‘Keep environmental justice at the core, not mere environmentalism’

Working on resource distribution and management, especially the conflicts around them, Manshi Asher has spent 26 years on jal, jungle, zameen (land, water and land rights) and environmental justice issues. Her insights into the interface between society and nature, and the relationship between people and nature, have informed several campaigns over the years in the Himalayan Mountain regions. She is the co-founder of the Himdhara Collective, a Himachal-based environment research and action collective that was formed in 2009, working with small grant support and community collaborations to break barriers around environmental issues.

Speaking to Question of Cities, Asher says that “urban areas have their own governance systems but how to access these to assert democratic decision making, engage with its politics and structures, make issues political are all important…the middle class approaches the courts and looks for judicial solutionism. And the solutions that come end up impacting the poorest.”

Would you share your understanding of the environmental issues you have been working on?
When I started working, I began realising that there has been a long history of injustice at various levels about people’s access to resources. People’s identities and survival are linked with their landscapes. Unless this is asserted through collective action, it’s not going to yield rights. People have been struggling for their rights but those of us with privilege have a bigger responsibility. 

I have been associated with different organisations but environmental justice has been at the core; not environmentalism but environmental justice because environmentalism treats environment as a separate entity without looking at the power hierarchies and people as part of nature. Environmental justice is important because India’s economic growth model is based on passing costs to the poor and marginalised while the benefits of the resources are for another class of people – in a non-democratic way. 

In the neoliberal era, we started seeing a proliferation of large developmental projects and with that also environmental regulations and governance frameworks were put in place. This was also the time of the Kyoto Protocol and the conversation of climate change was picking up. But in India, within a decade, these laws were diluted because they became a hurdle for ease of doing business. For example, governments have been clamping down on the consultation process with people, mandated in the Environment Impact Assessment notification 1994.

From 2006, we saw dilution of environmental laws; the state’s clampdown on the environmental agenda in the past 10 years is regressive. Increasingly, environmental issues are seen as problems that can be solved with technological interventions. The push is for ‘green economy’ and top-down climate solutions. So now the struggle is against a solar park encroaching on natural areas or other projects by the same large corporations that pushed fossil fuel-based industries. Environmental justice now is about holding on to a basic understanding of what it means to preserve natural resources, livelihoods, and the identities of people dependent on nature – and this includes urban India.

Why is resistance important in cities, especially those which are developing rapidly?
Resistance is, at an individual level, about basic dignity and justice, and will be there in response to power. Cities, in fact, are spaces where power hierarchies are stark, with a lavish elite and high-consuming society alongside a society which is exploited and gated-out. There are issues like gentrification and ghettoisation, issues of caste, religion, gender. These hierarchies are reproduced in a different form from the rural and are invisibilised in urban settings. Everything is more individualised, so there is all the more need for coming together.

Within a city, the class divides are wide. For example, who is bearing the brunt of the flyover or the metro being built though the high demand for them is by another section? Conflicts over resources are more stark and, therefore, I believe that resistance is also stark, but it is very difficult to sustain. This is because cities have a dominating middle class that is controlling the narrative or demanding those services. Domestic workers in cities have been struggling with unionisation. This is critical for resistance; without it, the structural violence will be worse.

What are the challenges and barriers to collective action and movements?
They are barriers at multiple levels, some more systemic than others. The first, in a democracy, is space for people to participate and peacefully express themselves; for this, the relevant constitutional provisions need to be protected. Where people’s constitutional rights are contained, limited, or clamped down upon, if there’s an environment of fear and repression, then it is systemically difficult for people to organise or act.

Secondly, people’s concerns of livelihoods in cities are so overwhelming that it’s difficult for them to organise on environmental issues. Also, environmental impacts are in the long-term and it is difficult to organise for such issues when struggling with livelihoods.

Thirdly, polarisation on the grounds of divisive factors like caste, ethnicity or religion, makes it more difficult to organise. These three, in the Indian context, are very big at this time. The fourth is that environmental issues are so global that action at the local level is difficult and the impact takes longer. It is easy to become cynical or lose hope, especially when the courts or the system are not doing their job even though decisions made in the name of national interest or economic development mean compromises with the environment.

Are there other barriers in cities?
In urban areas, the individualisation and people’s alienation at the community level, makes collective action difficult. Environmental justice action comes down to individual actions that are easy like switching off light bulbs, shutting the tap, using green products, so on. Individual solutionism is propagated but it takes collective action for far-reaching political or transformative change.

For collective action in cities, people have to put aside many differences and it also takes time to unfold. Major environmental movements, like that of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy survivors, took years of struggle to get even small decisions in their favour.

One of the most important things to overcome barriers is to educate people to develop an understanding of the root causes of the environmental and related problems. It’s important to understand the interlinkages between the global and the local level, and how different issues intersect with each other. This is important to also understand solidarity and collective action. Educate, organise and agitate – the Ambedkarite slogan can help overcome the barriers.

Also, it is important that the action is taken at multiple levels because a one-point agenda or a singular approach is probably not as effective. Action cannot be only on the social media, it cannot be a struggle locally only on the ground and nothing in the national media. There’s traction, networking and solidarity needed at various levels. And for any environmental campaign, the timing is important; and building allyship and cross-sectional or intersectional dialogues which can help overcome barriers.

The most important thing is hope. If people lose hope or the capacity to wait it out for change, then it leads to cynicism, apathy, and inaction. And we can’t afford that.

Any examples for how and where people have broken barriers to protect their rights or ecology?
We cannot pinpoint and say that this struggle or that movement was successful or not. For instance, the Narmada Bachao Andolan was fighting to stop the dams. That they were not able to stop the dam in Gujarat can be seen as a failure but their struggle achieved a path breaking Supreme Court order on rehabilitation which was their success. The movement’s most important contribution was that, when no one was questioning what development meant, it placed the question at the centre of the public discourse. It gave the slogan ‘Vinash nahi, vikash chahiye, which meant that dams as development were destructive because one community was paying the cost while another benefited. This had a larger impact.

Every movement has put forth a counter-narrative or pushed an idea that challenged power. For instance, the idea of environment impact assessment came from the fact that people pay the price of a project and social costs need to be accounted for in the project cost. Look at the feminist struggles and laws made as a result of women coming out on streets. When this happens, the silence around issues is broken, it leads to far-reaching changes, pushes a different or counter narrative which then can be taken forward in terms of law, policy changes, mindset shifts. The shift in people’s mindsets is the biggest impact of collective action. On environmental issues, several movements and people have challenged the idea that economic growth cannot be compromised. 

Sometimes, movements have their own ebb and flow. One can see in urban areas, many young people have come out on the streets and there are organisations like Fridays for Future. Today Greta Thunberg, speaks today about Israel’s war on Palestine in her strikes and this is also climate politics because the military-industrial complex is probably the biggest contributor to emissions and the climate crisis.

Initially, several young organisations were only talking about saving a tree or protecting a park in their area. They have now widened their understanding to build movements, take collective action, and adopt initiatives from the ground. It is important that people participate in whatever capacity they can.

How can breaking barriers build something too? What is the class angle to this?
In the context of cities, better resistance is possible if there is breaking down of class and caste barriers. This, I believe, is very important.

First, there has to be recognition of the class and caste barriers. The interaction between the middle class and those in low-income areas or colonies is important. I was reading a study on thermal injustice in Bengaluru highlighting the caste and class impacted by heat waves. What issues do construction workers or domestic workers face during a heat wave or air pollution is rarely discussed; these issues are raised by the middle class in urban areas.

Who frames an issue is important for environmental justice. For instance, the air pollution in Delhi every winter is pinned to the stubble burning by farmers in Punjab though the causal factors are complex. Unless this framing is changed, it cannot be fully addressed and the framing can only change if there is an acknowledgement of the structural hierarchies that exist, especially the class and caste.

Second, it is important to have dialogues across different groups because there’s a kind of elite environmentalism in urban areas. For instance, there has to be an interaction between urban environmental groups and unions of taxi drivers and domestic workers. Urban areas have their own governance systems but how to access these to assert democratic decision making, engage with its politics and structures, make issues political are all important. The representation or participation of the marginalised communities of a city in these spaces is needed for creative solutions. 

In Delhi, for instance, the courts have solutions for solid waste management but the waste-to-energy leaves out informal waste pickers because the entire waste economy is privatised. Residents were protesting against the waste-to-energy plant in Okhla. If these middle-class residents concerned about air pollution interact with the waste pickers and take their concerns on board, then you will have a creative solution.

But the middle class approaches the courts and looks for instant judicial actions. And the solutions that come end up impacting the poorest, as we have seen in cities. There is a need to challenge judicial solutionism, this kind of top-down techno-managerial solutionism, and work from the ground up.

What strategies and tactics can be adopted for breaking barriers on various issues?
There are different strategies depending on the issues, the region, the people. In my experience, it’s best to always work with communities at the centre of all efforts and have processes be community-led. As a strategy, we realise the need to create a wider public discourse, which involves not just working on the ground but also using social media and other available spaces to have these conversations.

We consciously started engaging more with the youth in the past six years. They are not only a large part of the population but also have newer aspirations in areas where there is dependence on natural resources and conflicts are emerging. With the agrarian crisis, rising unemployment, consumerism, and cultural changes in the wake of globalisation, the young need this engagement and they also recognise the issues. We have been using social media to amplify issues.

Then, there is a change in the engagement with government ministries and legal systems. We focus more on dialogue, not just reacting to decisions or firefight all the time. This requires creative strategies. We are also getting into research, not only to build evidence but ethnographic research with deeper interlinkages between cultural, economic, social, political issues in communities. I have switched to this slower grassroots research process. Movements are also spaces of knowledge building. 

There is an understanding of resistance as mass protests, mass movements, but what I have seen is that when democratic spaces are shrinking or multiple kinds of power hierarchies exist, there is something called everyday resistance and everyday struggles which happen at the individual and collective levels – these need to be focused on to keep alive the hope for change.

Shobha Surin, currently based in Bhubaneswar, is a journalist with 20 years of experience in newsrooms in Mumbai. An Associate Editor at Question of Cities, she is concerned about climate change and is learning about sustainable development.

Cover photo: Bajoli Holi dam strike by women 2014. Credit: Sarvesh/WSS Fact finding team