I’ve been reading the new book on
the environment Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India, by Aseem
Shrivastava and Ashish Kothari published by Penguin/Viking last year. For these
past three decades I’ve been myself immersed in environmental campaigns, in
particular against opencast coal mining in the Damodar valley. As the
temperatures begin rising steeper each summer, the monsoons fail repeatedly,
droughts and floods become increasingly frequent a lot of people have started
taking an interest in the Other Side od Global Industrialism.
The greatest changes in society
come from within an acceptance of particular value systems and their impact on
food, water and human happiness as far as the natural environment is concerned.
Up until the industrial revolution value systems were dependant on a basically
survival environment. After the advent of industrialism and the economy
dependant on minerals and non renewable resources the industrialized West moved
into a new theatre of industrial
production using machines powered from
fossil fuels and left behind the good old egalitarian systems of farming and
exchange -- the food system that had
held together the Old Order. This was armed colonialism which was backed by the
newly available automatic firepower and brought its own militarized hierarchies
and the policing of hitherto peaceful self-sufficient natural environments and
their highly evolved societies which suddenly became backward savages sitting upon
the raw materials useful for industrial production. This was the recent epoch
we have witnessed and whose face is familiar in our new India where we have
inflicted more damage on our natural environment and rural and forest societies in the name of development
than two centuries of British colonialism and three centuries of Mughal rule
could achieve.
Throughout the five centuries of
colonial expansion over the planet governments became more and more powerful
especially after the nineteenth century, and it is estimated the natural
heritage and species lost and being lost is something not witnessed in millions
of years. European colonialism snatched more than half the planet’s richest
continental resources in the name of Sovereignty and through what has been
defined by Native American jurists as ‘Conquest by Law’. After the colonization
of Meso-and-South America
in the 16th century came the colonization of Africa ,
America , Australia
and the Pacific, Southeast Asia and South
Asia . Vast swathes of hitherto untouched natural environments
became subjected to the scythe which is called development, farming the planet
for industrial warlords.
Today I see no answers or
solutions given to find the right direction. I keep reading pages after pages
of radical new solutions, a ‘how to’ type of approach, but the solution to my
mind lies not in building fairy castles but in identifying the sickness and
tackling it at its source. Nobody fully seems to understand – maybe a few do –
that the most urgent action is to stop the massive damage being done to nature
and society while we keep on implementing ‘solutions’. Its what happened with
Global Warming. Everybody was optimistic until the space for optimism ran out.
Then these agencies started to tick faster but kept failing. Now we are aware
Climate Change as its called, the result of anthropogenic global warming,
cannot be any longer stopped. And I’m not joking. There are rays of hope like
Niyamgiri in Odisha and several other successful activist campaigns against
destructive development, but the problem will not go away. There has to be a
national consciousness consensus that the state is headed in the wrong
direction. We require to step back and analyse our own selves. No great change
in society ever was possible without a change of self, a philosopher’s stone.
Like Sparta or the presence of
Socrates which helped develop the Roman state. Or after 300 AD the rise of the
Roman Catholic in Europe . For better or worse it led to
the Reformation, Renaissance, Age of Exploration, and finally, the
Enlightenment. Then all the lights suddenly go out. The greatest wars the world
has ever seen raged from end nineteenth century (Zulu and Boer Wars) to the two
great World Wars in which an estimated eighty millions died.
The challenge for educational
institutions in our own times bear the shadows of the past and the even longer
shadows cast by the future. The schools, colleges and other educational
institutions are today churning out the young citizens of tomorrow born into an
uncertain, fragile and mechanistic environment
-- digital and cyberspace, neuro engineered and robotic -- they are the citizens of tomorrow in a
world with an evidently new moral order… When I look at the good schools (ands
I am specifically looking at our Indian schools)I am greatly distressed because
these high achieving young folk are being created precisely to become fodder
for the Industrial Machine waiting to swallow them. The IM is the devil in
disguise. I know the paychecks are good, and more’s the problem! It is these
industries that will provide these youth what is today fashionably called by
the nouveau riche a’higher standard of life’. It is precisely this double-speak which I am
referring to. I know that all parents want their children to ‘do well’ in life,
but what is ‘well’ may I ask ? Are we calculating the costs ?
It has been said that culture is
the product of a sound education. What do we mean by a ‘sound education’ ? Does
99.8% in exams sum up human life ? The
human race is a long rigmarole of change but nowhere have robotic geniuses
created El-Dorados except in the present times.
Are not the creations of our imagination – our own children – the most
important investment in our common futures as a race ? And with their superior knowledge and ability
are they not the material needed to bring the
environment to nothing but rubble. This planet EARTH we stand on (always
thinking we are standing upright!), this Blue Planet, is a tiny fragment of an asteroid in the
hostile emptiness of black space warmed by a slowly dying Sun. It is no longer
Blue as in Armstrong’s 1969 photograph from the Eagle on his way to the moon.
Recent NASA photos show it brown by day, and by night ablaze with electric
lights. We have created a dying
environment in the only home we have.
Education has been going on for
millennia, and all great civilizations evolved their own great systems of
education in their own languages and scripts from Mayan, Inca and Toltec to Mesopotamian, Arab and
Egyptian. Even Europe latterly after Greece
had education. China
and Asia have been great models for education. Highly
civilized societies have presided over what we now possess. There have been the
great Upanishadic schools of India ,
and even now the higher education of India
is in her temple schools and ancient ethnic ways of life and culture having
their own knowledge systems.
I am trying to say that we cannot
have systems of education which celebrate the blowing up of the Earth and
polluting its atmosphere to the point that it will be too hot to live in and
climates will change destroying all traditional ecological produce from
agriculture to forest gardens. We cannot to afford to have a highly industrialized planet and a
more highly polluted living space just because every body wants to live “
Western Style”. In his own inimitable way the Mahatma said “If every one in India
wants to live at the standard of the England
then five continents will be required.” As ever, he was Spot-On.
The natural spaces are
disappearing so fast that in a decade rivers, lakes, forests, and what is
referred to as ‘the countryside’ will disappear under highways, parking lots
and industrial developments. Europe and the UK
have woken up to the world crisis faster than Indians and hit the brakes. Coal
is out in Germany ,
UK , France .
The sky on an an April day in the
countryside “under and English heaven” azure blue as a baby’s eyes, is still to
be experienced. The ‘London Smog’ of old is no more. The forests of Europe
once ravaged by industry and war a full and flourishing, the rivers clean and
brimful, same with the lakes.
We continue with fatalistic
feudalism to the utter collapse of our last ecosystems, cities piled with
stinking garbage, the poorest nation in the world with the highest malnutrition
levels (worse than sub-Saharan Africa I’m told) – Here is a challenge for our
educational institutions: Schools, Colleges, Centres of ‘Higher’ (whatever That
means) learning’. Tomorrow is what we do today. If we do it wrong there may not
be any Day After Tomorrow.
The higher educational institutions and the so called
higher class English Medium schools (upto Plus Two) in India are churning out
students for the higher income elite sector/industrial jobs which is directly
responsible for the destruction of India's natural resources and massive
displacement of land and forest dependent indigenous peoples. This high-end India is concerned with private and state consumption which
reflects in GDP and is representative of less than a quarter of the Nation's
population. It has been estimated recently that 200 million Indians enjoy a
level of GDP equivalent to the economies of Great Britain , Germany , and France combined. But what about the rest of the Nation of 1.2
billion souls supposedly all created equal ? There is not and can not be
equality for all and 40 percent of India 's 1.2 billion live below the poverty line of a dollar
a day, while 25% live in a state of chronic malnutrition and abject poverty and
starvation. Most of this kind of malnutrition and starvation is linked with the
eighty million displaced in the last sixty-five years through state sponsored
destructive development projects. If education is to have a social purpose it
must not be exclusive or hierarchical or create an exploitative class and has
to be national in the best sense in the belief which Thomas Jefferson voiced in
the words" We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created
equal."(American Declaration of Independence 4th July 1776 ). In the modern Indian system such equality is not
envisioned and even if envisioned cannot be applied due to racial, religious,
and caste prejudices. We have created an increasingly industrialized India facing historical acceleration dependant upon economic
hierarchies which are at the cost of the Nation's poorest and is dependent upon
the natural resources and lands they have ancestrally lived upon. We are
witnessing the social evolution run amok of modern India especially in the past
two decades -- since Neo-Liberalisam was given full rein -- a situation similar
to what the Spanish Conquistadores enacted in the Americas with the conquest of
the Aztecs by Herman Cortes in their lake-encircled capital of Tenochtetlan in
1519 in Mexico, and the subsequent conquest of the Inca in Cuzco, Peru by
Francesco Pizarro. In both events modern firearms, Spanish steel, horses and
germs (smallpox) carried by the Spanish triumphed. The germs caused epidemics which
almost wiped out the meso-American population. In our present context similar
forces are at work only the weapons are Economic, Psychological, and
State-empowered policy, and and the germ most powerfully active is a new
technology for transforming traditional mindsets, i.e. Internet, Television,
Advertizing/Media and Cellphone. India today is the film-set and landscape of the 2009
blockbuster film Avatar.
BULU IMAM
Sanskriti, Dipugarha
Hazaribagh, Jharkhand
16th September, 2013
Written specially for the Mt.Carmel
(St.Joseph’s School) 50th Jubilee Annual 2013
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