Love Your Monsters_ Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene - Michael Shellenberger [46]
In the years that followed, the Chipko movement — referring literally to the Hindi verb “to stick” (as in, to the trees) — would become an international media sensation. “Tree hugger” entered the lexicon as an all-purpose signifier for environmental sympathies. Among greens in the West, the Chipko movement became a symbol of poor women standing up for nature, while for many Indian elites at home, it provoked nostalgia for ancient spiritual customs and traditional ways of village life that seemed to be fast disappearing in India’s modernizing cities.
The Chipko story became iconic in rough proportion to the degree to which it became detached from the actual events that transpired in Uttarakhand. From the start, Chipko was driven by a desire among villagers for local autonomy and economic opportunity. Outside efforts to protect the Himalayan forest would spark a backlash among the very same villagers. The actual history of the Chipko is the story of rural Indians’ efforts to establish local control of resources, first by fighting the outside forest contractors who wanted to log their trees, and then by fighting outside environmentalists who wanted to protect them.
Today the Himalayan region, like the rest of India, has chosen the path of economic development and modernization. Even so, the idea that the women of Uttarakhand were hugging trees to protect the environment and prevent economic development, repeated most famously by Vandana Shiva in her international best seller, Staying Alive, captivates the imaginations of Western environmentalists and urban Indian elites alike.2 Sitting comfortably at the intersection of environmental suspicions of modernity and India’s home-grown ascetic tradition, the Chipko fable has profoundly misinterpreted and distorted the true meaning of Chipko, and with it, the larger story of modernization in India.
1.
The notion that poverty ennobles while wealth corrupts has transfixed elites for centuries. It is repeated by those with wealth and power as both a cautionary tale about the spiritually corrupting effects of wealth and a way to rationalize their power in highly unequal societies. In India, this was manifested by the glorification of asceticism in the traditional Brahminical value system espoused by high-caste Hindus.
In the early 20th century, Mahatma Gandhi updated this Brahmin asceticism by advocating an idealized vision of a traditional village-based society with limited needs, limited ambitions, and small-scale subsistence production. “We have managed with the same kind of plough as existed thousands of years ago,” he wrote in his 1910 book, Hind Swaraj. “We have retained the same kind of cottages that we had in former times and our indigenous education remains the same as before.” Economic development, for Gandhi, was no prerequisite for happiness. “A man is not necessarily happy because he is rich, or unhappy because he is poor,” he wrote. “Millions will always remain poor.” In Hind Swaraj, Gandhi defended hereditary occupations, and thus, implicitly the caste system.3
The Gandhian valorization of poverty and asceticism fit neatly into the emerging cosmopolitan discourse of “sustainable development” for poor nations. With the rise of environmentalism in the 1970s, many Indian elites started to justify asceticism and poverty not only as spiritually ennobling, but as environmentally virtuous as well. “Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj has for me been the best teaching on real freedom,” wrote Shiva, who trained as a physicist in Canada. “For Gandhi, slavery and violence were not just a consequence of imperialism: a deeper slavery and violence were intrinsic to industrialism, which Gandhi called ‘modern civilization.’”4
Shiva and other green elites attacked modernization and development in India as a calamitous foreign imposition on the rural poor by multinational corporations