Ravi Agarwal

Global Multispecies Justice Symposium: The moral, legal & political status of humans, animals and the environment
University of Sydney — 17/18 June 2019

The ecological crisis has many dimensions that are not encapsulated in the anthropogenic interpretation of ‘environment’.

This perspective has also been the lens through which human impacts on the non-human (or nature) have been addressed in post-industrial times. Also, its manner of usage in policy and legal processes suggests that there is a power structure within which this term operates, relegating the most vulnerable and the non-human animals to its lowest rungs.

I argue here that the ‘environment’ should be considered as a foundational and inclusive space for all humans and non-humans, and the systems of justice should be established according to this understanding and shift of perspectives.

1. The term ‘Environment’ as valued in policy and law is human-centric and often selectively so.

Over the years, I have been involved in environmental work, ranging from policy, on-the-ground interventions and working with ideas of nature as an artist and curator.

In India and in other countries, the legal and policy-making processes related to the protection of the environment recognize only some of the harm being caused by human activities, such as to distinct aspects of ecosystems like air, water or soil, but do not recognize a non-anthropogenic position or agency.

At the policy table often are institutional stakeholders, natural scientists, engineers, bureaucrats, industry representatives, etc. Labour, including the ‘informal sector’ — which incidentally constitutes the bulk of economic activity in the country — is unrepresented and the non-human view largely absent (unless it has been classified as a keystone species). Social scientists are frequently absent too.

As part of my formal environmental engagements, I have participated in numerous processes to lay down environmental standards, draw up national environmental policies or help write legal texts which constitute environmental laws.

My training as an engineer and being part of an environmental not-for-profit organization have facilitated a place at the table as an ‘environmentalist,’ where the world of natural science, technology, forensic evidence, wrapped in an invisible sphere of lobbyists, investors and private interests, is king.

In the discussions, there are glaring omissions. For example, pollution is defined by its impact solely on human health and not on non-humans or ecosystems. The values which are attributed to the environment have been reduced to those which are directly measurable and quantifiable. The formal legal processes of regulation or compliance to such norms and laws decide what is just or unjust.

The parallel worlds I inhabit, categorized as ‘artist’ and ‘environmentalist,’ exist but do not necessarily converse with each other, even though they may be speaking of the same ‘landscapes.’

2. Lived environments are inhabited by humans and non-humans in multiple and complex ways encompassing social, political and economic dimensions.

In my engagements as an artist, I am confronted with everyday relationships of people with nature, especially those who live in it, and may be considered as the most vulnerable.

It is apparent that these relationships are not captured by the terminology of ‘environment,’ as it is used, and need a broader understanding of lived everyday experiences, where inclusions and exclusions from nature form a basic underpinning.

There is an unstated hierarchy of impacts which environmental laws and norms serve. Hence air pollution became an issue in India after the capital city of Delhi became unbearably polluted for its middle-class citizens, even though poor women had been bearing its impact in smoky kitchens for decades.

The conditions of the most vulnerable and their connection to the natural world are not fully acknowledged or factored in. When working with the anthropologist Jan Breman, photographing the migrancy of labour from the village to the city, I better understood the powerlessness of the economically poor, and their lack of ability to participate in formal political processes.

The multiple dimensions of exclusions of those whose lives were invisible became clearer to me, through their landlessness, or separations caused by caste and gender.

There were other insights, such as the fact that there are those more privileged even amongst those on the economic and political margins. I saw the camps of those trying to enter the city for a livelihood. People who came into the city could do so owing to kinship or patron relationships, and had access to learning some basic skill to survive in a competitive urban setting.

It seemed that the systems of justice or of the political state were far away, inaccessible or just not designed to reach them.

3. Existing systems of ameliorating environmental harm often cause adverse consequences owing to their limited and anthropogenic approach

Increased marginalizations of the vulnerable

Environmental laws, in fact, can marginalize the vulnerable even more. I saw this when photographing the forgotten river in the megapolis of Delhi. Polluted, uncared for, yet a site for all the city did not want — junk and the poor.

In one case over 100,000 such inhabitants were evicted from the river bank in the course of a few days, owing to a High Court order. The order was based on a governmental affidavit which claimed that these people were the cause of the pollution in the river. It begged the question — if people do not have water to drink, how do they create sewage?

There are similar cases where forest laws have been used to evict indigenous people from forests.

Displacements owing to new urbanizations

There are farming villages which grow marigold flowers on the fertile, flood-silted banks of the river Yamuna. The river is also a site for everyday ritualistic celebration of the mother goddess Yamuna, by those who relate to its waters as holy and sacred — despite its material blackness.

The marigold horticulture is carried out without fertilizer or pesticides as community farming which engages the women of the village.

Today, as real estate becomes increasingly scarce in the 15-million-peopled city, there are plans to urbanize this land in ‘sustainable ways’ and shrink the places for worship.

It is strange that what seems already sustainable is being changed in the name of ‘sustainability’. The fertility of capital is more than the fertility of land.

Differential technology access

In my work with fishers in South India, I have observed a hierarchy within even the same community. There are those fishers who had some capital to pool in as groups and tie in with local businesses to upgrade their fishing vessels.

This translated into a bigger engine, bigger boats (which carried up to four fishers), bigger nets and an ability to go out further into the sea, from an earlier 2 km to 20 km, which resulted in bigger fish catches.

The solo traditional fishers, with their paddle boats, came home with smaller and smaller fish catches each day, as fewer fish were available closer to the shore. They were slowly moving away from fishing to other supplemental jobs.

As the beach was being taken over by tourism and new inns and hotels came up, these fishers were engaging with housekeeping and cleaning. Many had sent their sons to vocational schools to turn them away from fishing. For them, a generations-old livelihood was at its end.

Along with them will disappear the deep knowledge they had of fish, their spawning, an ability to read the sea, and the reverence they held the waters in. It was the slow disappearance of an ecosystem’s understanding, rooted in livelihood, culture, mythology and language.

Non-Human Impacts — The decimation of the vulture

Since what is polluted or toxic is largely seen from an anthropogenic viewpoint, when it comes to non-human animals the effects can be even more disastrous, for they are largely invisible.

Of the 100,000 chemicals available, many of them have not been tested for human impacts, but almost none of them are even required to be tested for non-human impacts since these are even lower down the hierarchy of concern.

Even half a century after Rachel Carson’s dire warnings, the ecosystem impacts are not studied enough or adequately brought into normative standards.

As an example is the recent near-decimation of the South Asian Vulture. From a thriving population of over 40 million in the 1980s, it had shrunk to less than 1% of its size by the early 2000s.

In twenty years, the vulture, which had remained unchanged over eons of evolution, besides being mentioned in the ancient Hindu epic of the Ramayana or adorning Cleopatra’s crown, had been rendered almost extinct.

A popular painkiller, Diclofenac, had caused this. When given to livestock to reduce its pain owing to excessive milking, it destroyed the vulture’s kidneys when it fed on their carcasses. Behind this were the procedures which allowed new chemicals and drugs to be introduced in the market.

River management and fish migration

A species of fish called Hilsa, which routinely migrated from the lower estuaries of the Ganga upstream to its Himalayan origin to spawn, cannot do so anymore. The hydroelectric dams and barrages built on the river stop such migrations, since they have not been considered when engineering the river.

The recent questions regarding what an ecological flow in a river should be is another example of the invisibility of non-human animals and ecosystems.

As is well known, rivers which are the foundations of life support ecosystems for a myriad of biodiversity, but have been considered as mere water channels — where water is a human resource.

When the contentious issue of how much water can be extracted from the river, or what should a minimum water flow be, comes up, it cannot be answered with little knowledge of what life it is that the river supports.

4. The situation needs to be rectified and needs actions in multiple spheres

The idea of the ‘environment’ needs to become more interdisciplinary to help shape policy and legal frameworks

To introduce the non-human into environmental policy, norms and law needs a basic shift in how the non-human is considered.

Are scientists, both natural and social, asking the questions which current policy needs answers to? In this task, research can play a fundamental and determinant role.

It may be important to show the interdependence and injustice through research by identifying those questions which can help such shifts.

A more foundational approach may be needed

The way humans inhabit the ecosphere needs to be expanded both by rethinking what the ecosphere is, as well as what the human in it is. Shifts on both sides of the relationship are needed.

Relationships with ‘nature’ are multidimensional. The ecological crisis is a result of these relationships being reduced to a binary. I suggest that the real crisis is here.

To reformulate this relationship, both the idea of the ‘self’ as well as of ‘nature’ needs to be expanded.

To understand these relationships better, as they have and even now exist, one needs to grasp the holistic ways in which nature is inhabited by those who are dependent directly on it and are the most vulnerable today.

By helping preserve ecosystems of biology, culture and livelihoods on the ground, we can also help cohabit with the myriad of life around us.

The human-nonhuman relationship is not a fixed one or singular. While the non-human as a category called ‘nature’ has of late been contested by eco-philosophers like Timothy Morton, the human also needs to be questioned and expanded.

What constitutes the boundaries of the ‘self’ and how is the idea of ‘self’ internalized?

Akeel Bilgrami cites both Gandhi and Marx as those who spoke of the non-alienated self, albeit in very different ways. Marx speaks of the alienation of the body of the fish from the water it lives in when it becomes polluted. The water becomes an expanded body of the fish.

Gandhi, on the other hand, speaks of the moral self, and in a Hindu idea, of a cosmic self.

In my own experience, nature has been a driving force in the way I imagine the world. It should be stated, however, that according to the historian Ramachandra Guha, “Ironically, Gandhi was, by all accounts, himself profoundly indifferent to the wild.”

In my work with the fishermen, I carried out an exercise to note down their descriptions of the ‘sea,’ they lived with every day.

The words they used were all functional and depicted an everydayness of a lived relationship with the sea and its ecosystem. I, on the other hand, thought of the sea as an abstract aesthetic landscape of beauty or thunder, tempestuousness or calmness.

My distance from it was more than physical; it was formative of my relationship with it — which of course changed dramatically when I engaged with it through the eyes of the fishers.

Indigenous cultures and cultures of those who live with nature can help us better understand and expand these relationships

Ideas of nature, and of cohabiting with the non-human, have roots in multiple knowledge systems of those who live with it, as an everyday existence.

The writer Amitav Ghosh cites the tale of Bon Bibi, the forest lady of the Bengal Sundarbans. She is woven into the everyday lives of the villagers as a way to coexist with the man-eating Royal Bengal Tigers which live there.

He writes:

“[T]he Bon Bibi legend uses the power of fiction to create and define a relationship between human beings and the natural world. Nowhere does a term equivalent to ‘Nature’ figure in the legend of Bon Bibi, yet nowhere is its consciousness absent; although ecological concerns are never named, the story is profoundly informed by that awareness which the literary critic Larry Buell has termed ‘the environmental unconscious’ — a phrase that is all the more useful, in my view, because it does not invoke the cultural and linguistic freightage of the word ‘Nature.’”

In a recent book, Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas, described as a multispecies ethnography, Radhika Govindrajan documents the entanglement of interspecies relations in Kumaon, a Himalayan region in the state of Uttarakhand in northern India, through lived relationships with goats, cows, monkeys, pigs, bears, leopards and dogs.

She calls for “a productive and open anthropomorphism that begins with the awareness that not all chasms are bridgeable can challenge our hubris about the distinctiveness of human animals.”

Nilanjan Bhattacharya, the filmmaker who works on indigenous peoples’ food cultures, describes some of the indigenous groups taking from nature in order to live in nature, but not with impunity.

This is reflected in their social worlds through rituals of reciprocation and respect shown to nature to express debt and gratitude, expressing a restorative relation with it.

In addition, there is the element of forgiveness.

Akeel Bilgrami privately remarked that these moral-psychological responses about taking from nature are very different from the situation found in the sphere of the state and the collective issues there, on the matter of taking and debt.

In the collective sphere of the state and governance, a great deal of debt needs no moral-psychological response of any kind, no feelings of guilt, no feelings of gratitude, no asking for forgiveness.

To give due credit, there have been attempts to discuss non-human rights by the judiciary in the context of cruelty caused during traditional annual bull racing (Jallikattu) in Tamil Nadu and providing the status of personhood to the rivers Yamuna and Ganga by a court in North India.

The first led to massive local riots and protests, while the latter order has been stayed by the Supreme Court of India.

In two more recent cases, last month, one High Court held that birds had fundamental rights and should not be caged, and another ruled that animals are legal persons with citizens as their representatives. The sphere, however, seems legally undefined.

Conclusions

For current understandings of nature to be included in a formal modern legal and policy framework which only allows for a certain kind of scientific knowledge as evidence may need a radical reformulation of the sphere in which the human-nonhuman relationship is thought about.

Besides only addressing the issue of human inequity, it also needs to address the co-constituency between the human and the non-human.

A more extensive and inclusive comprehension of the environment and of nature may need a shift in the conceptualization of the human-non-human relationship itself.