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| IIC NATURE GROUP NEWSLETTER | JUNE 2008/MONTHLY/No. 1 | |
Home MAIN ARTICLE 'The Role of Leadership in Environment Protection'
Thank you very much, Dr. Karan Singh, President of Indian Council for Cultural Relations, the Director-General of ICCR, Board Members, Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen. It is a great honour and privilege for me to be here with you tonight and it has been such a great experience for me to be here in India during these two last days. I am happy to be here today, therefore, to join in remembering and honouring the memories of one of the great visionary leaders of India and the world–Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad. The last few days have been very inspiring and very exciting because I have been touching and reflecting on the lives of two of the great leaders of the last century– Jawaharlal Nehru and Maulana Kalam Azad. Because both of them were people who were very much involved in shaping the destiny of India, and in many ways of Africa, because they inspired many of our leaders. At a time when they were making great progress here in India, our people were just beginning to wonder how they could ever deal with the mighty British empire. Sharing private moments with Sonia Gandhi and giving both the Rajiv Gandhi and Maulana Azad memorial lectures is like taking a magical path in the great Indian modern history. I have been very, very inspired. Looking into the life and times of Maulana Azad is like peeping into the trials and tribulations of a man who chose to play his part when destiny found him and thrust him on to the stage at a very important time in the history of India and the whole colonised world. When the Norwegian Nobel committee gave the prize to the environment and to me in particular, some people were aghast and asked, ‘What is the relationship between trees and peace?' And often I have thought that perhaps the question they should have asked is, what is the connection between peace and the resources, because the tree for us is a symbol of the resources we have on this planet and we were trying to draw attention to the fact that we need to manage these resources responsibly. The link between sustainable management of resources, good governance, justice, equity and peace is what the Norwegian Nobel committee was trying to draw attention to for the world. The committee wanted to challenge the world to redefine the concept of peace and security and to include in that concept the idea that we cannot have peace in the world if we do not manage our resources sustainably, responsibly, accountably, and if we do not share them more equitably. This was new. Perhaps not completely new, but to put sustainable management of resources, governance, equity and peace together was definitely new. And this is the message that the Norwegian Nobel committee wanted to send to the world. In order for us to be able to manage these resources that way we need a governance system that is democratic, that is responsive to the people, inclusive, one that allows the voice of the minority to be heard--even though in a democratic process the voice of the majority will still have its way. We need a governance system that respects human rights and the rule of law and that deliberately and consciously promotes equity. It is not possible to have peace in the world if a large number of people live in abject poverty and others live in wealth. It is not possible to have peace in the world if we ignore the voices of the minorities. We all know about conflicts in the world and I know if you can think of when, at any one time beyond the issues of religion, the issues of politics, the issues of ethnicity, you will find that the new reason why there is a conflict is because there is a scrabble for the access and control of resources. It may be water, it may be grazing ground; these are very common in my part of the world. It may be minerals, also very common in my part of the world, it may be land. People who feel injustice, who feel excluded and oppressed, instigate conflicts and wars. This is their way of seeking justice using the means that are available to them. Some of them may choose violence, others like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King may choose non-violent means. But they are all seeking justice and equity. Since the beginning of the Norwegian Nobel committee some 100 years ago the committee first honoured humanitarians who would go to the battlefield, collect bodies of the dead soldiers and bury them with respect. Or take those who were wounded and attend to them. Later on they expanded that concept and started honouring those who brought fighting parties to the table so that they could have dialogue. Much later they looked at the issue of human rights and they saw and recognised that you cannot have peace if you do not respect human rights and practice the rule of law. And than in the year 2004 they made that historic decision to say to the world that you cannot have peace if you do not have justice and equity. Therefore if we manage resources sustainably and share them more equitably, we are more likely to pre-empt the root causes of conflict and wars. Now the green belt movement, when it first started, it was inspired by the United Nations conference that was to be in Mexico in 1975. Many of you will be too young to remember but in 1975 the very first women’s conference was organised by the United Nations and it was that conference that made or pronounced the first Women’s Decade. Ten years later we went to Nairobi and we came up with a Nairobi Strategic Plan for the women. Ten years later we went to Beijing. And by then we thought we had it all together so we haven’t met again. I don’t know if we feel if we have succeeded. But during that conference there was a lot of preparation by women all over the world and in Kenya we were preparing under the leadership of the National Council of Women of Kenya. And we would come together as women from different sectors and ask ourselves, what are the issues that we shall take to Mexico? I had gone there as a member of the Kenya Association of University Women because I wanted to raise the issue of women members of the academic staff in the University of Nairobi because we were being discriminated against. So that was my issue and I was ready to go to Mexico to get support from other women. But when I went to this forum and I listened to the women from the countryside, they were not talking about academic terms of service. They were talking about real issues of survival. They were saying that they need clean drinking water, they need firewood which is the main source of energy, they need good, adequate, nutritious food and they need an income. When I listened to the women, some of whom came from the same countryside, I grew up in–this I have described in the memoirs that Dr. Singh mentioned–-I thought something has happened. And indeed what had happened is that in a span of about 20 years a lot of vegetation that I knew had been cleared to bring in cash crops, especially coffee, tea, but also plantation of exotic species, especially the eucalyptus from Australia and the pines from the Northern Hemisphere. Indigenous forests were being cleared and cut to make way for these plantations. As a result many of the streams and rivers I knew as a child were drying up, and the rain patterns were changing and there was massive soil erosion. So the clean water that I knew as a child, the clean streams in which I used to play with frog eggs and tadpoles were gone, and that for me was the awakening experience that was to put me on the path of what would eventually become the Green belt movement. I told the women that listening to them I recognised that our environment is changing and I think we can do something about it. I said, let us plant trees. They said they didn’t know how to plant trees. They were just peasant women. They are not foresters. I told I am not a forester either. We can together learn from the foresters. So we approached the foresters and the foresters taught us how to plant trees. The women didn’t have any education on forestry, they didn’t have diplomas in forestry, but eventually they were very successful and they planted trees that to my eyes looked exactly like the trees foresters plant. So I decided that they deserved to be called foresters. We popularised them to make them feel good about themselves. We called them foresters without diplomas. Initially the green belt movement didn’t have a human rights angle or a political angle or a democratic angle, you would say. We started to plant trees for the sake of trees, to meet the felt needs of women that we are participating in that forum and none of whom went to Mexico actually. But it was later that we realised that what we were doing was trying to rehabilitate an environment that had been destroyed. But as we were trying to plant trees we recognised that part of the reason why our environment had degraded was that it had been mismanaged, and we wanted to know who was mismanaging the environment. And that’s when trouble started because we took a turn and started looking at the root cause of the environmental degradation we were dealing with. We recognised that quite often it was the mismanagement of the resources, especially forests of the people, by the government in power. And so in trying to understand the role that governments play in protecting or in damaging the environment, we gave ourselves what we called civic and environmental education. To teach ourselves how we govern ourselves and why we govern ourselves that way–and then take action to try to rectify the way we governed ourselves. And that is when the government started saying that we could continue planting trees, but we should not engage in civic and environmental education. But civic and environmental education was important because if you do not understand how the forests are destroyed, if you do not understand governance, than you are just going to try to undo the damage but you can never get to the root cause of the problem. So we started educating ourselves, and we recognised that the government was part and parcel of the destruction and so we started educating ourselves on the fact that it is very important that citizens become aware of the fact that resources, common resources like forests, like soil, like land, like air, these are common resources that we all need, and also resources that will be needed by the future generations. And therefore these resources don’t belong to the government. The government is a custodian of these resources and the government has a moral responsibility to protect these commons for all of us and also for the future generations. Now any government that doesn’t do that does not deserve to be in the government and should be voted out. And that’s exactly what we were teaching. Now it wasn’t bad but the government didn’t like it! Eventually we were able to mobilise public opinion to appreciate the role that citizen’s play and the fact that you have to hold governments accountable for these commons. Otherwise we shall leave deserts for our future generations and they would wonder what we were doing here if we could not think of them. So eventually we were able, after almost fifteen years, to participate very actively and also to bring the opposition which had been fragmented before, we were able to bring those fragments together, and in the year 2002 we finally managed to get rid of the government that we thought was very responsible for the destruction of the commons, especially the forests. I also want to make a connection that sometimes it is necessary for us to make, to see that how sometimes governments can be doing one thing, they think they are doing the right thing, but they are actually precipitating crises down the road. Forests are source of rivers. In my country at least the major source of energy is hydropower and we get that energy from the major rivers, and there are very few major rivers in our country. The largest comes from the tributaries from Mt. Kenya. For those of you who know Kenya well, that’s the largest river. And across that river we have built several hydropower dams. Now those dams were intended to last for about 50 yrs. They are almost now unable to meet our demand because they have become very silted. Now, where is the siltation coming from? From the land, from the forests. And why are we getting siltation? Because trees are being cut and because we have planted the wrong types of trees in catchment areas–trees that do not allow water to percolate into the ground to feed rivers continuously throughout the year. Instead when it rains, as Dr. Singh said, the water flows downstream as fast as it can, and along with it goes the topsoil which then is deposited in the dams, which you have borrowed money from the World Bank to create--those dams--and so you continue paying debts to the World Bank but you are not getting the services from the dams because you are doing some very unwise things upstream. So eventually we did manage to get rid of that government in 2002 and I was very fortunate and privileged to find myself right in the middle of the government as the deputy minister for environment. Now we continue to struggle because we still need to rehabilitate many of the degraded areas, especially those forests. And in fact we have several programs going on as we speak. The challenges are too large, and new ones are coming. As you know one of the major ones that we are thinking about at the moment is climate change, and as Dr. Singh mentioned already, we are seeing the results of what is happening. Suddenly with our own naked eyes we have seen drying rivers, drying streams because the snow and ice on Mt. Kenya and Mt. Kilimanjaro is melting . The rainfall patterns change. When rainfall patterns change crop failure will follow, especially when farmers are very dependent on rainfall. And you know what happens when crop failure comes? Your people starve. And I’m sure occasionally you do hear of cases, especially in our part of the world where people are suffering. It is not because they are not hardworking. It is because the climate has changed, rainfall has failed.We also have genetically modified organisms. We are constantly being encouraged to change our eating habits, to change our crops and we are constantly losing the indigenous food crops that we used to have and which were more adapted to the climate that we live in. It is partly to raise awareness on the issues such as these that we recently launched the billion tree campaign, where we launched UNEP (United Nations Environment Program) and ECRAFT, which is an international research institute based in Nairobi. We also campaigned to plant one billion trees. And as I said last night, that actually if I was a very successful campaigner I wouldn’t have to go anywhere else because India alone can produce one billion trees overnight. Are you going to plant those trees or not? That (pointing to a photo of the Kadamb tree which Dr. Maathai planted in the IIC--Ed.) is one of the billion trees campaign the one that we just planted. But this campaign, I want to give you the website link. I like to give people the website link because I know that you just might encourage children, school children, schools, organisations to plant trees and register in the website. You can access it through the green belt movement–www.greenbeltmovement.org, or you can approach it through http://www.unep.org/billiontreecampain, and it would be very good if you were to plant a tree, even if it is one tree, do register. So the last time when I was in Nairobi which is about a week ago, we planted six hundred million, over six hundred million trees had been pledged. So I am quite confident that we shall have a billion trees pledged before the end of the year. The challenge is, will they be planted? So I am really asking everybody, wherever I go, to not only pledge but plant. And don’t only plant, make sure that tree survives. Because that’s much more important. Better to plant one and make it survive than plant ten and it doesn’t survive. And as I said yesterday, I listened to discover that everyone of us needs ten trees for the carbon-dioxide you exhale. You exhale carbon-dioxide every minute of your life. So what is happening to that carbon-dioxide? You need ten trees to take care of it. So I like to encourage people to plant their own trees because otherwise they are using other people’s trees to take care of their carbon-dioxide. And it is partly because of this concern for climate change that we have also, I have also decided, not decided but accepted, to be a goodwill ambassador for the Congo forest ecosystem. And I did mention yesterday, and I want to repeat, because some of you may not have been there but we are very concerned about three major forests that we have along the tropics. The Amazon forest ecosystem in Brazil, which is mainly in Brazil but many other countries are also involved in S. America; also the Congo forest ecosystem. The Congo forest ecosystem is extremely important for Africa because you know we have two deserts in Africa--the Kalahari desert to the south and the Sahara desert to the north. And in between the saviour is the Congo forest ecosystem. Without that forest the two deserts will merge and that definitely will be the end of that region. So we are very, very concerned about protecting it. And we had the fortune in 2005 of having ten governments whose countries are in that ecosystem agreeing that they want to save it. And they are the ones who asked me to be goodwill ambassador, and I have been goodwill ambassador and I want to share with you some very good news while we are here. I think it was yesterday the British government pledged fifty million dollars, oh no, fifty million pounds, that’s about a hundred million dollars, to the kitty to support that initiative and I think that is highly commendable and I am hoping that other governments will also come forward and help to support these ten governments so that we can save these forests. The other forest that we are very concerned about is the forest in south-east Asia and the face of the south-east Asia forest is the Borneo forest. What they are now calling the Hat of Borneo, just to make it a little more cushy so that people can know that there is a hat of Borneo. How do you save this south-east Asia forest? Extremely beautiful forest, I visited the forest recently, it is extremely beautiful, extremely important especially for climate change, but very threatened. Not so much in Brunei, which is the country I was visiting, but in the other neighbouring countries. But there is a goodwill among their governments around, especially Indonesia and Malaysia to protect this very, very important forest in this part of the world. Now forests are very, very important. I don’t need to dwell on it. I know all of us know the services we get from forests. But we also know that everywhere in the world forests are under pressure because people see forests as resources to be exploited. There are many people who go into the forest and all they see is timber. Others go into the forests and all they see are skins of animals or pets that they would like to catch. Others go into the forests and they see other resources that are extremely valuable like medicine, that’s all they are looking after. But these are not resources that should be exploited because these forests have a very special ecosystem and they cannot be replaced by exotic plantations. As I said last night, exotic plantations of pines or eucalyptus are not forests. People call them forests because they think forests are trees. There is much more to the forests than the tree. Trees are what we see but there is much more we may not even see, and certainly much more we still don’t know in those forests. So we need to really be very concerned, especially about indigenous forests. We also need to be concerned because without those forests we will not have water. Our rivers will stop flowing. And that will be the day when water will become a commodity that is privatised by a few international corporations. At the moment I can tell you that in Nairobi if you want to buy bottled water, you pay more than you pay for coca cola. Now that says something. So water is a very, very important resource, and as I said yesterday, it is most likely that water will be the first resource wars will be fought over. As some people want to privatise, others want to get into the forests and privatise the forests, others want to just make sure that they have control of clean drinking water. One of the ways that communities conserve their bio-diversity and their resources is through culture, and I want to mention that because I am a guest of Indian Council for Cultural Relations, and I want to emphasize that for me, culture is extremely important and I know you as people of India you understand that, probably more than anybody else because as Dr. Singh was saying, you are people with a very, very ancient culture that has spread to many, many parts of the world and has enriched humanity in very many ways; in more ways than just the food. Many people just think of food but there is much more to Indian culture than food, than curry, I know that. And I want to say that culture influences who we are, and who we are is influenced by our environment. India is what it is because of the environment that you people found here when you found yourselves in this part of the world. And people sometimes tend to forget that we are, that culture is coded wisdom. The language has a lot of history, a lot of wisdom, a lot of who you are. Can you imagine if somebody removed your language from you? The only people who understand the value of language are colonial masters. They really understand fully the value of languages, because the first thing they would strip you of when they colonise you is your language. It is an extremely important part of culture. Because it is the vehicle through which wisdom, experiences of few of past generations is carried forward to the future generations. The minute you deny people their language, you quite effectively cut them off, it is like an umbilical cord–-you cut it, and you can very positively be sure that the past is lost. And that is part of the tragedy of our continent. And for me at least it is extremely inspiring when I think of Indian culture, because of the way you have been able, despite the fact that the British came here they were unable to crack that nut, and it is perhaps because you understood the value of culture. And language is an essential part of that culture. Other aspects of culture are clothing, festivals and rituals. Look at this--these are part of the rituals. These are part of the ceremonies. You would probably not relate to what I am saying if you didn’t have these gods in front of you. And only you understand the value. And can you imagine how much we conserve because we incorporated some of those resources into our culture, into our festivals, into our rituals? We also forget who we are. And quite often when we forget who we are, we lose all the wonderful values that we have brought with us from the past generations. In the book Unbowed, I explained, for example that when I was a little girl and I would go collecting firewood for my mother, she once told me do not collect firewood from a fig tree. I must have collected firewood from one or she would not have warned me, but I asked her why, and she said that is a tree of god–we don’t cut it, we don’t burn it and we don’t use it for building. It must stand there. When we want to offer sacrifices, we go and do it under a fig tree. So for my people a fig tree was a sacred tree. And for that reason, when we were growing up, fig trees were everywhere. But then we were Christianised and we were taught that god doesn’t live near those trees and in fact we also believed that god lives on Mt. Kenya. We were told, no, god is not on Mt. Kenya. We said where is god–he is in heaven. Well, I have been looking for heaven, I haven’t seen it. So it is probably true that god lives on Mt. Kenya.Later on, actually when I was studying religion–-I am a Catholic-–I learnt that god is omnipresent, which means he is everywhere. So than I was at peace. I said, oh okay, if he everywhere, he is probably also on Mt. Kenya. So we have not lost. And he is probably also on trees. But I want to emphasize that this aspect of our culture, this wisdom that is coded in the way we lived is one of the reasons that the traditional societies and other societies like yours which have appreciated this part of your culture, have not been able to lose a lot of their bio-diversity. But those that have, whose culture has been completely destroyed, they have lost a lot of their bio-diversity, because to them that bio-diversity was translated into resources that needed to be exploited, to be converted into money. But you know in life, everything is not money. Sometimes the most valuable things cannot be translated into cash. And that to me is the kind of wisdom you can only find in culture. We are very much part of our environment; the environment shapes us and we shape it. Now I want to conclude, I am sure my time is over, I want to conclude but I want to conclude with a story that I heard, maybe it is about a year ago or so. But those of you who follow the NASA expeditions, you may remember that about a year ago or so there was a chartered Discovery that went into space, it was commandeered by a woman called Irene Couris, and they went up there and we were all excited; I was following the course, I find those expeditions very exciting. Now when the astronauts came back they had a press conference and Irene said that while they were coming back to earth–and of course when they come back you know they look at what is happening to our little planet–and they said that one of the observations they made was that there was a lot of dust, there was thick blanket of dust over Africa. Now I don’t know what other issues they found, for me, I kind of got stuck there, when they talked about the blanket of dust over Africa, and they said that they noticed that there was a lot of open ground, a lot of de-vegetation, a lot of logging of the forests, and especially the Congo forest in Africa. They noticed that many rivers were brown with silt. I talked about silt earlier. And they were very touched by that because they felt that the continent was being swallowed by the desert and that the dust was due to the exposed land. Now she asked a question and I felt like she was asking me. She said, why do they do these things? That is, why are we logging our forests? Why are we removing vegetation from the land? Why are we allowing our soil to disappear into the rivers? Why are we allowing the Sahara and the Kalahari desert to swallow our land? And because I have been telling people in Africa especially that the Kalahari desert and the Sahara desert start from where they are. When you cut a tree, when you remove vegetation from the land, you are creating a micro Kalahari and a micro Sahara. And one day these micro deserts would eventually spread, and when they do, they will swallow the entire land. So when she said, why do they do these things, I keep asking myself, so why, why do we do these things in Africa? And I then ask myself, why do they do these things in many other parts of the world? In Borneo, I told you, I saw a lot of logging of the forest. When I went to Japan, I was trying to send the message–is it possible to consume less? Even when you can buy, is it possible to control consumption? Is it possible to recycle? And I didn’t bring my recycled piece of cloth today but I showed it yesterday, a recycled piece of cloth which the Japanese are doing as part of that recycling. Because I told them, now you know the Japanese, they use a lot of chopsticks and Japan is one of the best covered countries. I think if I remember right, between 65-68% of the country is covered by vegetation. And the rivers are so clean, I couldn’t believe it, when I was entering Narita in Tokyo, I saw a river and I couldn’t tell where the river starts and where the sea starts. Because it was so clean. At home you can’t tell the river into the sea because of the silt. So I was very impressed. And I asked them, that’s how they were telling me that the rivers are very well protected, the hills are very well protected. But so I wanted to know, so where do you get your chopsticks from? We must expand our concept of the environment and not just worry about our own country but also worry about other countries where the resources we are using at home are leaving deserts. The Congo forest is being logged. Some of the people whose home is the Congo forest are the pygmies who are hunters and gatherers. I can assure you that the logging in the Congo forest is not being done by the pygmies. It is being done by very rich international corporations which are transporting those timber and paying virtually nothing because they get them as primary wood. So we must expand our concept of home to make sure that we see beyond our individual countries and see that, like the astronauts told us. The very first astronauts who went to the moon, when they came back they told us that they were overwhelmed by the fact that when they were out there, they could not see even their own individual countries. That they could not see the boundaries. And that they felt a strong urge to come back home and home was that small ball, blue ball that we have now become familiar with on television. So home is not just within the borders. Home can be that ball, home can be that whole planet so that it becomes our concern wherever we are and whoever we are. And there are very many things that we can’t do but certainly everyone of us can find some little things you can do in your life. You can recycle, you can use less, you can consume less. I guess your cars are not as bad as some of our cars. I haven’t felt any fumes in Delhi. It is probably because Delhi is so green and such a beautiful city, has trees, maybe its those trees, they are the ones keeping Delhi very clean despite the traffic. But there are very many little things that we can do to remind ourselves that this is home, it is the only home, and we definitely want it to be a clean and healthy home, also for our future generations. I want to thank you very much for the opportunity to come and talk to you, and I want to urge you, at least plant your ten trees for your carbon-dioxide. Thank you very much. A Thought |
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