which have magical powers.
However, though the expertise is available, it is rarely, if ever, called upon, perhaps because it shall disturb the cosy relationship between politicians on the one hand and contractors and industrialists on the other.
Also it might disturb Guha in his great enterprise of fisting himself incessantly. The plain fact is contractors do well for themselves. Governments do well for themselves. The people of Uttarakhand have certainly bettered themselves. But what has Guha vaporing about Chipko actually achieved? We have contempt for him because he writes stupid shite. We bear no malice towards some rural women who may or may not have cuddled some trees fifty years ago. I've done worse on a bender. Still, when Guha mentions them, he debases them to his own level.
In a lecture of 1922, Rabindranath Tagore observed that modern machinery had encouraged humans to embark on a “career of plunder [that] entirely outstripped nature’s power for recuperation. Their profit makers dug big holes in the stored capital of the planet. They created wants which were unnatural and provision for these wants was forcibly extracted from nature.”
Tagore was making money for Shantiniketan by talking in this vein. So what? He had talent. Guha does not.
If these tendencies continued unchecked, Tagore foresaw a future where humans had “exhausted the water, cut down the trees, reduced the surface of the planet to a desert, riddled with enormous pits, and made its interior a rifled pocket, emptied of its valuables.” It may yet not be too late to heed his warnings.
Heed my warning Guha. If you and your ilk continue to incessantly fist yourselves while saying 'Boo to the Middle Class! They should just fuck off and die!' then your arseholes will become vaster the Universe. It is not too late to eat your own shit so as to show solidarity with those who French kiss shrubbery.
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