By Rajshekhar Pant
Today is World Environment Day.
Much as October 2 brings Gandhiji’s portrait out of storage, dusted off and placed prominently on a stage, June 5 sees social and print media flooded with images of saplings sprouting from open palms and young trees taking root. People share photographs on FB of themselves planting trees. That is a good thing. Such images inspire others and make one feel like planting a sapling too. I see no reason to oppose this new tradition.
Yet, surely, this is also a day for introspection—a day to examine how sensitive and aware we, as individuals, really are about environmental protection and related issues. Is our everyday conduct shaped by environmental consciousness at all? The speeches of politicians and certain self-styled environmentalists, I feel, are not particularly important; one may simply applaud them and move on.
The first thought I wish to share is something I learned recently from my friend, Mr Vinod Pandey. He explained to me, very clearly, that the environment is not merely about trees and forests, and that planting a few saplings alone does not make one an environmentalist. I am not trying to diminish the importance of trees; I only wish to say that there is much more to the environment than trees.
How much carbon emission is our lifestyle responsible for? How do we use water? What is our attitude towards waste disposal? What do we eat and what do we buy? While building a new house, what materials do we choose? How much and in what manner do we use our vehicles? And so on, and so forth. These are all environmental questions. Clearly, our lifestyle and our way of thinking are the true measure of our environmental awareness and of our claim to being lovers of the environment.
I remember that a few years ago, the CBSE had introduced Environmental Studies as a compulsory subject at the Plus Two level. It could have become a powerful means of making the younger generation more aware of and sensitive to environmental concerns. But all glory to the policymakers! Merely passing the subject was enough. The marks obtained in it could not be counted among the “best four” or “best five” subjects. One can easily imagine how seriously students, teachers, and schools—which had become, or had been made into, shops of education—would have taken its teaching and learning. A few years later, as was only to be expected, the subject was quietly removed. I am neither an educationist nor an environmentalist, but I believe it ought to have been the most important subject in the curriculum. This episode stands as a powerful commentary on the seriousness—or lack of it—with which our so-called educationists, our government, and indeed we ourselves, regard environmental issues.
I often feel that, after our greed, the greatest damage to the environment has been caused by our impatience to find immediate solutions to problems at the policy, administrative, and personal levels. Faced with water scarcity, we dug tube wells and bore wells. To control insects, we liberally sprayed pesticides. We used herbicides. As electricity consumption rose, we set up thermal power plants. In the name of promoting tourism, we carved roads up to the summit of every hill and built four-lane highways. If we happened not to like a creature such as a snake, we simply killed it.
Never did we think it necessary to go to the root of the problem. We have always taken our conveniences for granted. We never really tried to establish a direct dialogue with the land around us and with the many things connected to it. Today, we describe locust invasions, unseasonal rains, flash floods in rivers and streams, landslides, and similar events with grand expressions such as “natural calamities”. The reality is that these are largely problems of our own making. They are the outcome of our increasingly hollow relationship with nature and the environment.
The previous generation did not celebrate Environment Day. Most people then perhaps did not even know the meaning of the word “environment”. Terms such as carbon footprint, ozone layer, climate extremes, carbon sinks, and global warming would have sounded unfamiliar to them. Yet that generation undoubtedly possessed an intuitive and uncomplicated sensitivity towards the environment.
Today, I feel that the greatest environmentalist in my life was my Aama—i.e. my grandmother. She taught me that cutting a green tree was a sin; that the first claim on the fruits borne by a tree belonged to the birds; that wasting food displeased God; that one should not pluck anything from trees and plants after dusk because they, too, needed their sleep. She taught me that ants should be fed flour, water springs and step-wells should not be defiled, and that feeding fish would bring good marks in examinations. And much, much more.
The simple wisdom of my grandmother was also lived by the generation of our parents. Perhaps that is why our home—and the orchard that spread around it—has always been shared with a world of fruits and flowers, birds and butterflies, snakes and frogs. A world that they, perhaps quite happily, chose to share with us.
(The author is an amateur filmmaker, a photographer, and a writer, who has written over a thousand write-ups, reports, etc., published in the leading newspapers and magazines of the country. He can be reached at pant.rajshekhar@gmail.com)
