Aryaman Jain
Abstract: In response to the ecological crisis, a 'Climate Sector' has taken shape. This 'Climate Sector' aims to solve ecological problems by offering technocratic fixes. It prioritises the question of energy production and tries to solve the problems of ecological damage from energy generation by innovating new ways of energy generation , and seeks to make them economically viable. It does not aim to radically change the trajectory of the ever expanding rate of energy consumption. The language of 'Sustainability' has become popular not only within the technocratic circles, but even in the larger discourse on ecological issue in which many activists of the West, and even internationally, have participated. The identification of 'Global Warming' and 'Climate Change' as the central issues of the ecological crisis has subsumed all issues under that of reducing 'Carbon Emission' , thus making it a technical problem to be understood and solved by the experts.
This paper questions the fundamental understanding of the ecological crisis carried by the Climate Sector. It indicates that in countries like India, there may be alternatives which can offer a better way to address the ecological crisis.
I
Today, much of the discourse on the ecological crisis has been reduced to discussions of temperature rise, atmospheric CO2 concentration and the number of tigers and whales left. These may or may not be valid ways to sense the problem, but all of these are based on instrumental observations, not the felt human experience. There is now a growing 'Climate Sector' which claims to be solving this problem for us, and its understanding of the problem is based on such technical parameters. This 'sector' is composed of esoteric start ups, research centres at Universities, think tanks, policy consultants, technology companies, energy corporations, NGOs, philanthropies and more. It has solutions for our problems, and its solutions are technocratic.
This discourse is today discussing policy on largely two lines. First, how do we meet our energy requirements. And these energy requirements are ever increasing. The second, how much and which areas of the Earth should we cordon off for protection while we exploit the rest of the Earth for our economy. And this economy is every growing. Clearly, the problem set up this way is a self-perpetuating problem. Nobody pauses to question the fundamental assumptions - do we really need ever increasing energy to live good lives, and does the economy really have to be destructive of nature for us to thrive?
II
Somewhere, we are all feeling that our relationship with nature is in crisis. We don't need scientists to tell us about it. The American farmer-writer, Wendell Berry writes:
"Why do I need a centralized computer system to alert me to environmental crises? That I live every hour of every day in an environmental crisis I know from all my senses"
But perhaps our educated-ness makes us depend on Science to validate any knowledge. And this has its consequences in so many areas of public discourse.
For example, the air pollution problem in Delhi and across the northern plains was not taken seriously until the Indian government established a comprehensive network of air monitoring equipment across North Indian cities and AQI data was publicly released. Perhaps we must wait for such systems to be set up for our water resources before we start thinking about addressing the pollution in our rivers and lakes with the same intensity. Not that the problem of air pollution has moved any closer to resolution since it became a hot topic of public discussion every winter.
In the newer generation of thinkers in America, one voice that makes sense to me is of Charles Eisenstein, who has repeatedly cautioned against the reduction of the crisis of nature to energy, carbon, climate and environment. In the essay, 'How the Environmental Movement can find its way again' he writes:
"...we have made a scientific, strategic, rhetorical, and political error by reducing the ecological crisis to climate, and the climate crisis to carbon."
He then goes on to make a deeper point that may be worth taking seriously after so many years of international climate talks going nowhere.
"A veteran activist once told me of a meeting he attended in the 1980s in which a group of leading environmentalists decided to adopt the term “sustainability” into their core lexicon. “We wanted to sound scientific,” he said. “We didn’t want to use words like ‘love’ or ‘precious’ and be dismissed as tree-huggers. We wanted to give people a rational, hard-headed reason why we should protect nature. We thought that appealing to the beauty and sacredness of nature wouldn’t reach the people who were destroying it, so we tried to make it about their self-interest instead.”
Around the same time, global warming entered the awareness of the environmental movement, growing over the years to become its defining issue. At first, global warming (now called climate change) seemed a boon to the movement. Now we would be able to force corporations and governments to do the things we’d always wanted, appealing not just to sentiments about nature’s magnificence, and not just to concerns over the health of some subset of people downwind, but to the survival of civilization itself. One no longer need be a nature lover to support the aims of environmentalism.
Let that last statement sink in. One no longer need be a nature lover to support the aims of environmentalism.
The result is that environmentalism has been hijacked by people and institutions who are not nature-lovers. We see where it leads: nature dies in the service of “sustainability.” Forests are cut for solar farms. Landscapes are sacrificed to pit mines to extract lithium, cobalt, silver, rare earths, etc. for decarbonization. There is an awful lot of money in the sustainability industry. It is the same story as before. Meanwhile, we neglect the priorities that are highest from the Living Earth perspective. The energy and funding and attention goes toward “saving the world” by reducing CO2. Neglected in comparison are the sea grass meadows. The peat bogs. The mangrove swamps. The beavers. The elephants. The whales. The sharks. Yet all of these are vital to planetary physiology."
Both Eisenstein and Berry, in their writings, emphasise that on the topic of energy, what we need to think about is not how to source our energy, but how we are spending the energy. Berry, in his 1977 classic, The Unsettling of America, writes:
“One possibility is just to tag along with the fantasists in government and industry who would have us believe that we can pursue our ideals of affluence, comfort, mobility, and leisure indefinitely. This curious faith is predicated on the notion that we will soon develop unlimited new sources of energy: domestic oil fields, shale oil, gasified coal, nuclear power, solar energy, and so on. This is fantastical because the basic cause of the energy crisis is not scarcity; it is moral ignorance and weakness of character. We don’t know how to use energy, or what to use it for. And we cannot restrain ourselves. Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human energy as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy. Nuclear power, if we are to believe its advocates, is presumably going to be well used by the same mentality that has egregiously devalued and misapplied man- and woman power. If we had an unlimited supply of solar or wind power, we would use that destructively, too, for the same reasons."
"It is already certain that our planet alone — not to mention potential sources in space — can provide us with more energy and materials than we can use safely or well. By our abuse of our finite sources, our lives and all life are already in danger. What might we bring into danger by the abuse of “infinite” sources?”
"Perhaps all of those sources of energy are going to be developed. Perhaps all of them can sooner or later be developed without threatening our survival. But not all of them together can guarantee our survival, and they cannot define what is desirable. We will not find those answers in Washington, D.C., or in the laboratories of oil companies. In order to find them, we will have to look closer to ourselves.”
III
Closer home, in India, Uzramma offers some of the clearest ideas on overcoming this energy crisis in her essay, Crafts Show the Way. Her proposal of forgoing Western style industrialisation and instead focusing on artisanal crafts for our production system offers an antidote to the technocratic solutionism. She points out that in India, the crafts are still practiced at a large scale, and can be directed to fulfil the needs of India's economic life.
"While in industrialised countries craft has become a hobby or has been relegated to a niche, India, unlike the hyper-industrialised countries, retains its large-scale of craft production."
The aspirational Indian need not settle for cheap machine made plastic clothing. If our textile production takes its inspiration from the indigenous traditions of the Indian weavers rather than the machines of Manchester, every Indian can wear hand crafted and customised clothing. Producing clothes by hand instead of machines would result not in an increase, but a decrease in India's overall energy consumption. With weavers and tailors in most villages of the country, most clothes can be provisioned locally, thus cutting down on energy required for transportation. This logic would apply to production in almost all spheres of our lives - utensils, house construction, furnishings, soaps, toys, food, art etc.
As Uzramma says,"the great craft traditions of India are not only part of our past; they are the clues to future industrial production. It is only the myth of a universal modernity that relegates handicraft to an inconsequential niche, and the history of crafts in India to a story of inevitable decline, of a natural transition from tradition to modernity. In this myth mass- production was said to be the modern replacement of handicraft, as part of a natural transition from tradition to modernity. The fallacy of this assumption becomes plain now when mass production itself faces obsolescence. A new paradigm is emerging, an end of the ‘carbon era’, in which craft production gains new value. Craft production employs low- energy technologies, for which the whole world is now anxiously searching. In the coming post-industrial age the features of craft production that were reckoned as weaknesses – particularly its dispersed, small-scale nature – will be seen in a new light, as socially and environmentally sound practices. It is dispersed and small-scale production supported by small-scale local energy generation that can avoid social ghettoization and concentrations of pollution."
Until British colonisation, Indian steel, produced at home by artisans was in high demand from Western Europe to East Asia for its high quality. The wonderful qualities of this steel, known as Wootz, were documented extensively by European scientists like Faraday. Under the British, the Agariya community which produced this steel in central and northern India was declared a criminal tribe and access to resources was cut by the colonial administration. After Independence, the Indian government has continued to promote the western production system of blast furnace steel, while doing little to reverse the colonial damage. As a result, the knowledge of producing this steel is now on the brink of extinction.
At Jeevika Ashram near Jabalpur, some of us met an Agariya family from the Dindori district. They were in the middle of making some art works with steel from the steel bars used in construction. After shaping the steel into its final form, they would paint it black with a petrochemical paint. We asked them what they used before the availability of petrochemical paints. They told us that before petrochemical paints, they didn't need to paint the product, because they were making their products from steel they had themselves extracted from the ore, and their own steel did not rust.
If we give up our addiction to industrial production, and adopt the saner ways of production that the Agariyas demonstrate, then our future will start looking very different. We no longer have to worry about managing the growth of our energy requirements and no longer have to panic about mitigating the harms of that growth.
This kind of civilisational path requires a re-look at the foundations of our knowledge. It is a beautiful thing that the knowledge we need for this evolution is actually not something to be unlocked by experts and preached to us, but embedded in society and waiting for us educated people to discover it when we open our senses and look with humility at what we have so far dismissed as being backward and primitive. In most parts of India, the villages are populated by artisans of diverse and intricate skills refined over many generations. To recognise the artist, we must learn to see art. For this art to do its work, we must let go of our urge to control from our positions of command. All this is to say, we the educated must overcome the colonisation of our own minds.
These are the sort of ideas with which some of us friends are organising workshops to create spaces of conversation and learning. For instance, apart from talking about the beauty of the craft economy in general, we are particularly sharing our learnings on building with mud. This is driven by a deep concern for where our architecture is going. If we go on with our project of replacing people's so called kachcha houses of mud with the so called pakka houses of mediocre materials like cement and steel which cannot provide the inhabitant with comfort, then more and more people will need air conditioning, and we will need more and more 'energy' and so we will either go for fossil fuels or some modern innovation which has its own harms. But the other harm is that these materials are wreaking havoc on jal, jangal, zameen everywhere. Rampant sand mining is destroying rivers from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. Where is all this sand going? Into modern infrastructure which is based on modern architecture.
Overcoming this system, and realising the beauty of living with mud is also the beginning of living our lives as part of nature, rather than apart from nature. It shows us a way of life which is rich and does not inflict violence on the Earth and her children.
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Editorial Committee's Comments and the Author's response to them
Editorial Committee of the DKS Journal appreciated the article as it was raising some issues central to the Knowledge Question in the context of Ecology and Environment, and sent to the author two broad Comments requesting that these may be taken into consideration while revising the article. The author however declined to revise his article, but appreciated our Comments:
“ .....My article has come out of my experience with youth environmental groups, movement spaces and the professional climate 'sector'. The contrasts of those experiences got me to reflect on the issues that I wrote about. So, I am glad that my reflections were able to also speak to you at some level....”
Our Comments, and the author's responses to our Comments, are given below.
Comment -1:
We are very pleased with your article, especially your take on how unsustainable is 'sustainability '. We also liked your assertion that the crisis in energy is about consumption rather than production. That the entire debate on climate and energy has been hijacked by the powerful industrial lobby is very true. While you have made a mention about Uzramma's work on the living craft traditions of our country , would it be possible to show that our rich craft traditions can meet the requirements of our country today with some 'evidence' , facts, figures in that direction? It was also felt by us that some reference to Indian movements for environment, ecology, etc, may be added , if possible.
Author's response to Comment-1:
On the possibility of furnishing evidence, facts and figures. I don't really have any such facts. To be honest, I have not done very in-depth research, and I wouldn't know how to find them either. The whole question of 'requirements' is worthy of lengthy discussion in itself. But in this article, I also wanted to beckon us from the realm of the scientific-technocratic to the realm of the felt - both sensual and emotional. And so, in the example of textiles, I have mentioned how there are tailors in every village and neighbourhood. Now, this is not exactly a figure and perhaps it is not even a fact. Whether the neighbourhood tailor can provision for the 'requirements' of the whole neighbourhood might be a matter of faith. It may be evidence to those who have known a tailor in their village or neighbourhood. The statement may evoke that memory, at a time when buying ready-made clothes has become the norm. With that memory might come an emotion, and it is on the strength of that emotion- which we may attach to the act of having our clothes tailored and to our relationship with our local tailor - that we can draw hope. In there lies some beauty.
On the question of having a reference to Indian movements. I haven't actually studied the literature on the Indian movements very much. I have some limited experience with movements. But I am unable to place them anywhere in the thought process of this article. And I don't know what analysis to offer in this regard. The article is coming from the concern that young people coming out of universities today who have a concern for the ecological issues of our time are going into the 'Climate Sector'. Now, this generation does not have much of a relationship with the movement spaces. This is at least true in the Delhi NCR region, where I have studied and seen things. In fact, for the most part they don't know what a movement is or what a sangathan is. They have a vague idea about NGOs at best. But then we have to recognise that there is a serious issue of alienation because of the highly processed nature of reality in the modern city. There is no imagination for where the electricity is coming from, where the building materials are coming from, or even where and how the food is coming - let alone that these things might be affecting humans and ecosystems. The urban-industrial default in every sphere of life keeps people preoccupied enough to keep these questions outside any consideration. So, we have to first start taking cognizance of the non-urban-industrial reality. Only once we take that possibility seriously, can we understand that there can be movements about these things.
Comment-2:
We believe that in your paper you are bringing up a number of ideas and questions that have a bearing on the Knowledge Question and ought to be an important matter for our Journal.
Giving below some specific observations and comments that you may keep in mind while revising your paper for the DKS Journal.
1. The following two statements from your paper are very key to it:
• Eisenstein's statement: "....we have made a scientific, strategic, rhetorical, and political error by reducing the ecological crisis to climate, and the climate crisis to carbon...."
• "There is an awful lot of money in the sustainability industry", and the making of the Environmental-Industrial Complex, much like the Military-Industrial and the Medical-Industrial Complex.
The paper could be an elaboration and substantiation of these key statements.
2. As is known , Ecological Movements were one of the first in the world that raised some deeper questions on Nature, Humanity and Development, and challenged the hegemony of Modern S&T. Are you of the view that that entire movement has been hijacked ? Or is this a problem primarily created in/by the West? The global ecological movement is still potent and capable of contributing significantly to the Knowledge Question?
3. Elaborating the Knowledge Dimension of the Ecological Question in a little more detail in the paper would help-- what were the Contents and Organisation of the Knowledges and Practices that protected and maintained Ecological balance throughout the world till the onset of the "Industrial Age" (Imperialist Age), and what changes in the Contents and Organisation of Knowledges and Practices have brought about the current crisis.
Author's response to Comment-2:
1. My intention of writing this article came from my feeling that there is a cognitive error with the way the 'Climate Sector' approaches the issue. That error is to sense things instrumentally rather than sensually while eliminating emotions from the issue. In other words, it is a Scientific approach. Hence we keep hearing about the Climate Science, the Scientists keep telling us the Earth is warming and there is an international scientific body called the IPCC which is considered an authority on the issue etc. And the consequence of that error is that it pushes for technocratic solutions rather than seeking to review our relationship with the Earth and each other. So, my interest is not really in going into what is the scientific error or the political error or the strategic error. I think those questions become moot once we consider this perspective. If the way we sense the problem isn't right, everything that follows will also not be right.
I have mentioned in the opening section of the article that the 'Climate Sector' has so many different kinds of organisations. It indicates the kind of money in this thing. I don't really know how much money there is and haven't done the research on the whole structure of it.
2. I don't know if the whole movement has been hijacked. I am sure there are some people who do not use the language of Science. But it is clear that most people started using that approach. Here in India, the latest hijacking, in my opinion, is to resort to the Constitution. It is no longer being said that people's dignity and our natural heritage must be protected because we feel that is right, but that these must be protected because it was written down somewhere. Now, I am not sure if any Western forces have influenced Indian organisers to talk about the Constitution. But I think that the increasing educatedness of every passing generation has something to do with it. And our education of course has its roots much more in the West than here. And it is after all a book oriented education. Yeah, I think the ecological movement holds immense capacity to contribute to the question of knowledge because every confrontation with the Earth, with nature and its elements in the raw holds the potential of a revelation. It is an unveiling. It is to see things afresh. It compels us to unlearn. It inspires us to drop the old language and start again.
3. Again, what I have written in this article really represents the limit of my knowledge. I am not a very serious research scholar. I have a very surface knowledge about the Agariyas, and I have spent time with people of their community only once. On textiles also, I have not worked very deeply. At the most, I can say that the trend has been from cotton to petrochemicals, from handcrafted to machine crafted, from distributed local production to centralised large-scale production, from desi seeds to American seeds and GMO seeds - all of which requires a lot more resource consumption and pollution. I am also trying to learn more about these things.
Aryaman Jain
Aryaman Jain was born in Lucknow. He grew up in Mumbai and Delhi. Formally he has studied environmental engineering and liberal arts. But his deepest education has come from his time spent with farmers and artisans, particularly in Kumaon, Awadh and Gondwana. He enjoys a breakfast of kachauri and jalebi.
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