Religion and Ecology in India and Southeast Asia

David L Gosling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134551774
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What part can Hindu and Buddhist traditions play in resolving the ecological problems facing India and South East Asia? David Gosling's exciting study, based on extensive fieldwork, is of global significance: the creation of more sustainable relationships between people and the natural world is one of the most urgent social and environmental problems of the new millennium. David Gosling looks at the religions historically and from a contemporary perspective.

1 Introduction

At the start of another millennium the physical condition of our planet continues to deteriorate. From the standpoint of the industrial world, standards of living are rising for most, and patterns of employment are increasingly shifting from goods to services, with consequent reductions in growth rates and environmental impact. Some of the largest developing societies, however, experience severe poverty and the escalation of environmental problems such as deforestation, the pollution of waterways and the depletion of natural resources such as minerals, fuels and biodiversity.

People tend to view these issues according to where they live. From the perspective of the industrial nations, the world’s most serious environmental problems are mainly the anticipated effects of global warming, ozone layer depletion and high population growth rates elsewhere. In the developing world, however, the perceived environmental problems cannot be so easily separated from their social context, but tend to be associated with loss of forest cover (and its inappropriate replacement), biodiversity loss, the contamination of rivers and natural resource depletion. Desertification is a major problem in some areas. Lesser problems are perceived to be urban traffic pollution, overfishing and the destruction of marine environments, and the environmental impact of large populations.

History and economics lay bare the patterns of exploitation and dependency that exist between industrial and developing nations. These range from the colonial exploitation of India by Britain, in the course of which vast tracts of forests were plundered to provide timber for railways, ships and furniture, to the continuing destruction of forests throughout the developing world to provide arable land to grow cash crops for export to pay off debts to the international banks.

In North America and Europe environmental movements have successfully challenged some of their societies’ excesses. In the USA these date from the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, though there were antecedents in the nineteenth century when Ralph W.Emerson (1803–82) and others argued for the creation of national parks. It is interesting to note, in passing, that these New England Transcendentalists, as they were known, used religious arguments in support of their proposals.

During the 1960s and early 1970s environmental groups proliferated and brought about a number of improvements. Clean air and water acts were introduced and environmental regulatory agencies were set up. By the late 1970s and 1980s large corporations in North America, Europe and Australia had organized themselves to block further environmental legislation, though in the 1980s public concern began to rise again as new scientific discoveries were made about ozone depletion and global warming. The failure of the post-Kyoto discussions of global warming at The Hague in 2000 represents a major setback.

The last decade has witnessed increased confrontation between environmentalists and the large corporations, which have resorted to the law to serve intimidatory lawsuits on individual protesters. The ideology of limitless consumption has become their dominant creed, as the following claim by a prominent sales analyst in the USA makes clear:

Our enormously productive economy…demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever increasing rate.¹

Although the environmental organizations have heightened public awareness of environmental issues, there are signs that they have lost their sense of direction. Instead of attacking irresponsible multinationals, or governments which deploy nuclear weapons, they destroy genetically modified crops and protest against nuclear waste from power plants. From the standpoint of the poorer Asian societies, the destruction of any food crops, whether genetically modified or not, is irresponsible, and from the standpoint of India, nuclear power (and therefore the safe disposal of nuclear waste) is an integral part of national energy planning.

The Asian viewpoint

In the so-called Third World as a whole, between 1960 and 1992, life expectancy at birth rose from 46 to 63, infant mortality declined by more than half, and real per capita income almost trebled.² These benefits were not shared equally, but the fact that they occurred was completely at variance with the pessimistic predictions of economists in the 1960s.

Many western analysts believe that the world’s economic and environmental problems could be substantially reduced if only the developing world would follow China’s ‘one child policy’. This view has been challenged by Amartya Sen. Comparing China with India, Sen points out that whereas their population growth rates are 1.4 per cent and 2.1 per cent respectively, the growth rates of their per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) would change very little if these percentages were exchanged. In other words, if China had a population growth rate of 2.1 per cent (which is India’s), its per capita GDP would only decline from 7.7 per cent per year to 7.0 per cent. (This assumes no change in the growth rate of total GDP.) Similarly, if India’s population growth rate was 1.4 per cent (which is China’s), the growth rate of per capita GDP would only increase from 3.1 per cent to 3.8 per cent.³

In spite of such claims—in this case by a Nobel Prize winning economist—many people continue to believe that the ‘population crisis’ is largely responsible for many of our global economic and environmental problems. Such people often choose to disregard a different kind of ‘population crisis’, i.e. that every child born in an industrial nation consumes eight times as much of the earth’s natural resources as a child born in a developing country.⁴ Furthermore, we might do well to ponder the fact that if the entire population of the world were transported to the USA and spread evenly across the states, the overall population density there would be no greater than it is now in the Netherlands!

The issue of population growth is capably handled by the United Nations report on environment and development that paved the way for the 1992 Earth Summit. It was published in 1987 under the title Our Common Future. The report acknowledges that in order to achieve sustainable development the world’s levels of population increase must decline, but links this to the promotion of women’s rights:

A population policy should set out and pursue broad national demographic goals in relation to other socio-economic objectives. Social and cultural factors dominate all others in affecting fertility. The most important of these is the roles women play in the family, the economy, and the society at large. Fertility rates fall as women’s employment opportunities outside the home and farm, their access to education, and their age of marriage all rise. Hence policies meant to lower fertility rates not only must include economic incentives and disincentives, but must aim to improve the position of women in society. Such policies should essentially promote women’s rights.⁵

The report also acknowledges the potential role of the world’s major religions in addressing social and environmental issues:

Sustainable development requires changes in values and attitudes towards environment and development—indeed, towards society and work at home, on farms, and in factories. The world’s religions could help provide direction and motivation in forming new values that would stress individual and joint responsibility towards the environment and towards nurturing harmony between humanity and environment.⁶

We shall return to this prospect presently.

India’s entry into international environmental politics has been documented by O.P.Dwivedi, M.G.Rajan and George A.James.⁷ It began with Mrs Indira Gandhi’s speech at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment at Stockholm in 1972. She was the only head of state from outside Sweden to attend. In her speech she acknowledged the wanton destruction of forests and wildlife, but also drew attention to the problem of meeting the needs of the poor:

When they themselves feel deprived, how can we urge the preservation of animals? How can we speak to those who live in villages and in slums about keeping the oceans, the rivers and the air clean when their own lives are contaminated at the source? The environment cannot be improved in conditions of poverty.⁸

During the next two decades India took part in the major international environmental debates which led to the 1992 UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro with varying degrees of enthusiasm. But there were two things which set India apart from many other participants. The first, shared by some developing countries, was the recognition that the UN environment and development agenda had from the start been set by western nations which were much more interested in ozone layer depletion and global warming than in deforestation, water resources and natural resource depletion, which are crucial for India. The second, shared to some extent by Thailand, was that there are cultural resources which can be brought to bear on these problems and correspondingly appropriate ways of addressing them.

During the nineteenth century there had been sporadic opposition to colonial forest policies in India, and even a century earlier the Bishnois had protected trees from being felled by their rulers by hugging them. But it was in the 1970s and 1980s that the Chipko and Appiko movements gained momentum.⁹ The 1984 Bhopal disaster demonstrated the dangers of forcing the pace of agricultural production without exercising sufficient care over the manufacture of potentially dangerous chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

Ecology

Ecology is the study of relationships among organisms and between them and their environment. Our primary concern is with the relationships between people, other organisms such as plants and animals, and the natural environment.

As an academic discipline, ecology is located among the biological sciences. Whereas biochemistry, cell biology, histology and the anatomical sciences relate to the foundational levels of biological organization (i.e. structural: organic, cellular and molecular; and functional), ecology deals with populations, communities and ecosystems. It is therefore a bridge between the biological and the behavioural sciences. The term comes from two Greek words, oikos, meaning ‘home’, and logos, meaning ‘understanding’. Ernst Haeckel, a nineteenth-century German who invented the term, described ecology as ‘the domestic side of organic life’.¹⁰

The scientific study of the environment can be undertaken by dividing it into four segments: the atmosphere, hydrosphere (e.g. oceans), lithosphere (e.g. rocks, soil) and the biosphere (parts of the atmosphere, hydrosphere or lithosphere where life exists). Each segment can be studied from the perspective of the conventional sciences, such as physics, chemistry, botany, zoology and ecology. The University of Delhi recently introduced environmental chemistry into its honours chemistry B.Sc. degree; it took three lecturers (including the author) to cover the course!

It is our contention that whereas in the West (i.e. the ‘developed’ industrial nations) environment and development are often regarded as unrelated, in the developing world environmental issues are experienced as integral to their social context. Thus, for example, deforestation in south Asia is not just a matter of tree loss leading to the destruction of a range of botanical species and a reduction in the extent to which carbon dioxide can be removed from the atmosphere. It is the harbinger of a whole range of ecological issues: loss of food supplies, drinking water and other essential commodities to people and animals living in a symbiotic relationship with the forests, an increase in malaria, and additional hardships for women. No wonder the developing nations at the 1992 Earth Summit reacted with shock and anger to the bland arguments of the industrial nations that they should grow more trees primarily to mop up the excess carbon dioxide cause by the West’s profligate lifestyles!

It is a moot point whether or not the West should itself isolate ‘environment’ and ‘development’ issues from one another. Clearly the UN believes that it should not. In developing countries, however, they cannot and must not be separated, and for that reason we shall consistently prefer the relational term ‘ecological’ to ‘environmental’. Albert Einstein once defined the environment as ‘everything that’s not me’, thereby indicating the crux of our problem, because in reality we are an integral part of the natural world. However, our technology and our cultural presuppositions—in part religious—have alienated us from our true context.

There are a number of recent publications which analyse environment and development issues from an ecological perspective. Ecology, by J.L. Chapman and M.J.Reiss, Ecology and Environment by P.D.Sharma, and the Dictionary of Ecology and Environment by P.H.Collin, are excellent introductory reading.¹¹ Sustaining Earth, edited by D.J.R.Angell, J.D.Comer and M.L.Wilkinson, contains useful scientific information relating to the Earth Summit, and an informative article about tropical forests by Ghillean T.Prance, the former director of Kew Gardens.¹²

Important points of view on a range of ecological issues are given by Arne Naess, Sulak Sivaraksa and Martin Palmer in Ethics of Environment and Development, edited by J.R.Engel and J.G.Engel, and much the same ground is covered in Ethics, Religion and Biodiversity, edited by Lawrence S. Hamilton.¹³ There are some notable contributions by Frédérique Apfell-Marglin and others in Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict, edited by Wolfgang Sachs.¹⁴ More recent publications include Global Ethics and Environment, edited by Nicholas Low, and Politics and the Environment, edited by James Connelly and Graham Smith.¹⁵ Asian regional publications will be discussed later.

Religion

Comparing environmental movement...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Ecology and Hindu tradition
• 3. Ecology and modern India
• 4. Struggles for the forests
• 5. Ecology and Buddhism
• 6. Thailand: A Case Study
• 7. India since Independence
• 8. Signs of hope
• 9. Expanding our horizons
• Appendix A. Medicinal plants identified in Thailand
• Appendix B. Indian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) accredited by the United Nations which participated in the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992
• Select glossary
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index