Sustainability’) as well as three chapters

Ramachandra Guha’s latest book, How Much Should a Person Consume? takes this quandary as his central theme. And this is well chosen, for much of Guha’s scholarship over the last 25 years has focused upon the need for an environmentalism that takes account of equity, what he calls social ecology. To Guha, environmentalism, properly construed, is the place to begin to imagine a better world, for environmental factors (including what others sometimes gloss as “natural resources”) are the Achilles heelofmodernisation. In a world of no limits, we all could consume to no end. With infinite oil, metal and rubber, and no air pollution, we all could drive cars. But in the world that we live in, such a vision is impossible. And in a world deeply divided by wealth and access to opportunity, it seems that every society that succeeds in becoming prosperous (these people Guha calls the “omnivores”) consigns those left behind to even fewer resources and more pollution (Guha’s ecosystem people, meaning those reliant upon their local ecosystems for food, water and survival). Guha sees well the complexity of these issues, and eschews the two easy solutions held out by what he calls romantic economists (we all can be prosperous omnivores) and romantic environmentalists (living without electricity is so pure and beautiful

– the poor should be happy to escape the stress of modern lives). But by repudiating these two extremes, he is left with no simple answers.

If you have read Guha’s earlier work, much that is in this collection of essays will be familiar. Ideas and evidence from books and articles on Himalayan forest protests, Verrier Elwin, social ecology, Indian environmentalism, American wilderness thought, authoritarian biology and global environmentalism, among others, are all reprised here, in some cases almost verbatim but in others expanded with new insights. Although many of these essays do not immediately seem to relate to the book’s title (and its final essay by the same name), they are united by Guha’s concern that environmentalism has in many cases fallen short of its potential, particularly as it has developed in the west, but in India as well. Here he proposes that environmentalists focus more upon social ecology as a way out of the modern dilemma, and he illustrates that such a move has a distinguished intellectual and historical pedigree.

In Guha’s formulation, environmentalism (or social ecology) ought to provide a moral basis and political agenda for a more equitable as well as sustainable distribution of the world’s resources. Towards this end, he provides one chapter that focused upon figures that Guha believes should be the “heroes” of social ecology

Economic and Political Weekly December 9, 2006

universities in the US, and his book Environmentalism: A Global History is widely admired for its transnational scope and even-handed analysis. It is a staple of undergraduate courses in the US.

Comparison on Environmentalism

Given the book’s ambitious scope, however, there was simply not enough space to do justice to the complexity of a full comparison between environmentalism in the US and India while also providing a history and rationale for social ecology. Guha made the choice to simplify his task and focus upon only one aspect of the environmental movement in both countries – thus, he only mentions in passing that there is a vibrant wilderness movement in India, and an active environmental justice movement in the US. The Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), WWF-India, and Sanctuary have no place in this narrative, in spite of the wilderness and national park movement in India having played a key role in the national and local politics since the 1960s. Similarly, Guha does not mention the extensive US literature from the last 15 years on the negative effects of national parks and wilderness conservation upon US minorities and the poor (a literature, notably, that was spurred in many ways by Guha’s own work). Guha suggests that the US environmental movement has been unaware of the role of over-consumption in environmental problems, but David Brower, the charismatic head of the Sierra Club through the 1960s and a leading wilderness advocate, explicitly drew attention to the global role of US resource use in his standard fund-raising speech (Brower hyperbolically claimed that “6 per cent of the world’s population is using 60 per cent of the world’s resources”) [McPhee 1971]. Similarly, the annual US ‘Earth Day’ held each April since 1970 has centred more upon consumption, pollution and resource use than wilderness.

Had Guha focused more upon the complexities of the environmental movements in both countries, the book would have been even stronger. He might have pointed out that Brandis, the German forester who was so crucial in establishing the Indian Forestry Service, was also the mentor of Gifford Pinchot, the first US forester. He could have shown that national forests in the US, as in India, have been the site of protests and struggles over local use (whether grazing, hunting or firewood gathering), but that these protests have taken a different political resonance in the US, as they have often fed into the right wing politics of Reagan and Bush. He might have mentioned that early in his career, Madhav Gadgil advocated national parks (such as Silent Valley) and biosphere reserves in India, including pristine core areas in which people would have had to be removed – perhaps this latter unsuccessful experience helped to persuade Gadgil of the need to focus upon social ecology. Had Guha looked for more connections between the environmental movements in the two countries, he would have found them, and his argument would have benefited from the added complexity. In Chapter Two, Guha compared the direct action of an American and an Indian in protesting dams in their respective countries. His analysis of the differences in their motivations and reception was superb – I would have enjoyed even more of this.

As much as anything, this book acts as an intellectual autobiography of one of India’s leading environmental scholars. Guha’s effective writing style mixes personal anecdotes with more scholarly evidence, and he positions himself throughout the text in relationship to the ideas and people that he explores. And in so doing, he charts his intellectual evolution: from sociologist to historian, from Marxist to conditional liberal, from a city dweller to a colleague of Madhav Gadgil in the field. The book also illustrates a good deal of consistency in his thinking throughout his career. He clearly continues to be concerned about the plight of the disenfranchised throughout the last 25 years, and his heroes are similarly disposed. And although he has travelled the globe, he continues to love his native India – its people and landscapes – and cares deeply about its future (though he makes a point in his first chapter to decry chauvinist histories). I trust that this book is by no means Guha’s final word on the subject, but it ably sums up a quarter-century of careful thought on how to reconcile the need for development with a sustainable and just world.

EPW

Email: mllewis@salisbury.edu

Reference

McPhee, John (1971): Encounters with the

Economic and Political Weekly December 9, 2006