How did WE Do on WED?
Ah, the environment. What is it all about? The verdant forests of the Western Ghats, so rich in species of plants and animals found here alone. The sparkling beaches of Gahirmatha in Odisha, where precious Olive Ridley turtles come from thousands of kilometres away, just to make their nests. Or the fog-kissed rolling hills of Uttarakhand, where crystal clear mountain springs cut through the foliage. But is this all that ‘environment’ means? Certainly not. Environment can be lyrical and beautiful, but it is also the basic stuff life and livelihoods are made of. Not convinced? Meet these women and men who have found the correct definition of the term not by spouting jargon, but through their actions.
For the women of Reni, a small Garhwal village in the hills of Uttarakhand, the precious forests around them were their source of livelihood. The forest provided fuel for lighting and heating their homes and their farm equipment was carved out of the timber. On March 26, 1974, 27 women literally Chipko-ed (clung) to the sal trees to protect them from an invading group of axe-wielding men from a sporting goods company looking to cut them down.
The Reni movement was close to 40 years ago. The fervour has only grown more intense over the years. Take the example of how the village panchayat of Chharba village, just outside of Dehradun city, foiled Coca-Cola's plan to set up a Rs 600-crore bottling plant in their village by unanimously passing a resolution against it.
For the Dongriya Kondh tribals of Odisha’s Niyamgirihills, the mountain is their god, their saviour and their guide. They are willing to lay down their lives to prevent the mountain from being torn down for bauxite mining by London-based Vedanta Resources PLC. Years of struggle ended in the Supreme Court awarding the Gram Panchayat the right to decide the fate of Vedanta’s bauxite mining project.
These are the people who have stood up for what the environment means to them. They might have never switched off their lights for a whole hour on Environment Day. They might have never designed posters and badges or held tree planting drives on that one day. But to them environment is not a theme for day-long festivities, it is a way of life.
What can we learn from them? What does ‘environment’ mean to you? If someone challenged the way of life you are used to, what would you do? How are you going to make a change this World Environment Day?
Do the Right thing: File an RTI
We have spoken about this before, but how many of us really followed through? The Right to Information Act came into force on October 13, 2005. It guarantees every citizen the right to know about the functioning of the government, subject to certain restrictions. Information can be anything in possession of Union ministries, Parliament and state legislatures and the Indian embassies, including memos, e-mails, opinions, press releases, circulars, orders, contracts, reports, and electronic data material. Even information about a private company held by a government department or body, such as Environment Impact Assessment, is accessible. In 2011 – 12, a total of 3, 74,048 RTI applications were received by Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions.
This WED, instead of wearing green for a day, do something more proactive, file an RTI application. You can start small – find out how much was spent, and how, on your neighbourhood park/ parking lot. Or go all out – what is the Rs 25,000 crore lying with environment ministry’s Compensatory Afforestation Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA) being used for?
Here’s a sample of the letter you have write.
Public Information Officers
(Name of the Department)
(Office) _______________________________
(Place) _______________________________
Sub: Application under the RTI Act, 2005
Sir,
Kindly provide the following information related to
Q 1 ________________________________________
Q 2 ________________________________________
Q 3 ________________________________________
I am depositing the application fee (Rs 10/-) separately/I am a BPL card Holder, So, I am exempt from payment of fees. My BPL card no. is:…/If you feel that the above requested information does not pertain to your department then please follow the provisions of Section 6 (3) of the RTI Act, 2005/Also as per the provisions of the RTI Act, 2005 please provide the details (Name and Designation) of the first appellate authority with respect to your department with the reply to the above request, where I may, if required, file my first appeal.
Thank you
Cool it with the carbon, will you?
You must have heard A LOT about ‘carbon footprints’. Simply put, your carbon footprint is the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the amount of fossil fuels you consume. You are thinking, ‘Hey! I’m a school going kid! I do not own a car or a factory, I do not have carbon emissions!’ Well, how do you get to school every morning? How does your mother prepare your meals? Most importantly, how much time do you spend online - on Facebook, playing games or chatting with your friends? This should not be news to you, but you are consuming fossil fuels all along the way and you are putting out a whopper of a carbon footprint.
Calculat-ron
The Green Schools Programme manual – How Green is My School? - is a handy toolkit to find out how your school fares regarding vehicle emissions, ambient air quality and energy consumption. Make it your mission to audit the
carbon footprint of your school. Want to strike closer home? The Green Neighbourhoods manual – How Green is my Neighbourhood? - does the same for your locality.
Combine the two and you can audit the emissions from your home, school and neighbourhood to answer the question – How clean is the air you breathe?
Look beyond the mainstream
Sensational protest movements make great front page news. And most of the time, they do little but help sell newspapers. Far more interesting trends to follow would be people’s uprisings in different parts of the world which do not feature as headlines, but force governments to change policies and industries to clean up their act.
In the US, people, from New York to New Orleans, are making their voices heard about almost everything from the Keystone XL gas pipeline to fracking shale gas in densely populated areas, from more corporate accountability to less corporate greed. In China and Pakistan, citizens are livid over increasing pollution and depleting resources. Pakistani dailies report that the country loses 6 per cent of its Gross Domestic Product to environmental degradation every year and has been facing climate change-related floods since 2010. In the last month alone, Chinese cities such as Kunming and Shanghai saw three major protests led by citizens demanding more environment protection laws in the face of rising pollution.
Closer home, people’s movements are demanding a new era of accountability. The long-running movement demanding justice for the victims of the Bhopal gas tragedy is a prime example. Recently, 65 representatives from various gram panchayats in Malkangiri in Odisha resigned en-masse over lack of governance and amenities in their areas. Nuclear power plants coming up in many places from Jaitapur in Maharashtra to Bhavnagar in Gujarat to Kudankulam in Tamil Nadu, have people up in arms. These are not random naysayers, they are the mean and women who are forced to live with the dangerous side-effects of ‘development’. Thousands of tribal protestors, dressed in traditional attire, from natural resource-rich states like Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and Jharkhand assembled in Jantar Mantar (New Delhi) in April this year to protest what they described as ‘loot of natural resources’.
These people are not merely demanding that outsiders must leave their forests and grasslands alone. They are demanding a change in mindset. They are setting up ways to make governments and businesses more accountable.
This WED, get a piece of the people’s movement pie, as told by independent media – by the people, for the people. Find a movement to follow and always be informed. Question current patterns of growth and development. Seek credible information about plans and policies.
Here are some good places to start:
Kafila.org
Infochange.org
Truthout.org
Cover me plenty
To balance the unique ecosystem of urban areas, the National Forest Policy stipulates metropolitans and smaller cities to maintain one-third of their land area as green cover. Any agency cutting down one tree has to plant 10 in its place. And yet, green areas in cities like Delhi and Bangalore are shrinking. The tree cover in the Garden City, Bangalore, fell from 72 per cent in 1973 to 12 per cent in 2012, according to researchers from Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science. Why are we telling you all this? Don’t worry, it is not to get you to go on one of those token plantation drives across your city. Forget a single sapling or a small area in your backyard and widen your perspective. Look to adopt acres of green cover! Every month, week or day, however much time your life permits, use it to explore a park, forest, mountain, valley or reserve in and around where you stay. This will keep you in the know of developments in the area and also serve as a great breather for your lungs in the chaos of urban life.
Our Picks: Go-to green areas
Mangarbani in Delhi
Chamundi hills in Mysore
Cubbon Park/Lalbagh in Bangalore
Sanjay Gandhi National Park (Borivili) in Mumbai
Legally bound: Know your laws
How can you fight for what is right if you do not even know what ‘right’ is? There are laws that take a shot at defining ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ for us as a society. A sound idea of legality that applies to you can save you from being misled by jargon, and help you hold those in power accountable.
Here is a crash course...
Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1974
Set up Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) to monitor water quality. Prohibits pollution of water bodies beyond prescribed limits. Penalises non-compliance.
Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1981
Sets ambient air quality standards – National Ambient Air Quality Standards. Prohibits polluting fuel and substances. Regulates emissions from appliances and organisations. Directs monitoring and reporting of CPCB with regards to air pollution.
Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972
Protects listed species of plants and animals. Demarcates ecologically sensitive areas as protected. Hunting is banned with 1991 Amendment.
Forest Conservation Act, 1980
Restricts state government from de-listing protected forests. Prohibits non-forest use of forestland.
Environment (Protection) Act, 1986
Umbrella legislation to coordinate between all central and state government bodies set up under the previous Acts. Issues guidelines on environmental issues – Environmental Impact Assessment of Development Projects Notification, Hazardous Wastes (Management and Handling) Rules, 1989 etc
Land Acquisition Act, 1894
Authorises the Government to acquire land for different purposes or schemes. Lays out procedure for measurement, valuation and transfer of land. Outlines procedure for compensation, approaching courts in case of dispute.
Consumer Protection Act, 1986
Outlines commercial transactions and manufacturers/producers within its ambit. Establishes Consumer Protection Councils at state and national levels. Creates agencies for redressing dispute at district, state and national levels.
World Environment Expo
How much for a green Planet? Do we hear carbon credits? Oh, but that is so passé. To celebrate the World Environment Expo...err, we meant Day!...here are the hottest-selling ways to go Green. But then again, what is their real worth? Before taking the plunge, measure that for yourself...
Go online!
From internet banking to Google deciding to Go Paperless in 2013, going online seems to be accepted as the best option to feel right by the environment this summer. So what if the paper industry-led campaign, Two Sides, revealed that Google actually uses 2.3 million MWh of electricity a year?
Buy skin food!
Crave that cosmetic must-have which sounds like a sweet dish - coconut shampoo or pomegranate lip-balm? Have you checked the label carefully for the contents? With a market flooded with herbal remedies for your skin, it is surprising that some of these products carry no trace of the 'food' ingredient they claim to. In fact, they might be an aromatic mix of toxic chemicals and perfumes, including formaldehyde.
Be a green scriptwriter!
Who says paper cannot be responsibly sourced? An advertisement of world's leading paper company, Asia Pulp and Paper claimed that they promote sustainable forestry in Indonesia. What they meant was they were actually destroying miles of precious Indonesian rainforests. But there lies the beauty of adverts...
Ride hybrid!
Should you stop worrying about those silly figures about the carbon emissions from cars and save up for that sleek new battery-powered Prius instead? After all, its manufacturer, Toyota, says it is not fossil-fuelled. The National Mission for Electric Mobility, launched in January 2013, offers tax incentives to those who purchase hybrid or electric vehicles. Well, they are definitely cleaner than a carbon-belching car. But they have their own dirty trail – like the nickel-hydride and lithium-ion batteries that power them. Also, the fact that though the cars have reduced CO2 emissions, they may be making up for emissions realeased during open-pit mining to source the copper used in their wiring.
Want to make a real dent in the emissions cloud? Plague your government, doggedly and with conviction, to give you an efficient, affordable, emissions-slashing public transport system.
So this June, GT Team urges you to be an informed consumer. Not for one day, but for every hour, every day!
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How did WE Do on WED?
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