Editorial: From 10-Minutes to a Lifetime

On Monday morning, Sikkim dedicated 10 Minutes to Earth with a slew of simultaneous plantation drives. With Monday’s effort, Sikkim has collectively invested 40 Minutes towards greenery exclusively under this initiative apart from the various other efforts it has made at the policy, community and individual levels. As the week unfolds, readers will [as will we] be inundated with reports pouring in from every corner of the State recording each area’s participation in the process. The ferocity with which press releases arrive will yet again attest to the fact that Sikkim can be inspired to care for the environment. There is no contesting the fact that saplings are indeed planted and it is accepted that children, even those from junior schools, the ongoing first term exams notwithstanding, returned home excited on Monday, bearing news that they planted little ones of big trees which will now grow up with them. And that should be focus o the 10-Minute dedication – drawing strength and sustaining involvement from the innocence and infectious idealism of the young.
In a world where countries continue to try and justify why they should be allowed to continue polluting, and despite all the snide comments that detractors might profer, Sikkim’s earnestness comes as welcome relief. Launching the programme in the year 2009, the Chief Minister had explained that 10-Minutes to Earth was Sikkim broadcasting an appeal to the world to protect the Earth and inspire more contribution towards the planet’s health. There is nothing new about plantation drives; that is a tokenism that the world community evolved long back as a fig leaf for World Environment Day to cover the abuse that it subjects the environment to for the rest of the year. What is new however is that the 10-Minute dedication has been reasonably successful through its past instalments in engaging participation. As the Governor points out in his Message for this year’s episode, the time has also come to invite “prominent citizens from outside the State who are working with us for the development of the State to participate in this programme.” After all, Sikkim, with 47.59% of its geographical area under forest cover, does not need more plantation drives, but why it should embrace the 10-Minute initiative is because it gives the young a unique undertaking to begin caring for nature and because one of the driving ideas behind the initiative was to get the bigger states and nations thinking on how they should complement tiny, and already Green, Sikkim’s gesture.
What Sikkim also needs to do is build up on this introduction and help a generation rediscover the close understanding that the people here had evolved of the land they lived in. Environment Studies is now a compulsory part of the syllabus, but it is woefully alien and too generalized. The text books are little more than repackaged Geography lessons. Environmental education is more than that, it includes cultural relationships with the land and should be more about learning to live with the environment and not an alienated learning about environment per se. Sikkim is perfectly positioned to make EVS [as Environmental Studies is known in schools], relevant and fruitful. Students, say in Delhi, might need textbooks because they have only concrete around them, but depending on textbooks in Sikkim will only distance students here from the nature that surrounds them. What is more, the State already has a rich tradition of sustainable dependence on the environment, aspects of which form an integral part of traditional life-styles here. That knowledge base is only one generation distant in the past. It can still be reclaimed. As part of Environmental Studies, students here should be learning about the concept of sacred groves maintained by village communities [an effective way to conserve green cover], learn of the stories of mythical powers of its water bodies and understand how people effectively protected them from pollution [and eventual loss] - by reinforcing their surroundings by presenting them as abodes of easily angered nymphs or protecting deities. The young need to also learn of the traditional hunting practices in which animals were killed only for food, and never as game or in retribution. If the environment has to be protected and conserved, people need to go back to tradition, not turn to more rules and penalties. Tradition needs to invoked, not as blind faith, but as the only pragmatic and practicable option. The myth that forests and wildlife need to be ‘protected’ from the lay people needs to be demolished. Wildlife was not wiped out by hunter-gatherers, they were pushed into extinction by city dwellers on indiscriminate weekend hunts. The forests were not lost to the need of villagers, but were consumed by the greed of the cities – that insensitive obsession for silver-fir panelled rooms in concrete jungles. The young need to understand this, and then learn of how their own respective communities connected with nature and lived with it, how they adjusted their life-styles around it and how they worked their belief structures into it to weave conservation and sustainable practices as part of that one aspect that no one can argue with – Faith. The 10-Minutes to Earth provides the perfect launching pad for a return to such involved engagement...