Excerpts from ‘Wild Fictions’

This is a wonderful essay by Amitav Ghosh. The following paragraphs just give the first part of the essay and I would recommend you to read the entire essay from elsewhere on the internet.

Wild Fictions: Narratives of Nature and the Politics of Forests.

by Amitav Ghosh

If there is anything distinctive about human beings, as a species, it consists, I believe, in our capacity to experience the world through stories. What then are the tales that animate the struggle over the environment that is now being waged all over the world, but most significantly in Asia and Africa? Here is one such: as with all the stories that follow, the point of reference lies in one of the most important battlegrounds in the current conflict over the meaning and definition of Nature – the Indian subcontinent.

The story, said to have been a favourite of Mahatma Gandhi’s, is called The Indian Hut and this is how it begins: ‘Some thirty years ago, a group of English scholars formed a society in London with the purpose of advancing the sciences and furthering the happiness of mankind by seeking knowledge in different parts of the world.’

There were twenty such scholars, and in order to better direct their inquiries, the Royal Society gave each of them a book containing 3,500 urgent and important queries. The most learned of these savants knew Hindi as well as Hebrew and Arabic and he set off in the direction of India, ‘the cradle of all the arts and all the sciences’.

After three years of travel, he came finally to Benares, ‘the Athens of India’, where he spoke with many a learned Brahmin and amassed an immense collection of manuscripts. He was about to head back with this rich cargo of knowledge, when it occurred to him that despite having spoken with Jewish rabbis, Protestant ministers, French Academicians, Turkish mullahs, Parsee elders, Hindu pandits and so on, he had not succeeded in clarifying even one of the 3,500 questions he had set out with. On the contrary he had succeeded only in multiplying the doubts that surrounded each of them. It came to his notice then that the most learned of the pandits of India was to be found not in Banaras but in the temple of Jagannath in Orissa. The eager scholar set off at once for Calcutta, where the directors of the East India Company provided a palanquin and bearers to escort him to the great temple. Travelling southwards, the scholar decided that he would not trouble the learned pandit with trivial matters and would limit his inquiries to three questions of the most pressing significance. By the time he was shown into the temple’s inner sactum, he had settled upon the three queries that seemed to him to outweigh all others in significance: By what means was truth to be known? Where was the truth to be sought? And was it necessary always to reveal the truth to mankind?

The pandit had ready answers for all three queries. All truth was in the Vedas, he said, and could only be sought by means of the Brahmins, who alone possessed the secret of the language of truth. As for revealing truth to mankind, why, said the pandit, prudence called for it to be hidden from most, while duty dicated that it be always made known to Brahmins.

These answers so dismayed the Englishman that he cried out in outrage: ‘So the truth must always be made known to the Brahmins, who won’t communicate it to anyone! The truth then, is that that the brahmins are unjust…’

There resulted a great uproar at the end of which the scholar was evicted from the temple and found himself heading back to Calcutta in an even greater state of dejection than before. On the way, while passing through a forest, he and his party were overtaken by a cyclone, blowing in from the sea. They pressed ahead, with the wind and rain raging around them, until at last they caught sight of a small hut that was protected from the elements by hills, rocks, and trees.The relieved scholar was of a mind to head towards the hut, but he could not persuade his entourage to accompany him. The hut belonged to Parayas, they said, members of one of the lowest castes of India, and they would not set foot in it. ‘Then go where you want,’ retorted the scholar. ‘To me all the castes of India are the same.’ So saying he went into the hut and was warmly welcomed by the occupants, a man of gentle countenance and his wife. As the thunder raged outside, the scholar spoke at length with his host and soon discovered him to be a man of far greater intelligence and good sense than any of the savants and pandits he had met on his travels. How had this simple man acquired such wisdom? At length, unable to contain himself, he inquired of his host where his temple lay.

‘Everywhere,’ responded the Paraya, ‘nature is my temple.’

‘And from what book,’ the scholar persisted, ‘have you learnt your principles?’

‘None but nature,’ answered the Paraya, ‘I don’t know of any other.’

‘Ah! That is indeed a great book,’ said the Englishman, ‘but who taught you to read it?’

‘Misfortune,’ answered the Paraya, ‘being from a caste that has an infamous

reputation in this country, I was not able to be an Indian. Thus I made myself a man; rejected by society, I took refuge in nature.’

And as for the issue of whether the truth should at all be revealed to a world which so often rewarded honesty with persecution, the answer was: ‘The truth should be told only to those with a simple heart.’

This, in short, is the narrative of ‘The Indian Hut’, a story published in 1791, by a Frenchman who had never set foot in India. The writer was Jacques-henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737-1814), a novelist, naturalist and philosopher who was both a friend and disciple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In the course of a varied and interesting life, Saint-Pierre accumulated many disappointments until the publication of his massive, multi-volume work, Studies of Nature which achieved an immediate and resounding success. Saint-Beuve was to say of him later that he had done for tropical nature what Rousseau had done for the Alps. Saint-Pierre’s unabashedly romantic and immensely popular novel, Paul et Virginie, was to earn the admiration of Alexander von Humboldt as well as Napoleon Bonaparte, who is said to have read it over and again in St. Helena. No doubt the novel’s themes of rejection, retreat and withdrawal held as much resonance for Napoleon as the novel’s island setting, which was Mauritius, where Saint-Pierre had resided in 1768. Saint-Pierre’s stay there was to produce what may well be his most lasting work, the Dutch-published travelogue, Voyage à l’Isle de France.

While living on that island, Saint-Pierre joined the circle that surrounded Pierre Poivre, a French naturalist and administrator who had travelled extensively in Asia. As is well known, the unique ecosystem of Mauritius had been seriously depleted by the first Dutch settlers. By the early-18^th century the dodo had already been exterminated and the forests denuded. Recognizing the fragility of the island’s natural environment, Pierre Poivre enacted a series of environmental measures, based upon his knowledge of the traditional forestry practices in China, India, Indonesia, and the Dutch settlement on the Cape.

Although short-lived, these measures, have been adjudged to be some of the earliest state interventions motivated by ecological concerns. Thus it could be said of Bernardin de Saint- Pierre that he assisted at the birth of ecology and environmental activism as we know it today: it is in this sense too that he shared in the authorship of a vision of Nature whose influence was to be felt far beyond his time. Along with his much-admired mentor, Rousseau, Saint-Pierre was both a creator and a disseminator of the romantic vision that was to so powerfully influence perceptions of nature not just in Europe, but around the world: in time Kings, Presidents and citizens were to fall equally under its sway. That Romanticism played an important part in the creation of the first national parks in the United States has been well documented; no less well documented is the fact that American parks like Yosemite served as models for the colonial administrators who created the earliest parks in Africa and Asia. Saint-Pierre’s ‘Indian Hut’ is therefore no ordinary story: it has played a part in shaping and forming real ecosystems, including those of the country in which it is nominally set.

To offset Saint-Pierre’s imagined encounter here is a story about a real English scholar and one of his brushes with Nature in India. The date of the event is July 1850, a mere six decades after the publication of ‘The Indian Hut’, and its setting is Calcutta – or Kolkata, as it has been known since 1998. The river that flows past the city, the Hugli, is subject to the pressures of the tides, and in the past it often happened that a high tide in the Bay of Bengal would cause it to flood the surrounding countryside. Thus it happened that on a hot July day in 1852, the Hugli flowed over its embankments, swamping the lowlying wetlands that surrounded the city. When the waters receded it came to be seen that a school of gigantic creatures had been deposited in a shallow wetland pond. Word of this event spread rapidly and in a few hours, reached the ears of an Englishman by the name of Edward Blyth who was the then Superintendent of Calcutta’s Botanical Gardens. Blyth was a naturalist of distinction and is credited with having anticipated some aspects of the theory of evolution. He corresponded regularly with Darwin who once described him as: ‘a clever, odd, wild fellow who will never do what he could do, from not sticking to one subject.’

Now, hearing of the gigantic sea-creatures deposited by the tide, Blyth set off immediately for the Salt Lakes – a considerable journey from the Botanical Gardens. He arrived to find some twenty whales floundering in a shallow pond. Their heads were rounded and their bodies were black, with white undersides. The adult males were over fourteen feet in length. The water was too low to keep them fully submerged and their short, sharply-raked dorsal fins were exposed to the sun. The animals were in great distress and their moans could be clearly heard.

A large crowd had gathered but somewhat to Mr. Blyth’s surprise they had not killed the whales. He had imagined that the animals would be set upon by the villagers, for their meat and oil. He found instead that many of the villagers had laboured through the night to rescue the creatures, towing them through a channel into the river. Many whales had been saved,. Blyth learned, and those that remained were the last of a school of several dozen.

Blyth chose four of the best specimens, two males and two females, and had them secured to the bank with poles and stout ropes: his intention was to return the next day with the implements necessary for a proper dissection. Before departing, he did everything in his power to make sure that his chosen creatures would not be freed by the local populace.

But a shock awaited him: on returning the next morning, he found that his chosen animals had been cut loose during the night. Now only a few inferior creatures remained in the pond. Not to be thwarted of these, Mr Blyth set upon them at once and quickly reduced them to ‘perfect skeletons’. On examining the bones, he decided that he had discovered a yet-unknown creature, Globicephalus indicus. But a few years later this identification was disproved, so it turned out in the event, that Mr Blyth had spent two days and much effort to no avail.

The text of Blyth’s article makes no mention of the human interactions that resulted in the retrieval of the skeletons. The references from which I have constructed this narrative are consigned to a footnote, but scant as these are, they leave no doubt that the villagers went to some lengths to free the whales. What was it then that prompted these people to exert themselves on behalf of the animals, at the cost of incurring the wrath of an English sahib?

The one thing we can be sure of is that their concerns were not the same as those that might have inspired a Saint-Pierre or a whale watcher of today. Possibly the lake in question was a public fishing ground, owned by a family or the whole village. Perhaps the villagers were dismayed at the thought of their common property being colonized by a school of whales; perhaps they imagined that their carefully tended stocks of fish would be rapidly depleted by the gigantic creatures. These reasons would surely have been enough to lend some urgency to their efforts. Yet compelling as these pragmatic reasons might be, I find it hard to believe that they were not allied also to a certain sense of awe, wonder and even compassion at the sight of the distress of these majestic creatures. Is it possible that there was no talk among the villagers of divine visitations, no stories told of signs from the heavens? I cannot believe that there was not. Such emotions might appear to have little in common with an ecological awareness, but if indeed there is, in cultures at large, as well as in works of literature, such a thing as an environmental unconscious, then surely it would consist in an overlapping of the pragmatic and the poetic, a broad acknowledgement of mutual dependence, in which rights, mutual obligations and a sense of wonder are seamlessly merged?

As in Saint-Pierre’s story, Blyth’s encounter too was probably with Dalits, members of the most disadvantaged castes of India. In both instances the people are unnamed, but there the similarities end: Saint-Pierre’s imaginary scholar converses with an individual whereas Blyth finds himself dealing with a collectivity; where Saint-Pierre’s Indian is a meditative recluse, worshipping in the temple of nature, the people that Blyth meets are of an eminently workmanlike frame of mind: far from sitting back to ponder the wonder that Nature has delivered at their doorstep, they have set immediately to work. What is more, the real English scholar, unlike Saint-Pierre’s imaginary hero, has no interest at all in the natives and their ideas of Nature: to him they are just a nuisance, an impediment in the production of perfect – if misidentified – skeletons. As for the animals, Blyth seems to have had neither the talent nor the inclination for forging any kind of relationship with them. In this he would have been no different from, other eminent naturalists of his period. His famous contemporary, Alfred Russell Wallace once acquired a siamang in Sumatra, and found that the ape would spend hours playing with his Malay helpers while ignoring him. “It took a dislike to me…,” Wallace tells us, in his disarming way, “which I tried to get over by feeding it constantly myself. One day, however, it bit me so sharply while giving it food, that I lost patience and gave it rather a severe beating, which I regretted afterwards, as from that time it disliked me more than ever.”

Despite the differences between Blyth’s narrative and Saint-Pierre’s there are also many parallels and intersections. Where Saint-Pierre imagines nature as a sacred space and a temple, for Blyth it is a ‘field’ in all the varied senses of the word: in other words, it is an area that lies beyond the hearth and is uninhabited by design, so that it may be subjected to cultivation – in this instance as an object of study. Where the visions coincide is that in both, Nature is defined by its exemption from contamination by people: it is as it were, the other of society, a province defined by its exclusion of human sociability. Thus did Nature come to be imagined as an Eden too perfect for the fallen progeny of Adam and Eve.

Let us return for a moment to Blyth. What if, on discovering his school of stranded whales, he had indeed paused to ask the villagers for an account of their actions, as Saint-Pierre’s scholar might have done?

The answer I suspect, would not have been recorded – by either Blyth or Saint-Pierre himself – for it would probably have taken a very different form from the pithy aphorisms that Saint-Pierre accorded to his reclusive sage. Most likely the villagers would have responded by telling a story – a fabulous tale that both Saint-Pierre and Blyth would have dismissed as a characteristically extravagant native fantasy, having nothing whatever to do with Nature.

Ideologies in environmentalism

If one were to read the literature discussing the evolution and history of the approaches to environmental issues, there are 2 or 3 basic ideologies that govern the thought process of human perception about the environment. More specifically, the various outlooks to other living beings are of prime significance in our approach to nature.

A few terms which are to be discussed at this juncture are: Anthropocentricism, biocentricism and ecocentricism.

Each of these are ideologies more than anything else. “Environmentalists” and so called environmentally conscious persons may come from any of these ideologies.

Anthropocentricism refers to keeping the human species as central to all activity. All plan and action will be performed if beneficial to the human species. For example, if a pesticide were to be stopped from usage, the argument would be that the rate of cancer among people is increasing because of the chemical. A certain species would need to be saved because they are essential to control pest populations or because the genetic material may come of some use sometime in the future. In case of man/animal conflict or man/ecosystem conflict, it is man who would be given the preference. It is important to note that the present day environmentalist mostly fall under this category. They fight for environmental causes using the relevant human suffering as a tool for advocacy. According to them, creatures without value for human use are expendable. At many levels, nature lovers would label this approach of ‘human centric’ environmentalism as ’superficial’ or more appropriately ’shallow’. Arne Naess has described this approach as ‘Shallow Ecology’ in his texts of which I will discuss soon in a future post.

In the biocentric perspective, all species are considered to be equal and hence any activity causing any harm to another creature in any way is considered as wrong. This is indeed a more radical ideology and would be hard to digest and accept for most people. If such an ideology were to be accepted, many changes would have to be made to ones lifestyle. Each ideology comes with its share of lifestyle modifications. This one will require the person to give up non-vegetarian food, give up leather, adopt organic food etc. This philosophy is keystone to the Animal Rights movement. They believe that without treating all species the various problems of the human species cannot be solved. Under such a perspective no species would be considered as a pest.

A more holistic perspective would be ecocentricism. Here, the central important is given to the ecosystem with adequate respect to the intrinsic value of non-living elements like air and water. The habitats of creatures are also given importance. Any process that would cause damage to the ecosystem and the biosphere as a whole would be considered as wrong. Therefore human industry and other ‘developmental’ endeavours would need to reorganize accordingly with respect to the biological and the elemental processes of the biosphere.

Understanding exponential growth

Growth is a common word, used repeatedly by governments of ‘developing countries’ to measure progress. By growth, one can imply economic growth or population growth or consumption growth. Growth is usually measured at national level by the GDP – Gross Domestic Product, which is the total values of the goods and services a country produces.

Usually in nature ‘growth’ goes through phases, affected by the study species and the conditions prevalent. When conditions for the growth of a species are good, which is, the availability of surplus food, few predators and the ability to reproduce effectively, there is exponential growth leading to the doubling of numbers at very quick succession.

Eventually, the organism will encounter certain checks. These checks may be in the form of depleted food availability or disease or predators. At such a point, the growth reduces. Eventually, after a series of fluctuations in the growth rate, the rate of birth and death of the organisms becomes almost equal and this is the dynamic equilibrium state. Stable ecosystems have dynamic equilibrium among all its species.

Unfortunately, for us and for all life on our planet, humans have found ways to bypass these natural checks. Most governments and MNCs have concluded that positive growth at the expense at nature is the only destiny for mankind. Let us understand further this phenomenon of growth. The following riddle has been quoted in the book ‘The Limits to Growth” which I have reviewed in the Useful leads page. It is a French riddle:

There is a pond in which there are many small fishes, insects and frogs. There are also small plants. A water lily bud appears in the pond. It grows twice its size everyday. In 30 days time, it would have grown to such a size that it will cover the entire pond and destroy all the other life forms in it. On which day will you realize that there is a problem in the pond and hence start taking action?

Alarms will sound when the lily covers half the pond. This will be on the 29th day. This will double on the 30th day to cover the entire pond. Till the 29th day we would not recognize this as a problem. There is always this delay in recognizing problems.

There is a possibility that we’re already late into the 29th day. But we still fail to accept this fact and continue to live by our old definition of growth and progress. To further understand this phenomenon, here is a quote from the same book, “The only result of this particular grow forever policy can only be the extinction of whales and whalers”. There was a time when whales thrived in good numbers in colder waters of the northern and southern oceans. Since the time that the hunting of whales began, their numbers began to decline. It eventually came to such a state that it became difficult to even spot whales. It would seem obvious that one would take a cue from this event and stop, or at least regulate the hunting of whales. What some countries like Japan did is testament to our approach to today’s problems. They made devices which would help them seek whales from their areas of refuge, devices using sound waves and infra-red, imaging devices etc. Therefore the sorry tale continued and whales were persecuted even in the sanctuaries.

Some people have gone on to say that Gross Domestic Product should be renamed Gross Domestic Cost. The loss of Natural capital will indeed be very difficult to recover.

The ’special’ dilemma

During my final year at medical college a professor made a joke “Soon we will reach such a high level of specialization that there will be a ‘Left index finger’ surgeon”. Of course we all laughed at the idea.

Through ever increasing number of ‘experiments’ and ‘research’ there is now so much literature and technique that each subject needs so many sub-divisions which further need more sub-divisions. Many sub-divisions have now become subjects on their own now. How does this affect the environment ( when I say ‘environment’ I mean ‘everything’) ?

A medical physiology lecturer needs a kind of frog which breeds only in a lake in a remote village which borders the Bandipur forest of South India. Students can learn about the functioning of muscle and heart from experimenting on the frog. Therefore the frogs are in demand. The tribal have been displaced from the forest by the government officers in the name of ‘conservation’. For a living they have few options, therefore they catch the frogs for the medical college lab. Due to relentless catching of the frogs (coupled with chemical run-offs of pesticides and fertilizers from farms and also climate change) the number of frogs decrease to such an extent that the lab get fewer by the month. The conservationist blames the tribals for the threatening the species of frogs. Alongside all this, a malaria epidemic occurs in the village after a long time. The local medical officers order DDT to be sprayed in the area and give drugs to all the susceptible people. This decreases the frog population even further.

The doctors donot know about (or are not concerned about) the fact that the frogs are the keystone and indicator species in the ecosystem which keep insect populations under control. They just want the frogs for the experiments. The conservationists donot know that the doctors are the ones creating the demand for the frogs. The tribals just need some money to get some food to stay alive. The frogs disappear and hence the mosquitoes increase creating a situation for malaria. The local medical officers are taught that DDT is the only solution for malaria producing mosquitoes. They’re only worry is malaria. The tribals have to move on to other jobs. The above situation is just a small example I’ve given to show the blindfolds within which each of us are probably working. The definition of the problem at each juncture is different depending on who poses the question.

This specialization business is not just in the academic circle. In every area of enterprise, anywhere from production to consumption there is now a highly ‘evolved’ division of labour. There are so many things to take care of that people are needed for so many jobs. Since the job becomes very specific, the only thing the person becomes concerned about is the input and the output of her/his job. They are not very concerned about where the raw materials come from, how they’ve come and who brought them. They have the raw materials and are expected to make something out of them. Once something has been made from the raw materials, the first level products are taken to the next level of assembly and so on and so forth. After the chain of events, the products reach the level of consumers.

People want cars. The car manufacturer wants the iron and steel, the iron smelter needs the ore. Iron ore is found ususlly in thickly forested areas and hence is a major threat to them. The person who is getting the ore mined wants to minimise his costs to give the best price to the smelter and hence he orders open-caste mining to be done. This destroys the forest. But he gets good customers as the price for his ore is the cheapest. The Smelter uses inadequate pollution control mechanisms to minimize his costs and hence releases lots of chemicals in the air and heat into the rivers. The car manufacturer gets all this and produces a hybrid car and calls it ‘eco-friendly’ and the seemingly ‘conscious consumer’ buys the car to show that he is concerned about the environment.

What are inter-disciplinary sciences? In the realization that people are losing perspective of the inter-relatedness of everything, some forums and academies have opened where people look at subjects from more than one perspective. This ensures more responsible science and also it has become a necessity to take research further.

Holistic perspective. The key ingredient missing in today’s world. Everyone is so busy playing their ‘parts’ that the ‘whole’ becomes irrelevant. It has hence led to a situation where each one doesnot consider the other’s problem to be his own. Each person has his own way of dealing with each problem and feels that there’s no need for a holistic approach. Only with the advent of such a perspective can one hope for the environmental situation to get better. “Only by knowing the whole can the parts be understood and not the other way around” (The Limits to Growth, 1972). Specialists, are they really?

Arrested development

Post no. 20

Moving on further in understanding dichotomy, we now arrive again at the word ‘development’. I have already mentioned in my previous posts that this is one of the most abused words in the english language; and now it has so many meanings that it can possibly be used for anything.

The dominant paradigm in the world still encourages the meaning of ‘development’ as – aping western culture and technology. It is as simple as that. Hence the terminologies – ‘Developed countries’ and ‘Developing countries’. This would amount to industrialization, urbanization and increasing the Gross National Product. It also means that the countries that are still ‘developing’ should increase consumption, give priority to defense and intelligence, improve facilities for science and technological research, send expensive rockets and satellites to take pictures of the earth etc.

Of course when the satellites take pictures from so far away, they would fail to pick up the faces of the billions of people who starve regularly or the pictures of the birds dying after eating pesticide laden seeds. Could samples of moon rock do any good in eliminating these basic problems of environmental degradation and poverty? With my current knowledge, I think not. I also feel that answers to such questions are already present in our heads.

To further hurt the dichotomy, there is a major difference that exists between adult action and children’s education. In this regard, there is also a difference in curricula between schools in developed and developing countries. Apparently primary schools in the west teach kids to appreciate peace, non-violence and compassion. The existing double standards has been well exposed by a group of 12 year old kids from Canada called ECO ( Environmental children’s organisation). They addressed a gathering at the United Nations and made a moving speech questioning the priorities of Governments of all the countries and also questions where the all-important ideals learnt from junior school of peace, love and compassion have vanished. The entire speech can be viewed on youtube (lookfor- the girl who silenced the world for 5 minutes). Therefore we can conclude that these kids are being taught good things but it somehow gets lost in the machinery of production.

Coming to schools in the countries like India, which are trying hard to become the like the west, there is little importance given to ideals like peace, sustainability and compassion. These countries have housed the preachings of Buddhism and those of Gandhi. Their messages unfortunately have been lost in formulae, calculations and ’scientific’ facts.

We wish to move towards a healthy, peaceful and equitable world but somehow our actions dont reflect that. The first step to break this vicious cycle is the instilling of appropriate education. This is probably the matter which needs the most urgent attention. Government in India has declared Environmental education as a compulsory subject but it remains a neglected subject and is never given importance due to 2 reasons:  The first one is the definition society gives to brilliance and status. Every parent aspires that the child reaches a high position in a big company and earn a lot of money. The second reason is the fact that teachers of environmental education themselves are products of this system and have failed to understand the importance of the subject. If this chain is not broken, this dichotomy will never be answered. The first step then is probably to educate the teachers who will then educate children. For how long will environmentalists and development experts have this quarrel? The fate of the world hangs delicately in the quest for the answers. The solution to the battle could lie in the appropriate education of the coming generation who can then decide for themselves how to take the world ‘forward’.

Mahatma Gandhi had mentioned in his book Hind Swaraj that the only way for India’s salvation is through keeping villages as the central point of all decision making. He goes on to mention that if countries like India move towards the western way of life, it would destroy the country and the planet. “A small island like Great Britain had to rule and plunder half the world for 200 years to reach where it has today; how many earths will India need to rule to reach such a position?”.

No taste for health

Post no. 19

Continuing on the topic of dichotomy between health promotion and usual human activity, something that all of us know is the relation of our diet with our health. Everyone knows that the kind of food that we eat nowadays is unhealthy. The magnitude of the issue probably still eludes most. It is not just as simple as saying that eating fatty foods will increase your chance of a heart attack. The ramifications of one food habits are far more than that. Everyone wants happiness, everyone wants longevity and everyone wants health. From experience one can say that it is very difficult to be happy if one is not healthy. Also longevity without good health can prove to be a torture. Why then do we continue food habits that can prove disastrous to our health?

The answer to this question will vary according to the person you ask it to. Poorer sections of the society who are landless buy whatever their daily wages allow. For them survival is more of a concern than health. Richer farmers have mostly opted for cash crops or mono-cropping; hence also have to buy food from the money he earns. People in the city are busy with their jobs and personal lives because of which cooking takes a back seat. People in cities eat out mostly and even then the restaurants one chooses for food is the one providing good taste, fills the stomach and easy on the pocket. No one considers the health aspect of the food that goes into the mouth. The problem is not that taste is a priority for food habit; it is in making taste the only priority. The taste for unhealthy food

is similar to any other addiction when looked at from the health perspective.

What is healthy, what is not? The answers to this are also nebulous. One day in the paper you would read that coffee is bad for health and the next day another article saying it is very good. Doctors say eat eggs and have milk and non-veg food. It should be good right? It has been approved by ‘health professionals’. Whom to believe? The government promotes consumption of eggs and Dhoni promotes drinking milk. Dhoni has no idea about the antibiotics, hormones, chemicals and pus in milk. Agreed that milk contains proteins and calcium and it would seem unbelievable that it is not good for health. We have been using milk in our diets for centuries, how can it be bad?

The delusion of safety that insulin and Sugar-free are available for diabetes and drugs available for hypertension are quite understandable. But these diseases never leave once they set in and eventually weigh down upon ones mind and body. Certain cancers are associated with the food we eat. Heart disease is highly dependent on the fat content of our food. The delusion of safety is also because of the remoteness of action and effect. We don’t get a heart attack on the first day of eating a chocolate doughnut. It happens as a result of persistent bad eating habits and hence the neglect. All this is in addition to the pesticides already in our food. It has become difficult to decide which the bigger problem is.

The people who benefit most from our eating habits are restaurant owners, fast food chains, doctors and pharmaceutical companies. If everyone were to eat healthy food, these industries would collapse. They thrive on our choice of unhealthy food.

What is healthy food? What is the appropriate food? Can it be tasty too?

Something very queer has come to my notice recently. As doctors, we too are taught about nutrition, what nutrients one can get from each food, the importance of milk, eggs and non-veg food and cereals, vegetables and fruits of course. But I am now of the opinion that this too may have been wrongly analyzed. One may not be on the same page as me on this take but it is something one can keep at the back of her/his mind and think about. In a lecture I attended recently I was introduced to concepts which explained the links of disease with non-veg food, milk and dairy products, eggs, coffee etc. Most of the links are direct but many are indirect also. The indirect links have to do with the web of interrelation between non-veg food and global warming, shrinking forests, loss of biodiversity in forests and oceans, loss of medicinal plants, side effects of medicines etc to name a few. On these issues I will discuss in detail in a future post as it is very important in itself.

Details of this kind of a diet are available if you would search for ‘world peace diet’ on the internet. It may sound funny but the arguments are very good. It is basically about vegan food.

The total disease burden on this world due to unhealthy eating habits is mind-blowingly huge. Let it be malnutrition, obesity, heart disease, cancers. It has been understood easily that the amount of money one spends on medical bills and the time spent with ill health and premature death far outweighs the cost of cooking ones own healthy food. And it’s also true that one can make very tasty food that is healthy too. The taste is always better if the food is grown naturally (natural or organic farming). Food from chemical agriculture do not taste as good and hence require additives and spices while cooking and that makes it more unhealthy. Once a person starts eating healthy food for some time, he/she automatically gets repulsed to unhealthy food. The taste of natural healthy food is irreplaceable. As I have mentioned above, food is also directly linked with economy, development and the environment. Making good choices for ones diet can actually save the world! Such choices may seem difficult at first, but when one explores the benefits of such a diet, it would seem worth adopting it. So that’s what I’m saying to you, explore the vegan options and try it.

In this post I have discussed a few of the aspects of link between health and food. There is a lot more to it if one would explore. Some answers can be found at www.sharan-india.org and www.nandita-shah.net

Hidden Legacy

The world has more money now than ever before. We are also ‘more concerned’ with the health of our near and dear ones and are willing to spend a lot of money for the sake of their ‘health’. There is wide-spread dissemination of knowledge related to health and hygiene issues. We have medical insurance now to ensure access to medical care in times of emergencies. But if we look into the details and fine prints of what goes on in the world, it comes to our notice we may be producing the sickest of babies since the time of human existence. In this post I would like to highlight the dichotomy in our desperation for a healthy life and the opposite nature of all our actions.

How is this possible? Does it have anything to do with human activity? Which activities? Can this be reflective of the fact that we are losing species at 200 times the natural rate, the fastest ever in the history of this planet?

There is an entity called – ‘persistent organic pollutants’ or simply POPs. These chemicals are used in a variety of industries, agriculture and in our daily lives. They are called persistent because they persist in the environment once released ( non-biodegradable). They are organic compounds having complex multi-ring structures with many halogen atoms attached. They are pollutants as they are harmful to health and environment. If they are so harmful to health and environment what are they doing here in the first place?

Some famous examples of POPs are DDT(insecticide), Polychlorinated Biphenyls(used in transformers) and Endosulfan(pesticide). There are several dozen such chemicals. As I have mentioned, these chemicals are persistent. When they are released into the environment they find their way into air, water and soil. When sprayed into fields then the crops take up some of them. From ponds and rivers it is taken up by small plants, which small fishes eat. These fishes eat many plants and therefore accumulate more chemicals in them. Some fishes die due to this and some of them survive but stay sick. These sick fishes are eaten by larger fishes and hence the larger fish collect more of the poison in them. Similarly in land ecosystems the fruits and then the insects and the birds and eventually the mammals accumulate the chemicals. Since there is a constant supply of these chemicals in the environment the levels always rise and never fall. This is the process of ‘bio-magnification’ or ‘bioaccumulation’. These chemicals also travel everywhere through air and water. It has been shown that it takes a chemical 3 weeks from the point of release into the environment to reach a point  halfway across the earth. So no country is exempt from the chemicals even though they may not be using it or have banned the usage. After all, chemicals don’t understand national boundaries or race or class. The maximum levels have been seen in the aboriginals in Alaska who have never used any chemicals.

So we sit somewhere high up in the food chain and hence we get the poisons from all the sources. We keep accumulating these chemicals in our bodies throughout our lives and face diseases like diabetes, loss of immunity, endocrine disruption and cancer. These are well documented effects of some of the POPs.

Who are the individuals at the highest point of the food chain? Who are the ones who consume food produced by human bodies?

Babies who drink mother’s milk are the ones who are consuming the food at the top of the food chain – breast milk. As it is clear from the above discussion, the level of the POPs gets higher as we get higher in the food chain. Breast milk has been tested from many countries already and a surveillance is now in operation by the WHO to keep a track on the level of POPs in breast milk. Therefore we have now arrived to a point where babies are getting back poisons in the highest dose in reward for what we have done to the environment. This is the legacy we give to all our children, whether rich or poor, whether from the US or India. Breast milk is still best for babies as other suppliments can never come even close to the goodness of breast milk for babies.

Don’t forget that DDT received the Nobel prize around 60 years ago. I just hope that this argument puts certain things into perspective. We are so concerned about health, then why do we continue to create an unhealthy world. If we stop producing POPs immediately, it would still take several dozen years till the existing POPs get eliminated. But many countries continue to argue about the importance of POPs looking just at some short term objectives. They use DDT to combat malaria in countries such as India, but they never try to improve sanitary conditions, urban architecture and irrigation projects which is the root cause of malaria in the first place. They want an easy way out by using DDT and they continually project that DDT is the only answer for malaria. With such a narrow perspective one can only expect more chemicals to accumulate and more diseases to come.

The only people happy at the end of this are pharmaceutical companies, corporate hospitals and insurance companies. They will continue to supply expensive drugs for the treatment of cancers and hormonal problems which shouldnt have existed in the first place. Hope all of you have medical insurance as we all are going to need it at some point of time.

POPs is just one of the examples for the dichotomy between health and activity. I will discuss the other parts in the next post.

Introduction to Dichotomy

There is no doubt that the problems our world faces today are of the most complicated order. Let it be that of environmental destruction, poverty, population, over-consumption, climate change, war, etc etc. There is however, a clear link between the causes of these problems and an interconnectedness in their existence. In other words, no problem can be tackled independently if a longlasting solution is intended. ( for a good example of the interconnectedness of the problems visit www.storyofstuff.com and see the 20 minute video)

Considering the complexity of the problems and the unbalanced distribution of power in the world, one of the best and simple ways to make a difference and hence contribute to the solution, is to act at a personal level, at a level where we make personal decisions. Then again, as I have mentioned in a previous post, we are not in complete control of our decisions….we have family, society, television, advertisements, ‘fashion experts’ etc pulling us to one side or the other.

Even then with some of the appropriate news that surfaces, one is continually made aware of the issues plaguing our world and therefore decide to make certain lifestyle changes. For example, a friend of mine who is an ardent non-vegetarian decided to go veg for a month after he read an article showing the link between non-veg food and increase in greenhouse gases.

We see many people making so called ‘green’ choices. Some of them even go to the extent of campaigning for environmental issues. The dichotomy that arises in these cases is the fact that there is no clear cut understanding on what ‘going green’ actually means. I too would be quite unsure on how such a question could be answered appropriately. This is for the simple fact that most of human activities, if not all, affect the environment in one way or the other. So, when we use the phrase ‘eco-friendly’ it actually means ‘less eco-destructive’. An advertisement for a car says that the car is eco-friendly because it gives 18 kmpl of fuel. Really…how does it become ‘eco-friendly’ ? It just becomes a ‘little less eco-destructive’ than it was before. It’s also not just about the fuel but all the metal, plastic and leather that goes into the making of the car. The issues of a car donot end at the level of air-pollution. This is a very important fact to understand.

There are people who campaign for veg food but are very materialistic, there are those who campaign for the poor but are part of corporations, there are people who campaign for issues of climate change but use chemicals in their farms. There is a dichotomy of principles. But I do agree that any change towards the positive is a good change, however small it may be, as every journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Now then,  when can a person call himself an environmentalist? Or nature friendly? Or eco sensitive? One of the ways to approach this answer is to question each of the components that constitute our lifestyle. In this post, my objective was just to introduce the existence of unclear understanding amongst people. I would discuss some key lifestyle issues in the next few posts.

Absolute uncertainty

Post no. 16

Consider the following sequence of events:

A man strolls into a lonely country road. As he walks, he notices some activity happening at the horizon. He walks towards that area and it becomes a little more clear. He notices that there is a group of people there. As he walks further towards the group, he hears sounds of their shouting but the words are not clear. On walking more, he sees that it is a group of old men. As he gets closer, some words get clearer. When he comes very close to the group, he realises that this is a group of old men talking about politics. He passes walks past them, and on walking further and further away, he words start getting muffled again, the images start getting blurry until he walks far away when the group is nothing more than a speck.

This perspective is mentioned in the book ‘Chaos’. What can we learn from the above passage?

The undertanding from the issue dealt with above can be applied to anything from life, philosophy to science. I will give you examples from a couple of experiences I’ve had recently.  First one is from the IPEN ( International persistent organic pollutants elimination network) conference I attended. After discussing the main focus issues on organic pollutants, the chairperson brought to the attention of the delegates the new and upcoming issue of ‘nano-particles’. As the name suggests, these are particles which are really really small. Nano particles are already being used widely in electronic items. They are already everywhere. The issue now is that these Nano particles being so small are very difficult to manage or control. They can float around like dust, enter our bodies through food and water or air. No one knows what could be the health consequences of such particles.

The second example I give is that of GMOs ( genetically modified organisms). Ps note that not all the applications of genetic engineering are dangerous, it is the production and release of modified organisms that is. Genetic engineering again involves playing with DNA blindly. The transmission of a fragment of genome from one species to another involves using certain enzymes and vectors. So what the scientist does is to isolate the fragment from one  species and puts the isolated material along with certain enzymes and vectors into a dish containing the recipient cells and hopes the incorporation of the foreign genes happen without problems. No one has proper control of where exactly the genes are going to be inserted. Depending on where the insertion takes place, some of the host cell DNA gets disturbed. Which function will get disturbed is impossible to predict. Therefore, the crops grown from such modified genes can produce new proteins(or aberrant proteins) and toxins which can prove very harmful for health of all animals including humans who consume them. Also, these crops spread their genes to surrounding fields containing native varieties of crops and hence affect even those who choose to not use GMOs. Many cases of the health and environmental impacts of GMOs have already been recorded and can be searched on the net. One recent example being the death of 200 goats which fed on Bt cotton( genetically modified cotton – bacillus thuringenesis) in Madhya Pradesh.

We come back to the story and how all this fits into it. When scientists are experimenting with nano particles or genes, they stand at a place far far away from the actual action. They have no control or no idea of all the outcomes of their actions. Our science has progressed to a stage where we assume things on a drawing board and keep hoping that thats what happens in the world of infinitesimally small particles. What we need to realise is that the world of these extremely small particles is very very different. I dont think our imagination is strong enough to visualise how the world would seem to a nano-particle. Nor does our technology allow this visualisation. But we still continue to play dangerously. The issue is that most people donot have the knowledge that GMOs or Nano-particles can cause serious effects, some irrevesibly. I will dwell into details in a future post. But the time has come to increase popular understanding on these issues.

When considering life in general, the above passage just goes to show our judgement making capacity or decision making skills. How far from the issue or the situation are we when we make a judgement about someone or something? What is the depth of understanding we have about a certain issue when we pass a judgement? If a known person contracts HIV, we have the tendency to assume a character flaw in the person without even trying to understand the reasons.

It is time we sit with the group of old men from here on and learn what they have to say before we assume things from very far.

Science and nature – Fukuoka’s views

“All I could give them was one straw”….

Very recently I read the book “The One Straw Revolution”. I was raving about it to my colleagues, more so on the evening of the 17th of August. On the morning of the 18th, I got the news of the death of Masanobu Fukuoka, the author of the book. Earlier this year, I had the fortune of meeting the person who wrote the preface for this book – Pratap Agarwal. He too, like Fukuoka, practiced ’rishi kheti’, a form of farming similar to natural farming.

Fukuoka was a microbiologist during his youth in Japan. In his book he describes his journey of why and how he gave up his job and his initial way of life, to eventually become a farmer, learning the technique of ‘natural farming’ ( an improvisation made by him of a very ancient farming methodology) and how he links it to his philosophy of life and everything. According to me, this book is a must read.

The book looks to on-lookers as a manual on the technique of natural farming, but actually it is a book of experience and philosophy. Though you may not agree to some or most of his philosophy, it still presents to you a new perspective. The appreciation of this perspective may come with time.

Science, according to Fukuoka, is an attempt by man to understand nature. And by doing so, man wishes to make something better than nature. For understanding nature, man studies it in parts – physics, chemistry, biology etc. So he segregates the processes and components of nature into different subjects. But the problem is that nature cannot studied in parts because nature exists as a whole. When this ‘whole’ is segregated, it ceases to be nature, it becomes something else. Secondly, an attempt to make something better than nature itself is futile because it is impossible to comprehend what nature is in the first place. When a person tries to understand nature, that is when the first mistake happens. Nature is not something that can be understood, it can only be loved and be amazed about. Thirdly, in the process to make something better than nature, man has created problems, a lot of them.

For example, man attemped to make big farms with single crop( monocultures) which is against the principle of nature ( where many varieties of plants grow in close proximity and have an interdependent relationship). Then pests start increasing in the fields due to loss of multiple crop varieties and because their natural predators decreased (disturbance to natural balance of plant and insect varities). Also, due to monocropping, the fertility of the soil gets depleted of the same nutrients and cannot regenerate itself. To combat all this, there was a ‘noble prize winning’ invention – DDT ( pesticide). Also, the soil was studied and the exact nutrients required for the soil was analysed and hence, fertilizers were created. It initially proved to be a savior for the people. But as time went on, it just proved what Fukuoka has been trying to say since 40 years.

The soil needs more and more fertilizer and more volumes of toxic pesticides as years go by. These pesticides persists in the soil and destroy all the life it holds. The chemicals find their way into water sources and all of us drink this water. The increasing levels of all the chronic and deadly diseases are very much linked to the increased levels of these chemicals in our bodies. I have studied the reports myself. Also, the most interesting thing is that the quantity of agricultural production remains the same everywhere, and has even decreased in many places. Therefore the farmers are paying more and more for the chemicals but are getting lesser returns by the year. Hence the increased suicides amongst them. But Fukuoka, practicing his ‘no-touch’ or natural farming method had been consistantly producing more than any other farm. His field’s fertility increased by the year.

Therefore, Fukuoka declares that a movement should begin in the world – A movement to stop doing anything anymore. Because whenever we do something, we create new problems. Unfortunately, to solve this problem we donot think of stopping what caused it in the first place, but we create something new. And this gives rise to a new set of problems; and the cycle continues.

Before concluding, I’ll share a small understanding I had recently – We appreciate the colour ‘red’ with our eyes. It cannot be explained or understood as a particular wavelength. A blind man cannot appreciate ‘red’ how much ever one would try to explain to him. It can only be experienced.

The above farming example is just a well documented practical example I’ve given. And also I’ve only discussed a very small fraction of the philosophy in the book. Hope the above reflection will tempt you to read it.