Anil Agarwal Reader, Volumes 1, 2 and 3

These three volumes bring together a selection of the writings of Anil Agarwal, the remarkable environmental writer and activist, journalist and founder of the Centre for Science and Environment in Delhi – who died in early 2002 after a long battle with cancer. He was well known and greatly honoured, both for his work in India (for example, The State of India’s Environment 1982: a Citizen's Report, which set the tone and the standard from which comparable citizen reports on other nations were developed) and for his internationalism (for instance, the book Green Politics: Global Environmental Negotiations 1, edited with Sunita Narain and Anju Sharma, which was a landmark in making accessible the key global negotiations, and in bringing new pro-people, pro-poor, pro-Southern perspectives). Anil was also on the advisory board of this journal from its beginning – and the Centre for Science and Environment was the first institution that this journal profiled (in Vol 1, No 1, April 1989).

Anil Agarwal Reader 01
The first of these three volumes presents a selection of Anil Agarwal’s columns on “Green Politics”, published between 1991 and 1994 in the Delhi edition of The Economic Times newspaper. The articles focus on the environment–development issues that Anil’s work helped push to the fore during the late 1980s (a turning point in India’s history of environmental movement) and 1990s. His column analyzed politics, practices and discourses and their impacts on the environment and the poor – not only to highlight the problems but also to point out what must be done from the environment–development perspective. In the early 1980s, India faced two crucial issues: first, environmental degradation was increasingly affecting the poorest stratum of entire rural communities; and second, this crisis prompted a number of people to work towards sustainable ways of land exploitation. The latter led Agarwal to contradict the common understanding of the poor as causes and vehicles of environmental degradation. Instead, they are part of the solution, since they have demonstrated that they are key promoters and holders of innovative and sustainable ways of survival.

This theme of the importance of understanding and learning from “dying knowledge” was one that was made evident in many of his writings. Those benefiting more directly from (but also affected by) the use of local resources must be their managers, rather than the bureaucrats and industrialists whose decisions are taken at distance. There are various case studies of communities that have shown greater wisdom in managing resources without environmental damage, in much wiser ways than centralized managerial ways, which usually have destroyed environments and life. However, there is a strong class affinity between bureaucracies and industrial interests, often collaborating in controlling resources. Moreover, Indian state apparatuses are too corrupted and inflexible, while industrial interests are too often blinkered in their search for profit. Nevertheless, the solution should exist – partnership between industry and local communities as ways of shifting bureaucratic structures.

Agarwal wonders why environmental issues can’t make or break an election in India, or why there is no popular pressure on leaders to take account of these issues in a context such as India where development based on the exploitation of resources from other countries is impossible. An answer to this is what Agarwal ironically calls “Green World Order”, an emergent process of ecological globalization running parallel to economic globalization, and a new form of international North–South relations based on “the environment”. For instance, the analysis of the various multilateral agreements that emerged from the UN Conference on Environment and Development at Rio de Janeiro in 1992 shows how the international order propels Southern nations – rich in resources though perversely poor, caught in debt traps, amids