The demise of Sundarlal Bahuguna marks the passing away of a generation that could uproot what it felt was harming the environment, like a mother protecting her child. For them, it was unethical to ask questions about the quantum of harm not because they had any intentions of being anti-development but as they believed, tradeoffs between environment and development may only bring unsustainable development. The visibility which the environment received in the early eighties was also due to the sensitive journalism of people like Darryl D’Monte whose Temples or Tombs: Industry versus Environment, a pioneering book that penetrated the discourses in universities as well as the grassroots transforming a generation in the process. On the environment day of 5th June, none of these environmental mentors are with us, and the protection laws they could achieve tend to lose their grip over enforcement once tossed off as an order from the judge’s table.
Law has never been enough for protecting anyone and last of all the ‘environment’. These meek denizens of the environment form powerful nation-states which are called ecosystems in the language of science and communicate through a voice, language, or a signal rarely understood by most people despite being one of them. They also have armies laced with toxic guns of bacteria and viruses to rebel against an illegitimate advance into their territories. Environmental laws have mostly been made in contravention to this understanding and mostly in a material mode of econometric models of growth.
Human beings, being just one of the animal species in this vast network of ecosystems, have illegitimately abrogated to themselves sole copyright to overconsume every other species the way it wishes to. In ignorance, greed, and vanity, it has become the most invasive species. Worse, laws sometimes are seen to be giving licences for destroying them. So, what’s the use of making laws for protecting the environment when the interpreters of law have seldom waded through the flooded streets or tasted mine effluents in their glass of drinking water and worse still the stench of dead animals at the coasts? As this insensitive inebriated humanity disconnected with nature marches over the corpse of ecosystems, it gets closer to death, destruction, and a reckless genocide of its own race.
Modern Criminology studies the human brain as a primary habitat of any harm before it materialises externally but those living close to nature are relatively happier and better adjusted. Yet forests, birds, water bodies, wilderness, and flowery hills are being allowed to shrink due to pollution, mining, and habitat destruction. In normal times when human interference is quite less we lose 10 species per year but currently, we have exceeded 10,000 species extinction per year. Much of the damage has also come from the laboratory modifications, mixing and generating or creating new species which are capable of bringing many more pandemics in the earth’s environment. Millions of food species with the farmer have been lost as governments over time have promoted only those 20 species which were produced and owned by US laboratories. The deadly 1980s Kalahandi famine of Odisha was the result of an adjoining dam due to which these local tribals lost 20 wild rice species that would give them free food even in drought periods.
The charm of wilderness is not a luxury, it has its own calming and spiritual impact upon human beings. Henry Bugbee’s The Inward Morning attracted the attention of Americans in terms of its spiritual content but ten years later in 1968, Aldo Leopold of the World Resources Institute brought greater clarity to the environmental question when he focused on land as the primary crucible of all environment. In his famous A Sand County Almanac, his anguished heart wrote, ‘One of the penalties of ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen’. The judiciary has not been able to deliver justice to the misuse of land in the environment. When the one-man environmental brigade of M.C. Mehta made the court listen to the woes of Punjab mothers who could not feed their children due to excess phosphorus in their bodies, it was the land that suffered prior to these mothers. The land had become a dump yard for chemicals due to an overuse of chemical NPK fertilizers as a strategy for HYV crops during the green revolution, Many chemicals flowed to rivers and the fodder of animals. The dairy products and then the mothers became toxic. When Mehta’s organization ICELA (Indian Council of Enviro-Legal Action) won the case the other problem was just waiting to be attended to. This was the overuse of oxytocin injection just before milking cattle. Oxytocin is a hormone that is produced in female bodies before childbirth. The helpless animals were subjected to this childbirth-like pain twice a day for speeding up milk extraction. Much of the Vegan movement is related to the dairy-based cruelties on animals which were slowly affecting the health of people, causing early puberty in girls and boys and also becoming a cause for osteoporosis in advancing age.
Far in the east, the Damodar Valley Project had come up in Bihar to generate power and eradicate poverty in the surrounding region. Within 15 years it was visible that something was not right and scientific studies revealed that excess metal flow from effluents in the coal and manganese quarries had affected the poor communities in the river catchment whose only source of water was the Damodar river. Soon the press exposed that the river was already dead and the only metal flows through the Damodar. A little away the Piparwar open cast mine was started with Australian miners and a promise of 2% local employment for the next 20 years that they would mine the metal. With their highly sophisticated machinery, the Australians dug out all metal within 4-5 years, no job to the locals who in the process also lost their dense and precious Saal (Shorea robusta)forest which gave them usufruct to sustain life in their village economy. Niyamagiri in Odisha and Athirapally in Kerala may soon meet this fate. The excavated land like a looted, pauperised, and the injured entity is left behind by developers as a museum of man’s murderous ravenousness. It was in this context that the 2019 Supreme Court orders passed by Justices Arun Mishra and Navin Sinha for demolition of five apartments in Maradu Municipality in Kerala for violation of Coastal Regulation Zone would go down in history for its determined verdict, unaffected by scheming politicians and money power. Environmental law is equally for the protection of the poor. In 1978 the Supreme Court had ruled that a mere right to life is not to have an animal existence but a life of dignity that is every human being’s primordial natural right. Environmental activism of the courts was at its peak during justice Kuldeep Singh as the Chief Justice and M.C. Mehta as the environmental lawyer in the Supreme Court.
Environmental destruction leads to immense destitution of many living beings, we only see the dominant species and remain blind to the small and speechless. Whenever a new modern city is made developers demand not just plots but a whole city from the political leaders of those states. Their mega machines dig out the land, shrubs, and village forests. The village wells become electronic waste pits and the water bodies and underground channels are blocked. Chennai and Mumbai floods have shown the consequences of blocking these water channels. Gurgaon’s more than 100 plus villages were overnight handed over to the developer in 1995. Dominant village groups were encouraged to grab land and through the Sarpanch on their side, it was easy to take away all Panchayat land. There were many rags to riches stories but poor villagers such as the potters, animal rearers, and grass cutters to name a few gradually started disappearing. Most animals who roamed free on common area panchayat lands and village forests were now declared stray and vermins. They mostly ended at slaughterhouses or stuffed in overcrowded shelter homes. The skyscrapers used a glass that killed sparrows, destroyed birds and their ability to breed. The city that had clouds of fireflies buzzing around and several rabbits peeped through a burrow as a car approached their shrub area were soon gone. Snake charmers started daylight poaching as some nexus between the police and developer wanted to remove the wild from what was to be a high-end apartment area, the mall, or a city club.
However, the question remains on what is the role of the state in environmental protection? This question perplexed those who carried their Public Interest litigation to the courts in cases regarding dams, mines, and power projects. A landmark case of Span Motels where the club of a politician was built after encroaching upon 28 bighas of forest land and Beas river catchment in Manali changed perspective on the role of the state. The notion of public trust was invoked in which certain common properties such as rivers, forests, and air were held by the government in trust to be its protector so that generations today and tomorrow would use it unimpeded in its original form.
When Justice Gita Mittal was posted as Chief Justice of J&K High Court, she could demonstrate the power of courts in implementing the trusteeship doctrine in protecting the state’s lakes, forests, and community livelihood options. As she says that the way a judge designs an order is in itself an art that can prevent defiance or contempt but alas most judges on environmental benches are themselves so unsure about the environmental problem that the orders they deliver lead much fuzziness on its enforcement. Why can’t judges be sent on some training to expose them to a milieu which could recharge the judiciary and inject contemporaneous environmental justice?
It’s time to look at the environment as a living resource, understand the language in which it speaks to us, and prevent another Covid-19 kind of a calamity that none of the governments, epidemiologists, or even virologists are in a position to handle anymore.
The author is president, NDRG, and former Professor of Administrative Reforms and Emergency Governance at JNU. The views expressed are personal.
