Monday, June 13, 2016

How we view the environment these days

"Reeds, messiness and bushes are not part of the green imagination. Instead, lush parks, tall trees and forests populate many million minds."

I have come across the same reaction to scrub forest, or even desert ecosystems.  There seems to be a need to manicure, control, create order.

The Art of Living case illustrates how narrowly most urban Indians view the environment

The riverbed is rich in reeds; they were removed. The many tiny pits and mini-ponds were filled up, and the soft, spongy ground flattened and hardened.
In other words, the riverbed quality of the riverbed was finished.
..... The banks of the Yamuna should be restored – not polished into a bio-diversity park, but helped to grow back into the patch of plastic-free, spongy, squishy, sandy wilderness that it once was.
Across the country, in schools, children should be taught to appreciate India’s less glamorous, less stereotypical, rich eco-systems – reed-filled riverbeds, marshy wetlands, pale, swaying grasslands, clumpy deserts, along with the more popular dense, green forests and gently flowing ancient rivers.


The World Culture Festival has managed this in the same way that many large projects do: by being politically connected, by quietly becoming too big to fail, and in the end by brazening out the public relations.

Amazingly, the citizens who petitioned the court have been accused of lazily speaking up at the last minute. As they rightly point out, they spoke up when it came to their attention; government agencies, on the other hand, exist to fulfil this function in a timely way. It is their job. Where was the Aam Aadmi Party government through this mess? 
....environmentalists have always had a hard fight against state and corporation, but the going is now a whole lot tougher. The new nationalism openly twins state and religion, makes a virtue out of loudly worshipping India even as it tramples all over it, and sees environmental concern as a nuisance. It wants to guard India, but is disinterested in protecting and nurturing it. It takes a staggering inversion of democratic and ethical values to think that public criticism tarnishes the image of India,


 

 

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