The Quest for Sustainability - A Tsurakú diary

A social-worker friend who travels a lot had been visiting Kolkata last week and we had been having long talks about resource conservation, Himalayan treks and Belgian beers, not in any particular order. Teresa was telling us about her voluntary work with organizations and what she saw and felt about conservation and community development efforts in Ecuador, China and other places. I asked her if she would want to write for Southern Initiatives and she readily agreed. The post below is from her travel diary from Ecuador , a country she visited in 2007. Look out for more of her writing in Southern Initiatives Journal of Sustainable Development.

Community Development in Tsurakú
by Teresa Au

After leaving Pacaya Samiria, I high-tailed it back to Ecuador, as I had already over-stayed my visa by nearly a month! I only had to pay a small fee on the way out though, and then spent the next few days on a constant stream of boats, moto-taxis, and buses. The cargo boat ride out of Pacaya Samiria to Tarapoto was even more grueling than the ride there. No parrots in my face this time, but there were about 30 muchachos (teenage boys) sleeping directly underneath my hammock at night. I'm not kidding; sometimes I would shift positions while sleeping and feel someone's knee in my back. It rained both nights, drenching all the hammocks on the poorly-covered upper deck, which I had hoped would be better than the kiddie-playground/zoo of a 2nd deck. I met a nice Colombian couple though and they helped me stay "muy tranquilo" during the journey.

After brief stops in the beautiful colonial cities of Loja and Cuenca, I arrived back in Quito. It was a very nice homecoming. My Quito family hadn't yet checked their email, so they had no idea I was coming. But when I showed up on their doorstep, they could not have been more welcoming. By then, I was suffering from another fierce bout of mysterious stomach illness, which started after a particularly unappetizing 3 sol menú in the Peruvian highlands of Huaraz. They were so wonderful and took such great care of me, making me special soups and asking about my doctor's visits. Again, I just felt so incredibly lucky to know such warm, loving, generous people. Meeting them is definitely one of the best things that has happened to me on my whole trip.

Once my stomach was feeling a bit better, I headed down next to Tsurakú, an indigenous Shuar community where I would be spending the next few weeks, volunteering with the Ecuadorian non-profit Jatun Sacha Foundation (www.jatunsacha.org). Jatun Sacha has seven different stations all around Ecuador, all trying to promote conservation in different ways. Their projects range from scientific research to environmental education to reforestation. I chose the station at Tsurakú because this is their only station located in the middle of a community. I loved what JJ and Emma were doing at Piedras, but research stations like theirs are so remote that the impact on local communities is not very apparent – aside from providing employment for 3 or 4 locals and making the land legally inaccessible to local people who might otherwise try to make a living off it through logging or gold-panning. What happens when you not only have to think about how to preserve the environment but need to consider the welfare of the local people who actually live there? If your only concern is conserving a large chunk of forest, it is possible to come in as a foreigner, purchase large amounts of land and effectively rope it off from any locals who might want to log it, clear it for farming (which is notoriously unsuccessful in rainforest anyway), or otherwise exploit its natural resources. This is essentially what a lot of people do; they set up private reserves or ecotourism lodges that protect the forest (or at least claim to) by prohibiting anyone else from touching it. But where does this leave local people, who are already struggling to put food on the table? A few are employed in ecotourism lodges owned by foreigners, but these places obviously can’t employ everyone and often they don’t even seem to try very hard (most of the people who work at Explorer’s Inn seem to be from big, faraway cities like Cusco or Lima).

Community development itself though is a very thorny issue. Often what is viewed as progress doesn’t seem to really end up benefiting either the community or the environment. In many of the other countries I have visited, I have seen this tension between development and conservation. In China, Nick and I hiked up incredibly beautiful and spiritual mountains, now flooded with tourists throwing their litter everywhere and carving their names into rocks. While trekking through subtropical forests in China's Yunnan, Simon and I saw hundreds of hills stripped of their trees for failed agricultural experiments, now lying bald and baking in the sun. Then in Vietnam, we hiked through stunning rainforest for 7 hours to reach an ethnic Muong village, only to find that a roaring highway had been built right beside the village.

Is it possible to create alternatives to exploiting the environment that are sustainable and also benefit local communities? I hoped that I would get some insight into this question at Tsurakú, a small community of roughly 300 Shuar. The Shuar are one of the largest, most organized indigenous groups in Ecuador, with their own language and customs that are more than 1000 years old. Although they are probably most well-known for being fearsome warriors, for shrinking the heads of their victims, and for polygamy, in the past 50 years Christian missionaries and the Ecuadorian government have changed (and in some cases outlawed) many of their traditional practices. Many have given up their traditional semi-nomadic existence to live in larger, permanent settlements like Tsurakú, which lies right on the rough dirt road between the two small cities of Puyo and Macas. Changes like these have not only impacted their culture and traditional way of life but have had a substantial impact on the environment, as populations have grown exponentially and put much more of a concentrated strain on the forest’s resources.

When I arrived at Tsurakú, the station direction Marlon walked me through Jatun Sacha’s long list of very ambitious projects. This region of the Ecuadorian Amazon is quite special, as it lies in the zone between cloudforest and lowland rainforest. Once upon a time, Mahogany (ahuano) tress were abundant in the forests around Tsurakú. The numbers have dwindled over the years, as mahogany is a particularly profitable and increasingly rare hardwood. Jatun Sacha raises young mahogany trees as well as a variety of other endemic tree species and fruit trees in their plant nursery. They then plant these trees in plots of forest (“fincas”) owned by various Shuar families in the community. So far, they say they have planted over 5000 trees! Jatun Sacha is also planting and maintaining a community plot of land, where they are farming mahogany trees that could someday be sold by the community for profit. In the community, there are also two medicinal plant gardens that Jatun Sacha has started, to both cultivate these useful plants and to preserve the knowledge the Shuar have of natural medicine. Recently, Jatun Sacha has also started a project to conduct transects through different fincas to survey plant and animal populations. During the school year, Jatun Sacha also teaches environmental education classes at the local high school. I was very impressed by the ambitiousness of all the projects and thought that they all seemed interesting and worthwhile.

Over the course of the first week though, I discovered that worthy goals are not necessarily enough, unfortunately. There were about 3 or 4 other volunteers at the station the whole time I was there, and we worked on the various projects each day with the station coordinator and the single community member that they employ, a really cool Shuar named Natale. The work was enjoyable enough, the Jatun Sacha coordinators (Marlon and Carlos, both from Quito who rotated their time at Tsurakú) were both very intelligent, well-intentioned, and dedicated people, and Natale was great to work with and chat to… but where was everyone else in the community?

I quickly learned that people in the community tend to keep to themselves, while simultaneously knowing everyone else’s business. What this means really is that they don’t like to work together, and certainly don’t seem very motivated to work with Jatun Sacha. Jatun Sacha’s online description of Tsurakú had said, “The Shuar at the Tsuraku Center will be managing the reserve with two Foundation staff members.” This really should have read, “Our two wonderfully well-intentioned Foundation staff members will be managing several ambitious but seemingly futile projects with a single member of the Shuar community, who we employ.” Maybe that is a bit unfair. At least 2 families out of the 32 families at Tsurakú seem interested in what Jatun Sacha is doing. However, from the website’s description, I had envisaged working side by side with many different members of the community everyday. Unfortunately, the reality was very different. We rarely even worked with the 2 families who seemed most supportive of Jatun Sacha’s activities. Most people in the community don’t even seem to really understand what Jatun Sacha is trying to do, why they are there, or how they are trying to help the community, apart from the small monetary contribution Jatun Sacha pays to the community every month. While Jatun Sacha has a lot of really good ideas, many of their projects seem doomed to fail without community participation. Eventually, they hope that the community will be motivated enough and able to maintain Jatun Sacha’s conservation projects all on their own. I suppose to be fair, it is still a bit difficult to see how things will turn out, as the station is still very very young, and many changes could require years or generations to really take hold. Still, because the community itself suffers from so many of its own problems that are entirely independent of Jatun Sacha, it seems that Jatun Sacha is working against very unfavorable odds. Already, several of Jatun Sacha’s projects have flopped completely.

As usual, all of the issues involved here are frustratingly complicated. Traditional Shuar practices like hunting are simply not sustainable anymore, as the surrounding forests have been largely depleted of wildlife and populations have only grown. But how can Jatun Sacha get the community to think more in the long-term and be more conservation-minded (both for their own benefit and for the forest’s sake) when community members don’t even seem to want Jatun Sacha there or understand that they are trying to help? While I sympathized with Jatun Sacha’s struggles, I could also sympathize with the community. How can you expect the community to really embrace Jatun Sacha’s efforts when so far, they haven’t appeared to be any significant, DIRECT benefits to the community? Sure, they will eventually get to sell the mahogany from the mahogany farm (if any of it grows well enough), but that is at least 50 years down the line.

While I was at Tsurakú, I was fortunate to have the opportunity of speaking with Katie, the local Peace Corps volunteer. She is also trying help the community through various development initiatives, but has encountered many of the same obstacles as Jatun Sacha has. One of her main projects is helping the community develop community-run ecotourism as a source of income. Katie herself though has become a bit disenchanted by the whole notion of development, especially in this particularly community. By “development,” are we really improving the welfare of these people or are we just hastening their “progress” towards consumerism and commodification of their culture? As Marlon even said, when community members start making more money, the first thing they buy is a television and sound system, even before they think about providing more balanced meals for their children. But who are we really to tell them what to do with their money? As if our own society is any better…

While these issues troubled me a great deal during my time at Tsurakú, the volunteering experience was quite enjoyable in itself. I really enjoyed all of the talks I had with Marlon, Carlos, and Natale, with the other volunteers, and with Katie. I also found it really interesting to learn a bit about Shuar culture from Natale and some of the other people in the community that I met. My last weekend there, we participated in a community workgroup, or “minga.” This was probably my favorite part of my whole time there, as it involved walking 5 hours through the forest to get to even more beautiful primary forest, and then helping out the community with work that needed to be done. The “work” ended up consisting mostly of clearing some vicious weeds and secondary growth to make way for a football (soccer) pitch. I questioned again the real value of our contribution, but it was nice to take part in a community effort like that and get to know some of the people in the community a little bit. I had some good conversations with a very nice woman named Rosalina about chicha-brewing techniques and with her nephew Antonio on hunting and its role in Shuar culture. Some of the other community members who took part in the minga also told us fantastic stories about their family history, which was often very bloody and violent.

While the forest was not nearly as pristine as the forest in the other parts of the Amazon where I’ve volunteered, it was very beautiful in its own right. Because of its location in the zone between cloudforest and the lowlands, the whole region reflects a mix of those two habitats. Giant palms grow everywhere, and I recognized many of the same (or similar) types that I had seen in Peru. But here, moss covers all of the tree trunks and stilt roots. I really loved learning about plants I hadn’t seen before from Natale, Rosalina, Antonio and others, and I was constantly asking them random plant questions or exclaiming, “Que chevere!” (How cool!) when I came across yet another strange new plant.

Teresa Au has studied biology and psychology at Stanford and travelled for months in nations of the South to meet people and experiment different ways of life and living.

Copyright notice: The above post is © Teresa Au, 2009. All rights reserved. Do not use without prior written permission. Our email.

Social Construction of Learning

Imagine a world where learning is without burden!
While surfing Youtube for golden oldies we chanced upon this wonderful video from the Centre for Development of Imaging Technology (C-Dit).

Pretending Products

We had seen so many products which make blatant environmental/social claims that span the gamut from the saintly to the hilarious. Thus we had soaps manufactured using water from the holy Ganga (perhaps one of the most polluted rivers this side of the Himalayas), cosmetics galore flashing green and fresh credentials, cars and air-conditioners holding the banner for the environment. Some of these were small businesses making a genuine effort to deliver a socially-responsible and environment-friendly product to the market.

A recent article in Alternet adresses this issue: the veracity of sustainability/environment-friendly claims and how big corporations are buying into this socially-responsible niche for reasons not difficult to guess and consequences that are alarming. The article has a longish title which goes, `Burt's Bees, Tom's of Maine, Naked Juice: Your Favorite Brands? Take Another Look -- They May Not Be What They Seem'. You can read it here

Lobbying Letters

Letter writing has long been used as an advocacy tool to change the state of things and make the planet more liveable. Below is one such letter that has created history. This was sent by an NGO colleague in Lusaka:

*Okhil Babu's letter to the Railway Department in 1909*

"I am arrive by passenger train Ahmedpur station and my belly is too much swelling with jackfruit. I am therefore went to privy. Just I doing the nuisance that guard making whistle blow for train to go off and I am running with 'lotah' in one hand and 'dhoti' in the next when I am fall over and expose all my shocking to man and female women on plateform. I am got leaved at Ahmedpur station.

This too much bad, if passenger go to make dung that dam guard not wait train five minutes for him. I am therefore pray your honour to make big fine on that guard for public sake. Otherwise I am making big report to papers."


Okhil Chandra Sen wrote this letter to the Sahibganj divisional railway office in 1909.


It is on display at the Railway Museum in NewDelhi.


It was also reproduced under the caption "Travelers' Tales" in the Far Eastern Economic Review.


Any guesses why this letter was of historic
value?

It apparently led to the introduction of toilets on trains in the Indian Railways.

Women in the South - A Human Rights Perspective from Bangladesh

We received the following article from a friend working on human rights issues. This article points out the appalling state of empowerment and rights of women in many nations of the South - Bangladesh being the test case here. In a few snapshots it paints a horrifying picture of the crimes women face in trying to live a dignified existence. The article is being posted as received. Comments are welcome.

The Good Life for Bangladeshi Women!

Starting even before they are born, and continuing throughout their lives, girls are subjected to violence, exclusion, and exploitation based simply on the fact that they are female. Injustices committed against girls occur at all levels of Bangladeshi society in families, communities, and even in the highest levels of the government.

When a man threw acid on Rina, she reported to the police. But instead of implicating the true culprit-her husband –in the crime, she named a different man altogether. She figured that if her husband went to jail, the family would lose its breadwinner, and none would want to marry her daughters. Months later when Rina realized that the whole strange chain of events had taken place because her husband wanted to remarry; she decided to tell the truth about the attacker. But by then her testimony had become unreliable and her case became weak. Three months later her husband remarried. In protest of his remarriage, Rina left home. She joined to PHREB Leadership Academy for Girls to learn handicrafts. She received a three months training on sewing. In February 2007, she got a loan from local bank "Bank Asia Limited" to open a tailoring shop in the Chandgaon Balir Hat Slum area. She has achieved a grand success in this business. She has developed herself as an idle for the hundreds of thousands of oppressed women and girls in the area. In her shop she has three other girls working together. During the Eid festival (1st October to 14 October) she has earned more than 60,000 taka. The writer of this Article has asked her what is good life? She answered: "I am enjoying a good life NOW, this is good life. Good Life is a life with freedom of choice, decision making, right to enjoy life how I want and to be equal".

Shakila, though went to school in the UK, coming from a wealthy family, she lead a very different life from her brother. She was made to go an all girls' school and was not allowed to go out unchaperoned. Her father eventually brought her to Bangladesh while her brother stayed on to complete his education and later pursued a career. In Dhaka she was not allowed to go back to school and had to take her education privately. She was not allowed to go anywhere and if she got any crank calls she would be severely reprimanded, as it was her fault. Soon like millions of young girls Shakila had to get married, after which she found herself in yet another prison. Her husband used to return home at 1 or 2 in the morning then Shakila had to offer her body to her husband. She had no life, if she went out her mother in law would frown. Her husband does not allow her to a job and a freedom in her life, as she is a ‘wife’. She dreams to get equality, freedom and right to participation. She knows nobody will offer them freely so she has decided to come out and joined a primary school as a teacher. She is searching for a good life. She dreams such a society where men and women are equal. She is not only a dreamer but also a gender activist now to fight for equality. She told the writer of this article she wants to join the fight of PHREB and BKAF to ensure equality in the society.

Women and girls are caught up in such various circles all the time. They are taught to be dependent on men and submit to them. They are kept ignorant of their basic human rights. They can not be educated on their wills, can not marry on their choices, they can not work as they will be become disobedient if they are economically independent, can not walk alone because it is not safe, can not work long hours as it will hamper their household duties, can not go abroad if they go astray, can not think their own thoughts, speak their minds or even breathe as freely as they want to.

For every step they take forward, they must go back a few steps more. Women’s future are predetermined. Social prejudice and parochial state mechanisms ensures that women go only so far men allows them to go in every aspects of their lives. It is like the duck and chicken. Men are like ducks-whatever they do, when they come out of the water, they are dry. Women are like chickens; when they come out of water, they are completely drenched. They are made to think themselves the weaker sex. Eventually they become it, and the circle of oppression and violence continues.

Violence against women and girls by someone she knows, either parents, brothers, husbands, in-laws, relatives or boyfriends, is prevalent in all sections of Bangladeshi society. Domestic violence remains the greatest threat of women’s human rights. The violence that don’t only take place in villages but among the urban, educated and even privileged classes. Violence that is not always visible. Violence that is never talked about. Domestic violence against women and girls, wives and daughter in laws, girl children transcended all boundaries of class and creed, age and relationships. It can happen to any woman, anywhere. Even educated and otherwise strong women remain in abusive relationships due to the pressures of an unaccepting family, unforgiving society and in inefficient corrupt legal and rescue system.

Violence is not only about bleeding wounds and acid burns but also about incidents many people in Bangladesh don’t even refer to as violence that many women simply accept. Marital rape for example. For a woman, who, from childhood has been taught to obey and be submissive to men, be it father, brother or husband, and for a man who has been conditioned to be dominating, to exercise their authority over women, is marital rape really a crime? Does it even exist? Not in our legal system.

While on pen and papers we seem to have enough laws protecting women and their rights, their effect is obviously questionable. Domestic violence is just swept under rug as “private” affairs between a married couples or “family matters”. Many husbands and wives believe that wife beating is permitted by religion. Thousands of Girls are coming out breaking the cycle of oppressions. They want to pursue a good life for themselves for the future generation. The largest Adolescent Girls' Organization Bangladesh Kishori Adhikar Forum popularly known as BKAF is committed to ensure good life for Bangladeshi girls. BKAF helps girls in their transitions from the victims of gender based violence to the leaders for change.

[This article was written by Faridul Alam, Founder and Managing Director, Promoting Human Rights and Education in Bangladesh (PHREB); Copyright, Faridul Alam, All rights reserved]

The Web of Rights

A few weeks ago a young friend from Delhi spammed my Orkut account with a message urging me to check out their NGO's work on good governance, using Right to Information as a tool. Though the spam irritated me a bit, I was impressed visiting the organisation's website and learning about the work they are doing. The Right to Information Act and the involvement of Indian civil society in putting it to use has been a watershed among movements that have people at their core. While the relationship between right to spam and the right to information are complex, in this case, I thanked my young friend for sending me the information! In fact I invited her to write for this journal which she has done.

Unhindered flow of information say economists is an essential pre-requisite for perfect competition in markets. And perfect competition is best for consumer welfare. Drawing an analogy, if we think of citizens as 'consumers' and democracy and its institutions (elected representation, universal franchise, rule of law) as the framework, then again information becomes vitally important for this framework to deliver the goods. The goods: of course good governance, empowered citizenry, lesser corruption among others.

So the right to information is one of those 'super-rights' that if realised to its fullest can nurture and strengthen other rights of the people. This is why the rulers of the day have been jittery and attempts to dilute the law are afoot, here in India. Thankfully a proactive and vigilant civil society has till now prevented this from happening.

Yet, can this right stand in isolation as a source from which other rights and empowerments flow? We know this is not so. For information without understanding is useless, just as understanding without information can be misdirected. Education and the existence of a vibrant civil society movement guarantees that this marriage of information and understanding take place.

Let's talk about India. Here the right to information legislation is being used by deprived and better off alike in demanding (among various other things) information about progress in government projects, payment of old-age pensions among other things. But in many cases there is a civil society organisation facilitating the process of exercising the right. This is necessary as many of us do not know the exact procedures involved. Moreover a large section of the victims of mis-governance are the deprived. They are victims because their deprivation has made them vulnerable and among these deprivations is often a lack of basic education.

Education nurtures our social consciousness, even the most rudimentary knowledge of reading, writing and arithmetic helps us relate to the world in an extra-animal way that is not only about instincts. The Indian reformer Swami Vivekananda said

'Education is the manifestation of the perfection already in man.' Without the manifestation of this perfection - what we call here social consciousness, or our consciousness of rights and duties - no super-legislation can guarantee salvation.

While NGOs can play the important role of mediator they can do so much. To instil consciousness about rights, to inculcate the attitude of asking questions and fighting for answers, education has no alternative.

So in this web of rights where the right to information alongwith human rights occupy a central space, education happens to be the gossamer thread that holds it all together. Its that sine qua non which guarantees that the web, is a web of life and empowerment and not a quagmire of blind alleys and endless pits. And this is why the right to education (elementary education to begin with) becomes so important.

Alas! progress on this right is slow and in India we still don't haven't got the necessary amendment to the Constitution that will enshrine this supremely important right. Bogged down in nitty-gritties, procrastinating for reasons best known to ourselves we keep delaying in institutionalising one of the pivotal rights that will bring this web to life. When education and enlightenment reach every corner of our land and people begin to ask questions and demand for change, that will be the greatest of revolutions to have come for a long time. Till then we go on erecting the edifices of our democracy, on thin ground.

(Editorial written by Rajat Chaudhuri, Published in Southern Initiatives Journal of Sustainable Development, Vol II/I. Copyright, Southern Initiatives . All rights reserved)

Smoke, Tears and Mirrors of Development

As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler – Henry David Thoreau

The Frenchman has finally disappeared beyond the horizon. Good news for many of us that the last rites of the decommissioned aircraft carrier – Le Clemenceau - of the Fifth Republic was not performed in the scrapyards of India. The poison boat with a thousand tonnes of asbestos and other toxic substances in its hull was at last sent back home. But it took the collective might and tireless efforts of groups like Greenpeace, Ban Asbestos Network and others and finally the Supreme Court of India to deal with this retired warrior from the French Navy.

Why was it so difficult to send the ship back? A decommissioned aircraft carrier, it of course did not threaten us with guns or Exocet missiles! It was difficult because surreptitiously and without heed to internationally agreed rules we have decided to become a prime destination for the waste of the world’s rich. And the rich are very happy to bestow us with this honour and help us in ignoring a rule here, skirting round an agreement (Basel Convention and Basel Ban Amendment) there. We have welcomed dead ships for breaking at our dirty ship-breaking facility at Alang, we have shopped for the world’s dirt and poison like mercury, lead, ash, electronic scrap in the far shores of Europe, Australia and America.

We are told that all this dirt is needed because the dirt is not dirt after all. It yields `useful’ substances like mercury, asbestos, gold, copper, plastics which are required to supercharge the Indian economy. It is never revealed how toxic some of these substances are, how hazardous are the processes through which these are recovered from the waste. What is never spoken about is what the workers who are involved in handling and extraction get in return, what diseases plague them, what shadows darken their tenuous existence. The discussion if at all is about quantities, about numbers, jobs, the employment that the merchandisers of waste generate. Quality (the quality of life of these workers in this case) as often, is quietly forgotten. The benefits, painted in the colours of mass appeal, elaborated in the language of progress are repeated over and over again till the costs disappear from our minds. At best the costs are explained to be manageable.

Which brings us to another important and literally big story of the day – The Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) dam over the Narmada river in India, its promises and the tears of those it displaced. Though not as gigantic as the Three Gorges Dam in China the SSP, a Rs 30,000 crore (US$ 6.6 billion) project when completed has been promised to irrigate 1.8 million hectares. However as activists led by Medha Patkar of Narmada Bachao Andolan has been pointing out, the human and other costs are beyond compare. When the dam height was 110.64 metres the number of families affected by submergence in the state of Madhya Pradesh alone was 8860. The total number of affected families has been estimated to be around 25,000 while resettlement and rehabilitation is plagued by corruption and other ills. When the Narmada Control Authority recently allowed further increase in the height of the dam to 121.92 metres, it resulted in feverish protests and a fast by Medha Patkar and some affected people. The Chief Minister of Gujarat also went on what we could call a counter-fast in support of height increase of the dam and the farmers who will be benefited by the dam.

Here we see the promise of irrigated land coming in direct conflict with the welfare of the displaced people. Of course the court has stepped in asking the government to arrange for rehabilitation and resettlement (R&R) but as we have said before, the on-the-ground scenario leaves much to be desired. And also do these state governments have enough land to distribute among those whose lands have been or will be submerged?

And the undesirability of big dams does not end here. To speak of the biggest in the world, the 185 metres high Three Gorges Dam across the Yangtze in China, has been criticized for its effects on environment, ecosystems, loss of heritage sites, contradictions between flood control and hydroelectricity production, induced seismicity among other reasons. This dam has also displaced millions while their numbers have been underreported and corruption has eaten into R&R benefits.

One other mammoth project here in India that is supposed to propel us forward on the development path is the Sethusamudram ship channel between India and Sri Lanka. By cutting sailing time of ships this channel has been touted to bring direct economic and other benefits to the country and its people. As per latest reports about 5.16 million cubic metre of the shallow seabed has already been dredged as part of the project. The project goes on inspite of experts having faulted its environmental impact assessment (EIA) exercise among other things.

The juggernaut of `development’ rolls on. The tunnel vision of our leaders and we who support them leads us to believe in the benefits of rummaging through a poison boat, digging a ship channel or building the monstrosity of a dam. The costs are at best managed and very badly at that. Have we ever stopped back and tried to do a disinterested cost benefit exercise of such mammoth projects where all parameters – the social, environmental, economic – are taken into account and a participatory framework is used for decision making, as to the necessity of the project in the first place.

Surely dead men tell no tales, nor does those who are yet to be born. So the burden of unsustainabilty of our developmental model can be quietly passed on to our future even at the conception stage. And as for the present – the people that the dams displace or the workers dying of asbestosis or lung cancer in the ship breaking yard - we have courts to grant them alternative land, we have corrupt officials to underreport their numbers or demand bribes for getting rehabilitated, we have managers and experts to lecture on safety in the workplace and greedy contractors not to implement their suggestions.

But how long can we fool ourselves and go on. Can costs of displacement and disease be so easily measured? How does the economic, the social and the environmental costs relate with each other? Can our best climate modeling still predict where the next cyclone would strike and how exactly global warming will affect climate and weather of a particular region?

When the flesh and blood and tears and smiles of thousands of people and those unborn are at stake the concept of cost begins to lose the sharp and clear ring that commerce or economics tends to impute upon it. The arithmetic of numbers and the complacency of nice theories of that Italian, Vilfredo Pareto and the utilitarians, begin to ring with a strange hollowness. The hall of mirrors, that faceless development embodies; where we sit and vote for progress every election-time, begins to get dark. The glass gets blackened before our eyes. And with this dissolution of meaning we feel as helpless as the primitives, as to what we should do with the great power that science and technology has given us.

Do we go on managing and that too badly, the ills of our love for a glittering future of obscene wealth and power? Or do we start thinking anew, and with passion, for simpler, unsophisticated and more humane solutions to the problems of life and living. As individuals, communities and nations the choices are always open before us.

(Editorial written by Rajat Chaudhuri in Southern Initiatives Journal of Sustainable Development (SIJSD), Published in SIJSD, Vol I/IV; Copyright, Southern Initiatives. All rights reserved.)

Love’s Triumph over Fear

A card-carrying romantic will always say that in the end love triumphs over fear. And she may be right, but we need to go a bit deeper and ponder – fear of what and love of which kind and to what effect? Till we have done this bit of thinking, we really can’t be just happy about the triumph of love. From selfless love for fellow beings to the businessman’s love for profits there is a whole gamut of this emotion to observe.

To make matters simple we can focus here on three kinds of love – romantic love, the love for wealth, and the love for fellow humans. Love for one’s blood being defined more by biology and genes and its characteristics well known, is not considered here.Literature, history and the newspapers are replete with examples of how romantic love is ready to face all odds and how easily it conquers fear. So we have the story of Abelard and Heloise from 12th century France or that of Heer-Ranjha immortalised by the Indian silver screen.

Many are the instances of romantic love brave in the face of adversities -from jealous uncles to cruel kings. Dante said that this love `quiets our will’ and we tend to agree. Scientists who are intent on pinning down romance to chemicals point out that a neurotransmitter chemical called serotonin is among the most important in the chemistry of love. Interestingly this chemical can make people temporarily insane and insanity, as we know, often breeds fearlessness.

Love for wealth and profits has helped in the creation of huge enterprises and employment on the one hand and international crime-syndicates on the other. The worshippers of wealth do also have to rise above fear – sometimes it is the fear of failure, the tax official or angry union, while for others it is the crime investigator. Their kind of love is sometimes described as avarice but even if it does triumph over fear we can’t say straight away that its end-effects are intrinsically beneficial to society at large.

It depends on the subject who overcomes fear and with what final intent.Which brings us to the love for fellow humans, perhaps the greatest of all kinds of love. This kind of love as Gandhi, Martin Luther King and others have shown, triumphs finally and decisively over fear. The power of this love can free nations, save lives, bring peace and empower communities. Every concerned social activist will tell us a story, how such a love everyday confronts adversaries and one step at a time, spreads joy and happiness among underprivileged and suffering people. While there may be battles they lose, this growing community of men and women the world over are the vanguards of a movement, which through the power of love over fear, can truly change the world. These selfless people are the bearers of the legacy of Gandhi of Martin Luther and many others; nay they are the descendants of Prometheus!

Unforgettable quotes

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.-Thoreau

All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.-Thoreau

"To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge."-Confucius

When one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I foresee that all men at length establish their lives on that basis.-Thoreau

The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?-Thoreau

Let there be Rights

We are at the gates of Hong Kong - the venue of the sixth ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) - when this goes to print. Ministers and delegates from all WTO member nations will flock to this port city over the next week to try and fashion rules which will guide world trade in the coming years. There will be farmers from Korea, coffee growers from Brazil, industrialists from India and of course there will be the ministers the NGOs and many more. All will descend on that glittering port town to articulate their hopes and fears and possibly come back with a better deal for the constituency they represent. While Indian ministers will pitch for better deals in the negotiations on trade in services, their European counterparts will try hard to continue with the protection given by their countries to farmers. Cautious activists will try and buy time before the opening up of the services sector in developing nations to the winds of global commerce while certain powerful nations will band together pressing the South for better access to their markets for non-agricultural products.

More than ten thousand kilometers from Hong Kong and on a long and chilly night in Montreal, ten days ago, there was excitement of another kind. The labours of that endless night brought about a better deal for the environmental future of the planet. The 11th Meeting of the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change came to a close in Montreal this past week with the happy news that countries have agreed to do more (beyond the 2012 commitment period) than they had previously pledged, to try and control the havoc that greenhouse emissions are causing to world climate systems. This was some news for cheer and perhaps all excepting US and Australian negotiators were happy.

In the backdrop of Montreal, Hong Kong does not look promising enough. While more and more countries join the WTO possibly with the hope of a better economic future some simple lessons seem to be passing into collective oblivion. Excepting for conscientious activists rarely do we hear about the pitfalls of a system that is bred on contradictions. The basic premise of gains from trade stands on the assumptions of Ricardian comparative advantage. This in simple terms translates to the cold logic of concentrating in doing what you do best and let the others provide for your other needs. Talking of international trade this means concentrating on export of goods and services in which you have some kind of advantage. The second premise that links trade with development is that of trickle-down, i.e. to say the gains thus accrued will percolate and reach everyone.

Sadly these premises are riddled with practical holes. For example who will guarantee that if I spend the first few years of post-college life cramped in call-centres, working difficult shifts and conversing in a peculiar language over phone, with unknown unseen people thousands of kilometers away, that this will not affect the development of my character as a responsible and balanced citizen? How would we justify the loss of indigenous varieties of crops because of the lure of cash crops for export markets and the strengthening grip of multinational seed companies (hawking genetically modified crops and other poisons) on the farmer? How would we ensure that the export earnings trickling into the bank accounts of businesses in leather, textile and clothing and other industries will be equitably distributed among the labour who toil for these industries? Would the state guarantee that in the race to export and export more and fast we will not turn a blind eye to the pollution caused by tanneries? Such questions in there hundreds bubble up in our minds. And sadly we get few answers.

We hear much about managing growth, but can myopic politicians be truly trusted to manage expertly. Can we trust those whose vision often extend to the next vote, to manage with a clear conscience? Doesn’t such managing actually often boils down to the creation of consent where consent is essential and forgetting the rest?

A farmer in India cultivating a rare indigenous variety of rice suddenly finds the lure of floriculture (which has a good export market) too hard to resist. In the process he gives up his age-old practice and begins to cultivate gladiolus and rose which is sold in Amsterdam flower markets. Then one day the Dutch find that Thai roses or Turkish gladiolus are better and cheaper or perhaps they lose their interest in the rose. Roses go out of fashion. The farmer is now in dire straits. He may die of hunger if he doesn’t migrate to the city into the clutches of urban poverty. With some more following his footsteps the indigenous variety of rice he grew would soon be lost.

Yet the worshipers of the deity of trade tend to ignore how dependent (and hence vulnerable) we (nations and peoples) become on one another when we begin to produce just for the other’s sake. Even with the changing geographies of a globalised production only the contours of those dependencies change. It is also mistakenly believed that human beings can be easily impressed upon to behave in a certain way. The mantra of trade-investment-competition led economic growth profanely assumes that human beings like robots can be turned into machines for producing goods and services, while consumerism will be the fuel that will keep them determined enough to work the next day. That individuals are not only economic entities but also social animals, culturally concerned, lovers of justice and liberty and so on are things they want to ignore and try to mange.

In the world of sleepy villages and choking cities, where men and women feel strongly for more things than just bank accounts and plasma TVs, the common cause of growth for growth’s sake, cannot survive without generation of consent and coercion. Generation of consent can take many forms, like the Hindu demon-king Mahisasura - can hide behind a myriad guises, from the seducing advertisements at metro stations to the spiel of a seasoned politician sold on progress. We give this the name of covert coercion. But coercion covert or overt soon begins to bite and the more sensitive (the underprivileged and the conscientious) are the first victims. Some fall to the lure of covert coercion, some die of disease or hunger, but still some stand up and protest and demand that their rights be upheld. In democracies this pull of opposites (the machinery of consent versus the souls of the conscientious and the affected) gravitates around a shaky equilibrium but in autocracies and dictatorships the situation is far worse. Obviously in democracies the management of consent has to be done in more refined ways than in a banana republic.

All movements of rights that colour the social fabric of nations big and small are protests against this tendency of coerced homogenisation for `greater ends’. Of course this attack is not only from the system that promotes trade and globalisation but from all entities and institutions and ideas which falsely reduces everything to profits and growth, hearts to greenbacks, minds and emotions to cash machines.

This is the system which hires thousands of women workers in sophisticated chip manufacturing and electronics industries - because this is something women excel in and this is a fast growing sector that adds to growth figures - but refuse to give them a stronger role in a nation’s political life. It’s the same amorphous immensely powerful entity which destroyed the lands of Ogoni people in Nigeria and put environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and nine others to death. It’s the hydra-headed demon at work that killed and maimed thousands in Bhopal because of their least regard for environmental safety or displaced local Sakai people from the forests of Indonesia to clear the forest gardens to feed their paper mills.

Trying to impose a structure where there is none can be dangerous. From Marxism to MTV the macabre dance of structures continue. Many of the problems that dog societies and people and nations around the world flows from this tendency to impose, to homogenise, neutralise and shall we say robotify. But we have to stand up against all such designs and strongly assert our human, cultural, environmental, gender and other rights. This is the least we can do for a better future. So let us clap the gay activists of Kolkata or the small farmers movement in Brazil or the brave soldiers of Narmada Bachao Andolan in India fighting against big dams; let us drop our coins for the Greenpeaces and the Medecins sans Frontières and other innumerable conscientious men and women out to fight for their legitimate rights the world over, out to break free from this gauntlet of homogenisation that seems ever closer each passing day. In this pleasant Calcutta December, with the push and shove of Hong Kong about to unfold before us, I somehow have cold Montreal and the cheery-weepy climate activists on my mind.

(Written by Rajat Chaudhuri and published in Southern Initiatives Journal of Sustainable Development, Vol I/III; Copyright, Southern Initiatives. All rights reserved.)

Tread Softly

`Tread Softly for you tread on our dreams.' We will talk here of what we hold dear. What we believe should happen and hasn't been happening and from here we will raise our voices and galvanise our energies to realise our dreams. For better worlds are possible.