Editorial (4)
Seeing the Whole Elephant
Educational Institutions and policy makers need to play a role in preparing youngsters for the future. And the future will be determined by the decisions we make about our current development path - whether we shift to a low carbon way of life or not.
We asked a few college going students what they think of development. Many were sure it basically meant progress, bigger cities, better facilities, a better life. Some felt it was an inevitable aspect of human evolution. A few were quite puzzled, saying it was difficult to answer the question since there were so many complexities involved. One student said that just when India is trying to get ‘developed’, all the negatives of development are being talked about, including carbon emissions and climate change; she felt it was an unfair world, because her family after years of dreaming and saving were now going to buy a car – why should they give it up?
Every Indian would know the story of the six blind men and the elephant. Each blind man thinks it is a different thing – a wall, a tree trunk, a brush and so on, depending on which part of the elephant he has touched. ‘Seeing the whole elephant’ when it comes to development is much more complex, since there are so many more aspects to it and each person sees it with her own filters. Education and life experiences lets students - and most of us - only see a few facets of development – without the understanding that they are connected to innumerable other aspects of life.
The sociologist Ashish Nandy wrote about the concept of ‘colonialism in the mind’, where the elite of India had absorbed an entire way of thinking of the colonisers even after they had left. They then replaced the British as leaders as we adopted a path of western style development in India, much against the wishes of Gandhiji, one of the few whose mind was not colonized. Today our minds are not colonized by any other country. We are now dealing with our minds colonized by notions of ‘development’, just as in earlier eras our minds were colonized by religion. We are caught up in a paradigm which embraces the entire destiny of modern civilisation.
By and large, as human beings we suffer from a vulnerability - we seem to be able to value only immediate benefits and unable to see the whole picture in the space dimension or see far into the future or the past in the time dimension. In this issue of Eternal Bhoomi, we have attempted to share the writing of many visionaries from E.F.Schumacher and Thich Nhat Hanh to Vandana Shiva and Claude Alvares – writings that help us see the whole elephant of modern day ‘development’
Seetha Ananthasivan
Editorial - Eco Projects: Celebrating Down-to-earthness and Fulfilment
by Seetha Ananthasivan
The first issue every year has the same theme as the Bhoomi Conference (or Unconference) – this year, the focus is on the Campaign for a Million Eco Projects. The web portal www.millionecoprojects.com will be integral to this campaign, to document eco projects and faciliate the end user to explore, connect, act and share.
In a world which is obsessed with success, glamour and bigness, we thought we will celebrate down-to-earthness and the fulfillment that comes with working on all kinds of eco-projects, including the small ones, the kind a small community or a school / college / organisation are likely to undertake.
The only communities living sustainably, with a neutral or negative carbon footprint, live in small organic farms, coastal fishing communities or are tribals living in or near forests - all the rest of us who live in cities are caught up in high carbon life styles; a notable exception is Cuba the only country which has achieved sustainable development because of embargos on oil import and a determined focus on organic agriculture (even gardens of offices have been converted to vegetable gardens). When we are forced to do so, the need for survival makes us adapt and change. How can we make some shifts in our lives well before we reach a situation where calamity forces us to change?
In particular, how can schools and colleges play a role in showing children some of the ways of eco-wise living? Our education system fosters a divide between body and mind, practice and theory and left and right brained thinking. In addition, it supports a tunnel vision focused on personal success, unconscious of our utter dependence on our planet Earth. The issues confronting us are complex and huge – but we can all start with one eco project!
While we can outsource the execution of certain projects, an ideal eco project would be one that we have to be closely involved in – one that involves hands, heart and head – since such a project would be good for ourselves, our health and
well-being as well. Projects in schools in India have come to mean academic projects which include a lot of cutting and pasting and making a report or booklet as an end product, often with the help of parents. But doing real-life projects – like organic or terrace gardening, waste management by being mindful about food and other wastes and also segregating them, going in for solar activities that demand physical work from most of us, an attempt to integrate body and mind, heart and soul.
So it makes sense for all of us to engage in eco projects, preferably work hands-on at it. Also, doing eco projects is a kind of solving by pattern – simultaneously many issues get addressed when we work on a ‘Real Life’ Eco Project – we make new friends, we learn new skills and knowledge and we do our bit to make the earth a better place to live in.
It is a way we can all participate – children, youth and adults, in schools, colleges and other spaces – in doing our bit to live responsibly on Mother Earth.
The Bhoomi Team joins me in wishing you a Happy New Year! Let us set ourselves a goal for this year… At least one
eco-project for each one of us?
Seetha Ananthasivan
What's a Good Life?
All around us, the notion of a ‘good life’ includes exotic foods, big vehicles, lots of travelling, big buildings, designer homes, and factories to produce an uncountable variety of things, and electricity, coal and gas to make all this possible - all to keep pace with our faster lifestyles.
Individually, we may ‘seek happiness’ in a range of directions, but collectively most of the developed / developing world looks for a host of material comforts to lead a good life. Even world leaders when they meet, like our Prime Minister and President Obama, seem to have time only for business as usual.
Often, we may be unaware of the connection between the good life we aspire for, and the ecological repercussions of our choices – climate change, peak oil, increasing pollution levels, food packed with unnatural chemicals, etc.
Even those of us who understand these connections find it difficult to give up the good life goodies to which we are accustomed. Why? Where is this quest for a good life leading us?
A story narrated by Satish Kumar in Resurgence Magazine comes to mind. His mother told him this story of a man who was chased by a violent elephant. The man ran for his life, and finally climbed a tree, hoping the elephant could not reach him there. However, the single-minded animal began to shake the tree with his trunk. While the man held on for dear life, he was surprised by the honey that dripped on his face from a broken bee hive above him. He licked the honey, which seemed delicious, but along with it, he was stung on all sides by the disturbed bees.
Soon, a flying chariot with angels came by and stopped near him. Seeing his predicament, they offered to rescue him. ‘Just a minute’ said he, let me drink a bit more of this wonderful honey.’ The angels prompted him again and yet again, and finally gave him an ultimatum. The man was still pleading to have just a little bit more of the divine honey, even as he was stung all over and likely to be destroyed by the elephant ultimately. The angels finally left, leaving the man to his fate.
Would the man in the story have jumped onto the chariot if he was offered another kind of honey which was equally or more heavenly?
Perhaps the only way we can let go of our addictions to a high carbon lifestyle is to find an even better life to enjoy and value. In this issue, we focus on several writers who explore a deeper freedom, a greater fulfillment and a life of personal balance, closely entwined with ecological balance. While they seem to be located in different ends of a range of perspectives, from deep ecology to eco-socialism, from activism to inner spiritual search, we believe that all these multiple paths are needed and that they unfold in the same direction.
We have completed one year of Eternal Bhoomi – it has helped to bring together several people from many walks of life to participate in our forthcoming Bhoomi Conference – 2011 on ‘What’s a Good Life?’ This would not have been possible if it were not for the generosity with gifts in the form of articles, illustrations, innumerable photographs, designs and ideas from readers and well-wishers.
We hope that you will continue sending us your good wishes, and enjoy reading our 5th issue!
There is a delightful story of Birbal, who, on his way home, saw a group of people searching for something under a street lamp. What have you lost? he asked, and was told that a precious ring had been lost.
Birbal got down on his knees and joined the group to search. After a while, it struck him to ask, where have you lost it? Out there, he was told, and the place was pointed out to him. The puzzled Birbal asked,‘Then why are you searching here?’ Oh, well, he was told, ‘There is no light over there!’
This is a good story to understand what is happening to attempts to improve education today. To search in the dark, we need to ask the question, "What is education for?" Educational policy statements make it clear that the purpose of education is to develop skills and knowledge critical to the process of economic growth. At an individual level, a majority would say that education was needed for a ‘decent’ livelihood and status in society. These answers are so final, and the nature of personal and national economic growth are taken as so undeniably good and wonderful, that education has become a holy cow today. Re-thinking education then, is very difficult.
Another reality is that most of us have been educated in the same system and possibly enjoyed many aspects of it. This makes it difficult for educators and policy makers to step out of the conditioning that such a system entails and do more than just dealing with methods and issues such as extending education to more children who cannot afford it (as the RTE Act proposes). We need to use the very tools we learnt through education to re-think education – it is as tough an exercise as the eye seeing itself.
Today, it is established that economics without taking into account the ecology of the earth has led to unsustainable development. Just as a field of ecological economics is being developed taking into account principles of ecology, we need to re-think education, relating it to living sustainably on earth.
Ecological education would demand that we honour diversity of students, contexts, systems; that we believe in self-regulation and dynamic flow in processes of working amongst children and whole systems; that we understand the complexity of learning processes and interrelationships with the context and times we live in; that we look at long term implications of education and economic activities.
For instance - why does schooling not include the learning of agriculture and rural crafts at least for rural students in their syllabus? Why don’t children learn what is meaningful to their context? Why don’t they learn the basics of taking charge of their food and health, if possible through growing plants in gardens or through what is grown on their own farms? Why is there so little effort to involve children in issues regarding environmental degradation around their schools and learn more about how every person contributes to climate change? What notions of ‘success’ are we reinforcing? To deal with these questions, we may have to turn the current educational norm on its head in many ways– for instance, learning together with students and villagers may be required rather than
‘teaching’ as inputting by the teacher.
We need to step away from looking at Education as a ‘Public Good’ as mainstream economists call it, which makes it a product or a service delivered by schools to children. We need instead to look at schools and colleges as ecosystems – connected with other eco- systems / communities around us.
Just as innumerable groups around the world are re-thinking food habits, there is an awakening around the world about re-thinking the education habit for our long term success as a civilisation.
We thank all the writers and leaders who have gifted their articles to us to bring out this issue of Eternal Bhoomi focused on re-thinking education and sustainability.
Seetha Ananthasivan