Editorial:Awareness on Environment

Readers would have noticed a sudden spike in government schools organising special programmes under the “National Environment Awareness Campaign”. The theme for this year is “Forest for sustainable livelihood”. It is always welcome to engage students in efforts aimed towards generating wider awareness on matters of environment, especially in the present times when urban lifestyles have reached even rural homes and the connection with land and nature is no longer as immediate as it used to be until even very recently. It is important for the young to be introduced more intimately to environment because lives nowadays have become too cosmetic for the importance of environment to life to sink in. Despite all the talk of the Sikkimese people being essentially agrarian, fact also remains that the number of producers is going down. As more people get weaned away from the dependence on land, and as consumption veers increasingly towards manufactured goods, the relevance of environment, despite whatever may be included in Environment Studies textbooks, loses significance.
As mentioned, this disconnect is partly because of changes in lifestyles. A major contributor is however the imposition of rules and laws which have upset the traditional cohabitation between people and nature. With the State taking over the forests and with it the role of conservation, rules framed in offices too far removed from the resources they sought to preserve ended up dismantling the strongest protection nature has always had – traditional lifestyles adjusted to ensure sustainability. Such sustainable lifestyles were of course not unique to Sikkim, and are being lost across the world, but that should not mean that a course correction should not be attempted. In fact, it is time to resuscitate traditional knowledge and discover in its nuances the devices which will be urgently required to adjust to global challenges like climate change. For the non-believers, here are some Sikkim-specific examples. Villages in Sikkim have traditionally attached divinity to natural resources, and this was not ignorant blind faith, but an ingenious device to regulate sustainable use. This role of setting aside green cover as sacred groves for use in rotation or using faith to discourage defiling of water bodies was effected by monasteries and other religious organisations and worked very well for the State. When government departments take over this task, it is seen as an imposition and the law ends up alienating people from their surroundings. This alienation is regrettable because no forests have been lost to people who dwelled within or near them – the havoc has been wreaked by the demand of urban settlements far away. Also, with the alienation, all that exploitation needs is the promise of profit to win cohorts. For another example, take the case of organic farming. Again, this is welcome, but before any “awareness session” on organic farming begins, the government and its officers should first apologise to the farmers for having forced them away from organic farming practices in the first place and for having made them discard native crop species for hybrids. Organic was the only farming option for Sikkim until pesticides and chemical fertilizers were subsidized and promoted without enough education. Now the process is being thankfully reversed, but the task remains difficult because farming has become too dependent now.
Returning to the theme of events being hosted around the National Environment Awareness Campaign, the best way to observe it would be bring the senior citizens into classrooms and then take the students out with them to the surrounding areas where the elders will point out where a spring existed till a decade ago, identify medicinal herbs and their uses, explain what biodiversity means and how much of it has been lost... and the list can go on. If this is attempted at a large enough scale, maybe environment awareness will succeed as a campaign.