Rising from the Ashes of “Development” | Stories of Radical Ecological Democracy from India and Beyond
In this episode, we explore with environmentalist and author Ashish Kothari how entrenched “development” ideologies have led to an immense loss of traditional knowledge and cultural systems and caused immeasurable ecological destruction in India and globally. Ashish highlights radical alternatives being led by communities in India and around the world who are resisting the dominant capitalist, statist, and patriarchal model of “development” and offering transformative solutions from the ground up that are based in social justice and ecological wisdom. Highlights include:
How the Western model of development in India, combined with colonialism and globalization, led to incalculable social injustice and ecological destruction;
How the elite class within countries reinforces neoliberal and neo-colonial models, exacerbating existing inequalities such as gender and caste;
The concept of radical ecological democracy, as expressed through the Flower of Transformation, the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, Vikalp Sangam (Alternatives Confluence), all of which highlight and connect local community-led radical alternatives of social transformation, ecological restoration, and revival and sustenance of multiple knowledge and cultural systems;
Pathways to authentically engage in the practice of decolonizing knowledge systems and cultural practices to allow for the emergence of social and ecological diversity.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
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Ashish Kothari 0:00
The government of India decided post-independence 1950s onwards to adopt a model of development which was essentially what the West had been using for some time. It meant displacing several thousand years of civilization, indigenous, tribal, forest-dwelling, pastoralists, crafts, traditional knowledge systems. We have displaced about 60 million people, physically uprooted them from their lands. And, of course, the cost to nature is immense. Today's India is possibly the most unequal ever in history. So these are not flaws in the system, so to speak. They are actually inevitable consequences of the system. But I think for us as for the rest of the world, the biggest question right now is do we have alternatives? What we are seeing in the last 15 years is looking at a lot of grounded initiatives, where people are trying to find solutions to their problems, both by resisting what the dominant capitalist, statist, patriarchal system is bringing to them, but also saying we do actually have some answers.
Alan Ware 0:59
In this episode of the Overpopulation Podcast we explore with environmentalist and author Ashish Kothari how entrenched development ideologies create both ecological and social destruction. Ashish works to highlight community-driven solutions that harmonize human activities with the planet's needs.
Nandita Bajaj 1:26
Welcome to the Overpopulation Podcast where we tirelessly make ecological overshoot and overpopulation common knowledge. That's the first step in right-sizing the scale of our human footprint so that it is in balance with life on Earth, enabling all species to thrive. I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host of the podcast and executive director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware 1:50
I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance. We are proud to be the first and only nonprofit organization globally that draws the connections between pronatalism, human supremacy, social inequalities, and ecological overshoot. Our mission at Population Balance is to inspire narrative, behavioral, and system change that shrinks our human impact and elevates the rights and wellbeing of people, animals, and the planet. And now on to today's guest.
Nandita Bajaj 2:22
Ashish Kothari is the founder of Kalpavriksh, an Indian nonprofit organization working on environmental and social issues at local, national, and global levels. He was trained and subsequently taught at the Indian Institute of Public Administration and coordinated India's National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan. He served on the boards of Greenpeace International and the ICCA consortium of territories and areas conserved by indigenous peoples and local communities. He has served as a judge on the International Tribunal on Rights of Nature. He's part of the coordination team of the Vikalp Sangam, the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, and Radical Ecological Democracy. He is also the co-author or co-editor of several books including Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India; Alternative Futures: India Unshackled; and Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary. And now on to today's interview. Hello, Ashish, it's wonderful to have you here with us. Welcome to our podcast.
Ashish Kothari 3:31
Thank you. Thanks for the opportunity.
Nandita Bajaj 3:34
And Ashish, we are so impressed with the work that you've been doing in India and globally. Throughout your decades-long career, you've been a steadfast voice advocating for a shift away from traditional development models toward what you term as radical ecological democracy. And your journey has led you across the globe from the densely populated urban centers of India, to remote rural communities where you've seen firsthand the impacts of unsustainable development practices, and the resilience of local solutions. Before delving in depth to a discussion of alternative community-based initiatives, we'd like to start with a discussion of what you see as your primary critique of typical, quote unquote, development strategies in your home country of India, where I also grew up, and what impacts has that had on people and the environment in terms of the destructiveness of it?
Ashish Kothari 4:38
I mean, of course, it's important to look at pre-colonial and colonial history, which laid some of the foundations of the problems we're facing right now. But even if we skip that and say, Okay, post-independence 1950s onwards, the government of India decided to adopt a model of development which was essentially what the West had been using for some time. There was at that point in time actually quite an intense and serious debate between Gandhi and our first prime minister Nehru, before independence also, or between those who followed a Gandhian path and those who wanted modernization, industrialization, western model development. And, of course, with Nehru as first prime minister and with most of the people who were in the ruling party then kind of agreeing with his vision of where India should go, we took that path and not the Gandhian path.
Now, what has that path meant? It has essentially, I think, three or four things that are very, very important. Number one, a very significant and predominant focus on large, heavy infrastructure and industrialization in the initial phases and all the way till now; and then, of course, adding to that in the last couple of decades, digitization, artificial technologies of various kinds, etc. in all the sectors that you look at. So even if you take something like agriculture, which was a very major focus in the first two five-year plans - those days we used to have five year plans, we don't anymore - there was a lot of focus on agriculture. But again, the idea was how does one develop or improve agriculture. And that meant bringing in hybrid seeds, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, a lot of very heavy investments, which were put in by the public sector to help farmers to actually move into what they thought was advanced agriculture. But the same with manufacturing, the same and services. So that's one whole part of the picture.
The second is, there was very little attempt to try and build on the existing knowledge systems that India had. We're talking about several thousand years of civilization of various kinds - indigenous, tribal, forest-dwelling, pastoralists, crafts. Possibly at that point in time there may have been 100 million craftspersons or more, small scale manufacturing, and incredibly sophisticated knowledge systems which these were based on. But the same regime decided that we needed to move very quickly into modern science and technology in all the sectors including, for instance, in medicine. I mean, not that anybody was saying we didn't want modern science and technology. But given the predominance that it was offered, it meant displacing a lot of the local, indigenous traditional knowledge systems. That's the second element.
The third element is that we began to actually look at both nature and people as commodities. So instead of thinking of people in terms of social relationships, respect, dignity, and so on, and the rest of nature - forest, land, species, etc. - also as something that we have kinship with, and both of these are what we've lived with for thousands of years, through all the faiths, all the traditions, all the religions that we have in India, we started actually saying that no nature is available for us to exploit as a commodity. As an example, do you look at rivers and you say, Oh, rivers, fantastic, let's build dams and make hydroelectricity out of them. Forests, great, let's exploit them for timber, which of course started during the British colonial period, but continued subsequent to independence. Also, people - labor - so if we want to do mass industrialization and infrastructure growth, it means that people are available for labor and they want jobs anyway. So let's employ them. And so we had this whole process of commodification and commercialization that kind of intensified significantly post-independence.
And then finally, I think, I mean, I'm skipping a few elements, but I think another very important element was that development itself got defined in a very narrow sense. Now the word development is, in a sense, the opposite of envelopment, which is to say we're opening up. Okay, now, there's an opening up of opportunities, opportunities for enhancement of various kinds - cultural enhancements, social enhancements, and of course, also economic enhancement. But it kind of got very narrowly defined as percentage economic growth, the growth of GDP, which is how it was in the West, right, and we adopted it wholesale with no questioning. And so this whole goal was 5%, 10% - try and reach the Chinese growth rates at that point in time, which were in double digits. Now we also wanted to do that. And literally, actually, many finance ministers would say, We have to have growth at any cost. Now that 'at any cost' included, therefore, also the cost to the environment and to people, to displacement. If we look at the last seven decades of so-called development in India, we have displaced about 60 million people - physically uprooted them from their lands - for mining, for dams, for ports, for organization for various different kinds of so-called development, right. And of course, cost to nature is immense, many species disappearing and so on.
So if you take these three, four elements into account, and then you also add to that post-1991 the whole element of privatization entering into the global economy. Now until the 1980s, there was an inward-looking economy. There was some level of socialist economy thinking, public planning, public sector, etc, etc. It had problems like the ones I've just mentioned, but at least there was some element of saying, Well, let's try and be self-sufficient. Let's try and create a public sector, which actually enables more jobs to be created, helping to move people out of poverty, creating welfare schemes, public distribution systems, all that sort of stuff, right? Post 1991, as we enter the economic globalization, and a much greater shift towards things like the external economy, the global economy, so exports and imports and so on. We also then move much more heavily into privatization. And that's when, of course, India itself has fairly large industrial base, which was there already pre-independence and post-independence, even during the so-called socialist era. And that becomes significantly stronger as we see now with some of our biggest industrialists but also inviting the world's biggest multinational corporations to enter and do their business here. And the ultimate results of all of these things is what we're seeing now, which is very, very intense crony capitalism, very heavy influence of private sector on public policies, the increasing tendency to remove public sector from many, many different aspects of the economy and give them over to the private sector, even things like health and education, more and more privatization there.
All of which means, of course, also that it is that much more out of the hands of the poor, who cannot afford to spend so much money on education and health, but have to. So if you see the percentage of household income that is actually going into education and health, it has shot up significantly since the 1990s. And so therefore also the increasing gap between the rich and the poor. Today's India is possibly the most unequal ever in history, which is also a global phenomenon. But we see that in India with maybe 1% of the richest owning about 65 to 70% of the wealth, right. So these are not flaws in the system, so to speak. They are actually inevitable consequences of the system.
Even in terms of unsustainability, the last point I'll make, I think 10 or 12 years back, there was a very interesting report by the Confederation of Indian Industries along with the global ecological footprints network. And they did a relatively rough calculation of India's ecological footprint. And they said that we were already twice the biological, ecological capacity that India has. We were therefore clearly sustainable. And we had already lost half of that biocapacity, because of all the ecological destruction that was being caused. There was another report by the World Bank, interestingly enough, because the World Bank has been one of the institutions pushing us in this destructive development model. But sometimes you get interesting reports coming out of that. So there was one again, about a decade back, which showed that just five kinds of ecological damage, like the erosion of soil, the pollution of air, was causing a net loss of 5.7 percentage points of GDP per year. Now, that's at a time when India was supposedly growing at 6 or 7%. In effect, just five environmental losses, and there were a dozen others that they never even calculated, we're negating all of that growth. So clearly unsustainable. So anyway, there's fundamental inequality, injustice, and unsustainability built into this model.
Nandita Bajaj 13:13
I appreciate the depth that you went into for the answer, because the context is so important in understanding historically how things have evolved, or devolved within India, as a result directly of, as you said, the post-colonial narratives and practices, but also the post-globalization practices that opened India, not just to trade relations and extractivism, but all of the pollution and waste that has been exported into the country as well.
Ashish Kothari 13:47
If I can just sort of elaborate on that, I think that's very important point which I missed out on. So a colleague and I, Aseem Shrivastava, who calls himself a failed economist, because he doesn't believe in the neoliberal economics, so he and I did a book called Churning the Earth in 2012. So we looked at 20 years of economic globalization 1991 onwards, building on an analysis of what happened before that also, but especially 1991 onwards, and we looked at many things, but one of them was waste. And what we found was that India's import of toxic or dangerous wastes, which, incidentally, are not called wastes, they were called 'used goods'. So that's one way of hiding what they really are. So electronic waste, medical, you know, hospital waste, all kinds of stuff actually had jumped up several times since 1991. And all of that was being justified in the name of development and making economic growth and so on.
And at the same time, in those 20 years, the export of minerals and of resources from the oceans, fisheries and things like that, had significantly shot up. So what we were bringing in was stuff the rest of the world did not want. And what we were sending out is what the rest of the world wanted, but causing huge destruction and damage to our own society. Since 2012, I think this has only intensified, especially since 2014 with this government. We also looked at, for instance, waste produced in India itself. We just took a couple of elements. We took packaging, and we found that as the population had doubled or whatever in that period, packaging materials had increased by five times. So what we could see clearly with that one example is that, of course, population is an issue. But equally important is consumption patterns. Patterns of consumption, especially in the middle classes and the rich in India, have changed so dramatically, so dramatically. And that includes me. We are significantly over-consuming. That's also a very, very huge issue. It's a cultural issue. It's an ecological issue. It's a social issue. If I see my neighbor having a bigger television than me, then I also want that, etc, etc. All of this is happening in the name of development.
Nandita Bajaj 15:58
Totally. And we've discussed in other podcasts, there has been this global brainwash of what it means to lead a good life. And that is to have more and more and more, right? The hyper-consumerist model has been exported throughout the world. And as you said, the global middle class is the fastest rising demographic in the world, right? We're adding another billion people to the middle class just this decade. And the way the population factors in is that everybody wants to have that style of living. And while the Global North/Global South exploitation cannot be denied, I wonder if you could say a few words about the role of the elite class within the countries itself that invite that kind of neoliberal neo-colonial model?
Ashish Kothari 16:50
Sure, I think, no, India, I mentioned the class inequalities. But these class inequalities are also building on much older inequalities of gender, and caste, and a number of other things. But in particular, I think gender, patriarchy and casteism are maybe a few hundred or a few thousand years old, then class is kind of building on that, and each is reinforcing the other. So that divide, I mean, multiple divides, so to speak, have only intensified because of the neoliberal economic model, they have not actually reduced. And the same development model has created the climate crisis now that of course, it’s not created only within India. It is a global phenomenon. But within India, what we see is also and I think what you're referring to is what I would call internal colonization. And that's what I've also written about. It's very interesting that if you look at many of the countries who were formerly colonized are today colonizers, both externally and internally. China, of course, is way ahead of India, but India is trying to catch up. And externally, for instance, we now colonize places in Southeast Asia or Africa, where lands are taken over by Indian industries, or where palm oil plantations or other things happen because of our consumption needs in India, right? So that's one form of sort of external colonization.
Internally, cities colonize rural areas, in many ways, taking resources and dumping back garbage into them. And some parts of India, which are especially, for instance, the Adivasi, the indigenous parts of India or the coastal parts were fishing communities, or the grasslands and deserts where pastoral communities are very dependent on those ecosystems. Those are increasingly being colonized. They have been since many decades, but in the last 15-20 years, more and more as technologies become available that make it more possible to colonize these areas. That is what happens, people get displaced, wildlife gets destroyed, and all in the name of development.
And unfortunately, now that's even happening in the name of climate mitigation, or adaptation. So for instance, India has this huge renewable energy goal, which it's using to transmit an image of being a Climate Champion across the world by 500 gigawatts of renewable energy or up to 50% by 2030, of non fossil fuel energy. That's what our government's pledge is, which sounds great. And there is a lot of investment going into this. But then if you look at the nature of investment, much of that is going into mega projects, mega solar projects, mega wind projects, it's a form of what is called globally green land grabbing. So again, it's the farmers and pastoralists who lose out and all the wildlife that is in these areas. So this is now happening, unfortunately, even in the name of environment, climate, carbon neutrality, net zero, all the new buzzwords that we see coming out of either climate or biodiversity conferences. So yeah, this inequality sees this kind of internal colonization also, much more intense now it was always happening, but it is now much much more intense. Yeah,
Alan Ware 19:52
We've definitely seen a pattern when you talked about the pre-1991 era having some balance with socialist goals when India was more non-aligned, and there was a competition between the kind of Soviet model and the western-led model and then the fall of the Soviet Union just allows neoliberalism to spread like wildfire throughout the globe. And yeah, as you've talked about the critique of the development paradigm, that's really been supercharged since neoliberalism became unimpeded since 1991, you have a development paradigm called the flower of transformation, which is informed by your study of alternative development initiatives within India and around the world. And this model seeks to tackle social inequality and ecological destruction in a more holistic sort of way. Could you outline for us the five components of this model and maybe provide examples of movements or initiatives that represent each of these five petals in the flower of transformation, either in India or internationally?
Ashish Kothari 20:56
Sure, yeah. I think for us, as for the rest of the world, the biggest question right now is, do we have alternatives, I mean, other ways of meeting human needs and aspirations without causing the kinds of problems that we've just been speaking about. To me this is humanity's most pressing question right now. Because as part of that, also, is the question about how do you avoid wars and conflict and inequalities and, of course, the ecological collapse. So what we are seeing in the last, you know I've been working on all of these issues for the last 45 years, but especially in the last 15 years, looking at a lot of grounded initiatives, where people are trying to find solutions to their problems - both by resisting what the dominant system is bringing to them - capitalist, statist, patriarchal system is bringing to them - but also saying we do actually have some answers. So, let me give you an example.
The flower of transformation has five petals. There is the economic, the political, the social, the cultural, and the ecological, right, and these are all intersecting. Now with the economic petal let me give you an example of five thousand Dalit women farmers in Telangana in South India. Dalit is the so-called outcasts or untouchables of Indian society, the most marginalized section. And as women in patriarchy, of course, also marginalized. And these are all small farmers - one acre, two acres of land. So from a gender, caste, and class perspective, these are the people most on the margins, right? Now, in the last 35 to 40 years, they have through their own actions and with help from some civil society people they've rejected Green Revolution agriculture completely. They've gone back to about a hundred different species and varieties of their own seeds of millets, which are the oldest grains that we have in humanity - rice, wheat, pulses, and many other things, completely gone organic, sharing all their knowledge and seeds with each other. So no privatization of anything, and taking control of what they call not just food security by producing enough food on the lands for their families, but food sovereignty, which is to say complete local farmer control over everything to do with food production and consumption. Now, this is one aspect of the kind of economic petal. Now the economic petal would also have other things. So, for instance, control over the means of production could be also machinery, could be what craftspersons are using. Or it could be land. It could be forests. It could be water, rivers, and coasts, right. So that's one big aspect. And what they're also saying is self-reliance, that instead of globalization providing us our basic needs, so we get something like water from a thousand kilometers away, instead of that at least all our basic needs we can meet within a certain geographical region so that it's under our control. It's ecologically much more sustainable, etc. So that's the economy. And, of course, there's a lot more, but that's part of it.
Then, what they also realize, in central India, for instance, in many of the forest-dwelling communities the Adivasis, or indigenous people, have claimed self-rule by taking collective control over their forests and lands and saying, Why should there be a centralized department that controls the forest and takes away whatever it wants, without any benefits to us? We should be in full collective control of the forest. And we should use it for the enhancement and sustainability of our own livelihoods and our cultures and our land, and in the process also protect wildlife. So having done that, they say that we can't do that unless the political decision-making is also at the level of the village. So about 30 years back, one village came up with the slogan saying, We elect the government in New Delhi and make it accountable, but in our village we are the government. Nobody else will take decisions for us unless they're going through us and where the whole village assembly is involved. All the adults, male or female and, if possible even children, get involved in decision-making. And over a process of time they build the capacity of people who may have otherwise been marginalized, even within the community, to take part in decision-making. That's the political petal - is that democracy is not simply about going to elections once in five years and hoping that the party we elect will do the right thing for us. But it's really about us being decision-makers where we are about the most basic things that affect our lives - whether we're a village, whether we are an urban neighborhood, whether we are an educational institution, or an NGO, whatever, that all people who are part of these collectives will be part or should be part of decision-making. And we don't leave it just to government bureaucrats and politicians. So that's the political petal.
Now, we also find that you can actually have a village community which has both political local democracy and economic local democracy, but which is internally still very stratified, where it's still the, you know, the old men or the so-called upper castes who are taking all the decisions. So the third petal, equally important, is social transformation - social justice, equality, equity, non-discrimination, struggles against the kinds of injustices, traditional and new, inequalities that India has. If you take the same example of the Dalit women farmers, at the same time that they are creating food sovereignty and security, they're also fighting off casteism. They're also fighting off patriarchy. They're claiming an equal right to decision-making in society as a whole. And if you look at the transformations, they're much more than food. I would say that it's the dignity that they now have, which they never had earlier. It's the ability to hold their heads high and say what they need to say in the village community, which is the biggest, the deepest transformation that I can see there. And I've been following that example for the last 30 years. So that's the third sphere, or petal.
The fourth petal is culture and knowledge. So let's take another example of language. Now in India, we have something like 780 living languages, we probably lost 200-300 or more in the last few decades or centuries, but there's still almost 800. And each of these languages is a library of knowledge. So Professor Ganesh Devy, who conducted the survey called the People's Linguistic Survey of India, he was telling us that in the state of Himachal Pradesh alone, in the Himalaya, there are 230 different words for snow. Okay, so different words for different sizes of snowflakes, for how fast the snowflake melts, when in the winter, the snow is falling, etc. Each of those words hides knowledge about an aspect of winter. And he was saying, if we lose that knowledge, we have lost an enormous capacity to deal with climate change. But then I said, Okay, well, why would we lose the knowledge? And he said, because all across the schools in Himachal Pradesh, teaching happens only in Hindi, whereas there's half a dozen or a dozen languages in that state, right? So out of the 780 languages, teaching in the schools in India happens in only about 20 to 25 languages, which are the so-called constitutionally recognized languages, or, you know, they have much larger numbers than the others. Almost none of the Adivasi, the tribal languages, are actually officially recognized for teaching and education purposes, except where people have fought. So it means the significant change in education systems. And I'm only talking about language, but you can say the same thing about multiple knowledge systems, cuisines, food systems, songs, dance, art, etc, etc. So the struggles for reviving, sustaining, and giving pride and dignity to multiple knowledge and cultural systems is a fourth petal.
And the fifth one is ecological wisdom. Because you know, we can do all of this, but if our environment is destroyed, then we're all dead in the short term or the long run, right? So the ability to actually reinstate ourselves within nature, think of ourselves as being part of nature and not separate, which is what, again, all faiths and traditions have told us but somehow modernization has given us this thing that we are outside of nature, and also then saying that it's not just about human rights, but also the respect, dignity, and the rights of all species. And bringing that sense back through local community-led conservation, through the struggles for the rights of nature, through movements for putting ecology, environment at the center of economic decision-making, and not somewhere on the periphery, the movements for protecting landscapes and seascapes and ecosystems and species etc, etc. So all the five petals intersect in that moment for food sovereignty and dignity and justice so that those intersections are very crucial.
Alan Ware 29:21
Well, that reminds me of well, your work on a pluriverse, that there's a plurality of ways to create whatever the local group might want, in distinction to the universe of neoliberalist, hyper-consumption, strip malls, and certain types of consumption just being universalized. So the way of fighting that it's going to be very, very local context dependent. It can be totally homegrown or have some external element. And that does make it harder to talk about this in a way because there's so many different examples. Your brain tries to look for patterns. And I think you've been very good at finding some of those patterns for us. So thank you for that, because it can feel confusing.
Ashish Kothari 30:06
Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think if we look at I mean, here in India, one of those worldviews of transformation is what we're calling radical ecological democracy, which combines everything that I just spoke about - the flower of transformation, or Eco-Swaraj, Swaraj being a very old Indian concept of self-rule with responsibility for others and self-determination, which also enables other people's self-determination. And we have said Eco for us but that it also includes other species. But then there's somewhat similar notions all over the world. There's Sumak Kawsay and Buen Vivir and so on from Latin America, Ubuntu and so many other variants in Africa, Kyosai in Japan, [inaudible] in the native Northern American people, notion of country in Australian Aborigines, the reinterpretation of major religions, liberation theology, and within Christianity, socially-engaged Buddhism, etc. And, of course, then what's emerging also from the belly of the beast, the industrialized nations, the notions of degrowth, or ecofeminism, or ecosocialism.
So this is why we say it's a pluriverse, but what's very important for us is to say, Okay, while we respect the differences amongst all of these, and don't downplay them, let's see what are the commonalities, like you said the patterns. And what we find is the patterns are all of these will emphasize cooperation over competition. They will all emphasize the commons over private or privatization. They will all emphasize that it has to be a balance between the collective and the individual and not just individualistic nor only heavily collectivist. They will all emphasize the notions of interdependence with each other as human beings and with the rest of nature. They will all emphasize diversity as a fundamental value and not homogeneity. Right? So in that sense, actually positing 10, 15, 20 different ethics values, which are completely in contrast to what the dominant system is telling us, is what binds us together. And that's what we say is what could help create a critical mass for the macro changes that we want because, from all of these thousands of fantastic local initiatives at various scales, we finally need to be able to move to those macro global transformations in the economy and politics and so on. And it is through using these common threads of values and principles, connecting these different movements together, that we hopefully will be able to create that critical mass for macro change.
Nandita Bajaj 32:31
And one would have hoped that when the United Nations was established in 1945, that they would have modeled some of what you're talking about in terms of the pleura verse values, interdependence, plurality, commons over privatization, cooperation over competition. And interestingly, over the last several decades, the UN has very much started to channel the dominant neoliberal narrative that comes from these major power holders, in effect, the richest countries. Given all of these hurdles, do you see that nation states and international organizations like the UN have a constructive role to play in helping communities transition toward this radical ecological democracy that you're proposing? Or is it, is it a lost cause to think of that level of participation or cooperation coming from such powerful entities?
Ashish Kothari 33:31
I think that in the early phases of its existence, the United Nations with all the ideas that it was built around, did provide some very significant breakthroughs in international cooperation and some very significant global policy decisions and directions in the environmental field, for instance, agenda 21. And a whole bunch of agreements that came up around that time, or subsequent to that were very important, even for ground level movements to be able to say that, Look, this is what governments have agreed to, or, say, the UN Declaration on Human Rights. Though one of the critiques of that is that it was very individualistic, but nevertheless, for individual human rights, very important. And then subsequent to that the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and then the instrument which extended that to non-indigenous peasants and fisher communities and all of that. I'm just giving a few examples, but if you take this whole bunch of treaties, international agreements, cooperations together, that's an important, many important milestones, and tools that movements around the world can use even to pressurize their own governments against regressive policies and towards more progressive policies. So let me start with that. I don't want to ever underplay that.
But on the other hand, because the power in the United Nations is with nation states, that is to say, governments. From India, one person representing hundreds of different kinds of ethnicities and communities and languages and so on and so forth, just doesn't make sense. You know, however good that person might be, cannot possibly represent the incredible diversity of India. And you can say the same thing about so many other parts of the world. That's one problem. The second problem is that nation states in an era of economic globalization have always been at odds with each other. There's hostile competition. If, for instance, India wants to take a decision that is good for its environment, there's going to be somebody else, some other country in the world who's going to stand up and say you're violating our rights for free trade. So it's built in with WTO and all of that, and the United Nations has really not been able to do anything about this, because the human rights and environmental components of the UN have always been weaker than the international economic agreements. That has always been the case. If you look at sanctions. They're built into the economic agreements, but not into any of the environmental agreements, right? So if somebody violates the climate convention, for instance, as most of the industrial countries are doing, there is no sanctions. There's no possibility of any kind of sanctions against them. Or if what Israel is doing right now in Palestine, I mean, the UN is helpless, right? So it is, in that sense, there's a fundamental flaw in the structure in the architecture of the United Nations itself. And that flaw is that peoples of the world are not necessarily represented.
And that kind of asks this basic question of, Are nation states the right forum for decision-making for important things like say, the global commons, climate, seas, or peace, right? And I would say no. And if one is then extending the notion of radical democracy, one of the five petals of the flower of transformation, and adding with that the other petals, then you actually begin to see that political decision-making needs to happen hand in hand with the sustenance of ecological flows and cultural flows. Again, to take South Asia, the Indus River is divided into three countries. The Ganges into three or four countries. Now what we should be doing is to look at the whole Ganges and the Gangetic Plains or the Indus and its basin, or the rivers flowing in from China into India and becoming Brahmaputra as one ecological unit and cultural unit. There's also cultures that have been built around these rivers, right? Or you take Ladakh in the Tibetan Plateau. It's one big biological and bio-cultural region where nomadic pastoralists used to go back and forth. Wildlife used to go back and forth. Then China takes over Tibet, and a fence comes in between China and India or Tibet and Ladakh. And now, no such movement can take place, right?
So nation state boundaries have to also be questioned from the point of view of radical ecological democracy, ecological flows, cultural flows, etc. And to say, Well, if we want peace between India and Pakistan, or India and China, or India and Bangladesh, then we need to say that it's the local communities who understand those landscapes. These are the ones who actually should be in control over those areas with help, of course, from whoever needs to help them, and that they manage and govern through ecological principles. And if we do that, then from there to expand into saying, Okay, what would global governance look like? If it's not the United Nations, then what would it look like? And here, of course, it's not easy to give answers. There are a number of proposals, Abdullah Öcalan, the ideologue of the Kurdish Freedom Movement, one of the most neglected activist intellectuals in the world, unfortunately. You know, everybody quotes Marx, and Gandhi, and so on, but nobody quotes Abdullah Öcalan, but he's got some incredibly insightful writing, five thousand years of history, and all kinds of stuff. So Öcalan says, You go from that local self-governing unit of a Kurdish village or community to what he calls democratic confederalism over larger and larger landscapes, or what Gandhi called oceanic circles. So you create those larger landscape level connections, horizontal, not hierarchical. And you do that all the way all across the world. I think he calls it world democratic confederalism, where the peoples of the world are represented at global decision-making levels, with the ability of bringing that ground level flavor, and creating global solutions. Will it work? Who knows, I mean, but right now, it's not even possible to try it out. So but these are the kinds of proposals that people do have as an alternative to or in a way a reform of the UN system.
Alan Ware 39:13
That sounds quite based on a confederation of bioregions, right, ecologically coherent regions. That certainly has been around as a thought for decades, and makes a lot of sense. So you've worked with organizations, as we've been talking about in richer and poor countries, and richer and poorer localities, and we're wondering about some of the commonalities and differences you see in the goals and strategies of groups in richer or poorer settings, working for system transformation, social and ecological transformation. And how do you think they can best support each other or stay out of each other's way, both of those.
Ashish Kothari 39:53
This reminds me of a lecture of Ivan Illich, the writer Ivan Illich, the very wonderfully crazy Austrian philosopher, writer, thinker who lived most of his life, I think, in Mexico. Ivan Illich was called for a lecture in an American University, where the students are going to go to somewhere in Latin America to help local communities to develop, right. So that's the invitation he got, apparently. So when he went there, he said, You made a mistake in calling me because I actually don't think you should go. If your intention is to go and help these people, then please just stay back here. And then he spoke. He lectured for an hour and a half about how if you do want to do something worthwhile, then one is to look at your own lifestyle, and consumption and all of that and get out of the way of taking their ecological space. But the second is that, yeah go, but go with a spirit of humility, that you're also going to learn, and you have some things to impart to them, which is fine. But you're also going to learn that if you go like that, then sure, most welcome. I remember reading that many years back actually, and sort of laughing and being stimulated by that.
So with your question, in terms of differences, I think there's a very important difference between say the Global North and the Global South, the richer parts of the world and the poorer parts of the world, which is not geographic, which is also for instance, the rich in India, and of course, in Europe and the US and so on, and that the environmental or social or human rights movements in these two are very different. Because where you see in the richer parts of the world ecological movements, they are about actually dealing with the effects of overconsumption and overproduction and wrong trade, and saying, Okay, let's scale down, which is why degrowth, for instance, makes a lot of sense in Europe or many parts of Europe. And it makes a lot of sense even for maybe 5% of India's population. But in the poorer parts of the world, people are actually fighting environmental or social or human rights battles for sheer survival. They're saying, you know, our basic livelihoods are threatened. And even what we have is being taken away from us. So the struggles for survival, for identity, for livelihood security, for just saving the lands and forests and jobs and occupations and cultural identities and all of that is different from the ecological or rights struggles in the Global North. So that's very essential.
There's a second difference, which I think is becoming less now fortunately, which is that if you look at movements, like degrowth and so on, they are very material and physical. Let's scale down production. Let's scale down energy consumption. Let's scale down trade, etc. I think that's all great stuff. If you look at the struggles in the Global South, like the examples that I gave you, they are, of course, also about material survival, but they're also about spiritual connections with the earth. They're about the cultural and spiritual associations between human beings. So you get a more holistic, human, or life perspective in these compared to many of the movements in the Global North. As I said, I think that's beginning to become less so because I think people in the Global North are beginning to realize that one of the biggest problems is alienation from their own soul and their spirit, and of course, alienation from the rest of nature. And so there's attempts to try and change that, in many ways. So the biggest collaborations that can actually happen is to understand each other, to realize where we're coming from, not to undermine in any sense where people are coming from and what they're striving for, not to look down on each other in any way, but also to learn from each other. For instance, I think movements in India, which are trying to decolonize our knowledge systems, and our ways of living and so on, can actually help movements in Europe also to decolonize themselves.
Now, what do I mean by that? Two things. One, I think you may have read the recent report of the Truth Commission in Sweden, where the Sami indigenous people are making some really horrifying submissions of what the trauma that they have gone through over the last few centuries of being colonized by non-indigenous peoples in Sweden. So that's one decolonization. But the other is that, and this is what Gandhi said, wonderfully, I cannot possibly quote him, but essentially to say that those who are dominating somebody else are, in some senses, also limiting their own freedoms, because they can only think in a particular, very narrow sense. And it's the same if those American students and their colleagues thought that we are going to help the Latin American population to develop, they were so very limited in their own minds, that they were also not free. They had their own bounds and prisons in which their minds were. And so decolonizing the colonizers themselves and their minds is very much also part of what needs to happen in the Global North.
Nandita Bajaj 44:43
Those are two really helpful points. It makes me also wonder, you know, with a lot of the decolonization narratives right now, one thing to recognize is that there has been so many generations of whether it's neocolonialism through legal means through neoliberalism, or whether it's real colonialism. And so in some ways, the train left the station a long time ago, in a lot of the colonization has actually happened in the mindsets of the people in the world views. The global brainwash has created a very homogenous type of thinking across the world, you know, a middle class person in India and a middle class person in Canada could be interchangeable in the way they think. So how much of that real traditional knowledge of how a culture is sustained ecologically, and democratically and socially is still there? And how do we decolonize in the most authentic sense of the word, given that neoliberalism is the rule of law?
Ashish Kothari 45:53
Obviously, this is a huge challenge. We definitely have already lost a lot. I think if I see the work of the group Terralingua and others saying that the loss of languages is about as rapid as the loss of biodiversity I don't think we even have an idea of how much we've lost both in terms of biodiversity and in terms of knowledge systems and cultural diversity, languages and so on. I think the answer to this is not that we look for only the so-called pure traditional systems, or pure elements of diverse knowledge systems and cultures. Firstly, I don't even know what that would be because those are never been static. They've always been evolving and changing. You know there is this thing that traditional knowledge is static and modern knowledge is the only one that keeps evolving, which is of course not true. And I think if you look at a lot of the solutions that people are finding on the ground, is that they are doing what I would call hybrid systems.
If you look at these examples, all across the world of transformations, it's not that people are saying we will do only what our traditional systems were telling us, or only what my parents and grandparents have told us. I will continue that. I will learn from that. I will take the best of that. But there would be things possibly also in the modern systems that are useful for me, and I'll take those also. So the answer to your question, Nandita, is that can we create the possibilities of people, especially young people, coming up with these hybrid solutions in which they have pride in their traditions, but they're also open to innovations and new ideas and new technologies. And this could be in any field - manufacturing, services, crafts, agriculture, how does one do that in a way in which these people don't get swept away, in which the modern system simply doesn't sort of overpower them and submerge them, but also in a way, where in the traditional system, if there has been caste hierarchy, or gender hierarchy, they recognize that there's an issue there, and they also deal with that. That, I think, is the challenge. It's not really about sustaining the purity of tradition, but really creating the possibilities of this kind of transformations where people pick and choose, but they do it on the basis of values - of sustaining the earth, sustaining each other, sustaining cultures, etc.
Nandita Bajaj 48:17
That's a really wonderful response. And especially what you're saying is to not romanticize some of the traditional value systems, because as we do know, so many of the oppressive power hierarchies go long back much further back than just colonialism, like patriarchy. So it's a lot of like, transcending the worst and including the best and continuing on the march of greater and greater connection and collaboration. And within India, you've been a core part of Vikalp Sangam, or as you've called it, Alternative Confluences in English, which is a platform to bring together movements, groups, and individuals working on just, equitable, and sustainable pathways to human and ecological wellbeing. And late last year, the Alternatives Confluence released a People's Manifesto for a Just, Equitable, and Sustainable India. Could you describe some of what this manifesto contains?
Ashish Kothari 49:18
Yeah, so it's now actually almost about 90 organizations and movements that are part of the Vikalp Sangam process. And the idea really is that as we resist the dominant systems, we also visibilize and bring to the surface the radical alternatives that people are already practicing or want to practice and then, of course, what more needs to be done. So in the 'what more needs to be done', one of the ideas of Vikalp Sangam process is also to do advocacy. So if there is a shift to happen, for instance, towards small holder, small farmer, women-led agriculture, sustainable agriculture, or for instance, reviving the handloom, craft sector, etc, then we provide the examples of where that's already happening. But then we say we need the policy shifts in the government to make that happen much more to enable more such handloom weavers to come back into what they were doing or to sustain what they were doing, because right now they're swimming against the tide. They're paying almost the same tax that big industry has to pay, right, which makes absolutely no sense. And they are having to compete with mass manufactured goods which are obviously much cheaper because of the scale of production, etc. So the push is that if the government is really interested in small scale manufacturing, which it keeps claiming it is, and if it's really interested in creating jobs or sustaining jobs, which it claims it is, then it needs to shift policy towards favoring and creating subsidies or at least removing the hurdles away from handmade crafts. Same with sustainable agriculture, the same with local decentralized services, the same with decentralized renewable energy, whatever sector you're talking about, right?
So what we did was in 2019, we actually did a Manifesto for the Indian national elections, trying to convey to all political parties that in your manifestos and what you talk about, the debates that you have, these are crucial issues that you should bring up. At that point in time, we did that. Some parties actually did pick up what we had said. So we said, Okay, let's do that for 2024 also, in a context in which the situation has actually become worse. Democratic rights are much more under threat. Religious divisions and polarization have intensified. The attacks on civil society and democratic spaces is much more, etc. So we have a context which is actually, in some senses, much more serious. And so we did a renewed updated version of the 2019 Manifesto to produce this one.
Now, what the People's Manifesto 2024 basically has, it looks at every sector of society, micro-economy, macro- economy, social relationships, gender transformations, environment, agriculture, food, health, education, the whole gamut of sectors and says, What is it that the people's demand is? So for instance on, let's say, health, the Manifesto says that, firstly, a much more significant portion of the national budget should go into health, because it needs it. But also that health needs to shift towards much more community-led systems, towards having a diversity of medical and health systems, not just modern science, modern allopathy, but all the other traditional Indian systems also available in every clinic and hospital, to enable communities to empower themselves to take care of their own health. And this actually, incidentally, became very important. We did some documentation during the COVID pandemic. And we found that where community health systems were intact or could be built quickly, they were able to survive the COVID pandemic much better than when there was only dependence on the government sector or on the on the private sector, right. So, so this was a great learning for us. So the Manifesto builds on that learning and says this is what needs to happen in the health sector. Same with education.
When I said earlier that education, unfortunately, has become very much about brainwashing and homogenization and competition, is we've said that the education sector needs more budgets, but also quality transformations - in terms of what kind of learning and teaching, with whom, putting nature back into the classroom, or classrooms back into nature, and things like that. So these are just two examples. But I mean, we've done that for every sector. So that was brought out in December last year, and circulated, sent around. We hoped it would be picked up by parties. But I've looked at the manifestos of Congress and BJP, the two biggest parties. Congress seems to have picked up a few elements. But BJP, of course, has totally ignored it like last time. But it also then is a Manifesto, which is not meant only for these elections. It's meant to be used in any state context, local context. It's meant to be used by civil society to make changes in its own work, because a lot of civil society also does things in silos or in very narrowly defined ways. So it has multiple uses. And it has, of course, also been translated into about six or seven languages.
Alan Ware 54:06
So while it might not be picked up by parties at this point, you're seeing local organizations or other levels of institutions pick it up and promote it. That's good. And along with the Vikalp Sangam process in India, you're also part of a global process called the Global Tapestry of Alternatives. Could you describe some of that process and the goals of Global Tapestry?
Ashish Kothari 54:33
Yeah, so when the Vikalp Sangam process was a few years old, and having already worked on Eco-Swaraj, radical ecological democracy, etc. And then through all the work in the last few decades, having been increasingly in touch with movements in different parts of the world, resistance plus alternatives, I realized that we needed a global platform just like Vikalp Sangam was there for India. We needed something similar globally. Now, we have, of course, the World Social Forum, which for the last 20 years has at least made the slogan, 'Another World is Possible', much more popular. So when I first suggested this idea in 2016, interestingly at an International Degrowth Conference in Germany, the question that arose was, well, why not the World Social Forum? Why do you need a different platform for this? And the analysis that a lot of people who've been part of the World Social Forum actually gave us and that was my own understanding also, were that somewhere the World Social Forum itself has kind of ossified a bit. There's too much of control by one international council, which has a lot of old people from the early 2000s still in command, and they really were not focusing so much on radical alternatives, but continue to have a much stronger focus on resistance and critique, which of course is important. Now, since then the World Social Forum has been trying to reinvent itself, fortunately. But we realized then, after speaking to a lot of international networks and groups that we did need a forum for radical alternatives.
So which is why, after many years of talking in 2019, the Global Tapestry of Alternatives was launched. Now, we also wanted to learn from the mistakes that were made by previous, like the leftist internationalists, or the World Social Forum, or others to say that, Let's not make the mistake of making one big humongous international organization, which is hierarchical, where there's some sort of a central body of people who are taking all the decisions. But let's see whether we can actually create a horizontal networking and which is why we call it a tapestry, since a tapestry is woven together with hundreds of different cloths and pieces and threads. So that was a deliberately used symbolism to connect with more and more and more such groups.
Now what we did initially then was to connect with movements in Colombia, Mexico, Southeast Asia, and a few other parts of the world, which were similar to Vikalp Sangam, as they were already national or regional platforms, bringing together a lot of such movements and groups. So we have a general assembly, which consists of these national or regional networks. It also has what we call endorsers, or what 70, 80 global networks and platforms or regional networks and platforms that are endorsers - people from the commons moment, the solidarity economy movement, the ecofeminist movements, the youth movements, the indigenous self-determination movements coming together every three months to discuss, to collaborate, to learn from each other, to do joint actions, collective visioning, of what the world could look like, and challenging the system collectively and so on. So yeah, that's what the Global Tapestry is. It's got periodicals. It's got a global mapping process. It has intercultural dialogue processes. It has documentation of resilience and regeneration stories from around the world in times of crises, like stories from within the war zones or within the COVID pandemic, etc, and a whole bunch of other things.
Alan Ware 57:50
That’s a great use of internet technology to grow human potential possibilities, resistance with a fairly minimal footprint. You're not flying all over the world to share these things. And you've been promoting a radical ecological democracy for many years, and working against a growth-obsessed global capitalism that I'm sure you've seen just growing in those 45 years around the world. Given all those obstacles that you work with, you've stayed at it in the fight for greater ecological integrity and social justice. What keeps you going? What keeps you motivated to keep doing this work all these decades?
Ashish Kothari 58:28
Ok, I’ll have to give a slightly light response to that first, and then the more serious one. This time of the year comes with a lot of heat and sort of oppressive temperatures, but it also comes with mangoes. So, I mean, that's kind of semi-light or semi-serious also, in the sense that it's also pointing to the fact that despite everything we've done to the planet, and especially those of us who are rich and powerful, nature in some senses continues to provide, to inspire, to create the awe, the surprise. I mean, so much, right?
So I had this wonderful experience a few months back. I have a photograph of that which a colleague of mine took, and I wrote about it called 'Eternity in a Second'. And what happened was that I was down in Kerala in South India, very close to beautiful waterfall called Athirappilly, and there were these bonnet monkeys, macaques. Two or three baby monkeys were playing around, and watching baby monkeys play is like you can do it all day long. Watching them, we were laughing. And then one of them actually came and sat on a fence that we were walking along. And I was taking a picture or two, and then I noticed that it was looking at me with a lot of curiosity. And I know that actually looking straight into the eyes of monkeys is not a good thing to do. It's a sign of aggression. But nevertheless, I put my camera down and I just looked at it with what I hope was the softest possible look. It looked back at me. And then I don't know what happened to it. I just reached out my finger. And my friend who was there, she said be careful, it might scratch you and the mother was also behind. But the baby actually reached down, smelt my finger and then went back straight up and reached across and touched me with its finger for a split second. Okay, so my friend was fast enough to take a picture of that, of us kind of touching like this. And for me, that one split second encounter with another species was eternity in a second. All of evolution, all of the kinship of life, all of what we share as living beings on this planet, everything came together. And, of course, I've had a few other such moments. So one thing that keeps me going, to put it in a short way with this long story, is nature itself.
The second thing that keeps me going is communities on the ground, who despite the most intense struggles, who despite being on the margins, like I was saying, who despite being displaced and dispossessed by the state, or by capitalist corporations, are actually still welcoming us into their homes, feeding us, occasionally joking with us, joking with each other, and keeping their own lives going and their hopes alive. Now when I say that, if in those desperate situations, people still have hope and are doing fantastic things, then me with all my privileges, what right do I have to give up for? So I think, really, these are the two things kind of after 45, 50 years of working and knowing how desperate a situation it is, still keep me going. But I think there's still a lot of hope and inspiration in the world.
Nandita Bajaj 1:01:30
Well, that's a really beautiful answer. Ashish, it's been such a privilege to have you with us today. Your work in advancing radical ecological democracy, and also just looking so deeply with so much nuance at the different parts of transformation that are needed to achieve that goal. It really seems like some of the most essential work that needs to be done today. So we really appreciate you sticking with this work for so many decades, and leading the effort in bringing so many different groups together. Thank you for your incredible work.
Alan Ware 1:02:07
Yeah, I would just echo that. This is some of the most important work that needs to be done to connect all the resistance and the alternative possibilities. And if we don't talk to each other and network with each other, well, it's a lot harder to imagine globally, there really becoming alternatives that can be effective. So thank you so much for the all that work you've done and teaching us today. There's so much we learned.
Ashish Kothari 1:02:34
Thank you, Nandita. Thanks a lot, Alan. Every time I have this conversation, I think I kind of learned something new, also for myself. Everything that's in the head and the brain and the soul and the spirit kind of gets recharged. So thank you for those questions also.
Alan Ware 1:02:47
That's all for this edition of the Overpopulation Podcast. Visit populationbalance.org to learn more. To share feedback or guest recommendations write to us using the contact form on our site, or by emailing us at podcast at populationbalance.org. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform and share it widely. And we couldn't do this work without the support of listeners like you and hope that you'll consider a one-time or a recurring donation.
Nandita Bajaj 1:03:17
Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj thanking you for your interest in our work and for your efforts and helping us all shrink toward abundance.
