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ANIL AGARWAL: FORENSIC RIGOR AND PASSION FOR CHANGE

BY SUNITA NARAIN

Anil cherished the search for scientific excellence. "Forensic rigour combined with passion" is how a publication once described Anil. I cannot think of a better description of Anil, who lived every day of his life trying to understanding life and how much we can learn from innovation and change around us.

Anil was born in the year of India's independence--a member of the group that Salman Rusdhie has called the midnight children--and in his early years he was greatly influenced both by the legacy of the British and by the legacy of the founding fathers of free India. He grew up in urban India and attended India's premier engineering institution. Anil was cut off, as most Indians are, from the reality of rural India. But this was soon to change.

In 1974, Anil as a young journalist came across the Chipko Movement, which baptized him into the environmental concern. His teachers were the poor women of this remote Himalayan village. The women were ecologists, but of a slightly different variety. They hugged the trees saying that government could cut forests only over their dead bodies. But not because they believed that trees should not be cut--instead, the women believed they should have the right to cut the trees. For them the environment was much more than pretty trees and tigers. Their cause, in fact, had very little to do with trees. It was more selfish. Their own lives were so deeply and desperately intertwined with the existence of those trees that their very culture and survival was at stake. Hence, their protest and their struggle.

Anil understood this pain and espoused the women's message. From this he gave the Indian ecological movement its intellectual grounding. He wrote that environment and development were two sides of the same coin. He said that for the people of this village as for the millions in the developing world, what mattered was not the Gross National Product but the Gross Nature Product: their land, their crops, their forests, their streams and wells, their grasslands, their fodder trees, their animals. Their lives depended heavily on the very existence of these natural resources and, of course, their productivity.

Anil then spent a lifetime trying to get us to focus our attention on the protection, enhancement, and sustainable use of this Gross Nature Product, and he tried to find answers to problems in the knowledge of the people themselves. It is from this basis that the environmental movement drew its sustenance. The concept of protectionist conservationism' prevails across the paradigms of environmental management in the Western world. But the Indian environmental movement is built on the concept of utilitarian conservationism.' It remains deeply humanist and deeply conservationist.

What I also found amazing was Anil's love, indeed fascination, with how people lived with their ecology. He wrote how cultural diversity of the world was a direct outcome of the biological diversity of the world. He wrote often how he began to understand the extraordinary ecological diversity of India--ranging from the rangelands of the trans-Himalayan cold desert of Ladakh to the pastures of the hot desert of Haryana, Rajasthan and Gujarat. From the forests of the sub-temperate high mountains of the Himalayan range, which outside the poles boast of more glaciers than anywhere else in the world, to the forests of the high tropical mountains of the Nilgiris and Palnis in the south. Amongst all these different ecosystems and land formations, Anil was most fascinated by the vast riverine and coastal plains, especially the Indo-Gangetic plains where he was born. The Indo-Gangetic Plains are the world's most flood-prone plains. They sit below Earth's most seismic and also its youngest mountain system; as a result, these ranges, which are lashed by intense rainstorms, are also intensely fragile and erodible. These are highly productive, life-supporting lands, but their ecology is inherently tumultuous and crisis-ridden.

Anil made us realize that these ecological formations were inhabited by diverse people--nomads with sheep, goats, and cattle in the desert lands; millions of farmers living in the extensive plains growing rice, wheat and millet; tribal people in India's vast and diverse forests; and the fisherfolk living on the resources of the innumerable wetlands and rivers and expansive coastal waters. He said there is hardly any ecological space that is not occupied by some human group. Instead of becoming a nature-centered environmentalist, he became more and more interested in the extraordinary diversity of the human-nature interactions that exist in India. And in the wholeness, complexity, beauty, innovativeness, and intelligence of these varied human-nature interactions.

The third step in Anil's understanding of humanist deep ecology was his belief about the extraordinary cultural diversity and its rationality in the India's extraordinary ecological diversity. From ecology, he had moved to people, and from people-ecology interactions, he had discovered, as he loved to say, culture and its importance and its relationship with ecology.

It was in the innate intelligence of local practices and knowledge that Anil began to see the most unifying factor in the country's cultural diversity. In fact, as he said, he began to see that over time, the culture itself had encoded and incorporated traditional knowledge of the Indian people in their diets, in the way they live and heal themselves, in the way they cultivate and care for their animals and for plants, in the way they relate to water and to rivers. Almost like culture has become a genetic code--a genetic structure slowly incorporating information on how to deal with the changing environment and pass it on to succeeding generations--the myriad Indian cultures have incorporated practices and beliefs over millennia, which helped them to survive and grow in the harsh, difficult, yet promising and diverse Indian environment.

But Anil was never interested only in studying India. He always was interested in studying what can change India, what can get rid of its poverty, what can eliminate its growing helplessness in dealing with basic issues like water, how it can govern itself better, and so forth. Therefore, he repeatedly asked what he could learn to answer these questions, which will shape current and future India.

Because of this, Anil's advocacy was about the need to involve local custodians and knowledge-holders in the management of natural resources. The political economy of ecological concern was his business. His major impact was in making us realize that ecological security and food and social security go hand in hand. Because he believed always and fervently that sustainability is about making people understand the impact of their actions and giving them the ability to make the change, Anil's message was always inspiring and always empowering. This is a far more difficult struggle because it is a struggle against us. But as his work and legacy shows, mindsets are changing and action is beginning.

On his behalf, let me thank the chair and the committee of SCB's Distinguished Services Award for recognizing Anil and what he stood for. This award would have meant a lot to him. It means a lot to me.

Sunita Narain
Centre for Science and Environment
New Delhi, India
sunita@cseindia.org

Anil Agarwal received a special posthumous award from the Society for Conservation Biology in recognition of his extraordinary contributions to making mankind's onward advancement consistent with ecological protection.

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