I happened to watch a video clip of Yuvan Aves, a nature educator and the author of the magnificent book, Intertidal. “Good nature education can radically transform our culture… it socially and emotionally connects us with our local living world,” he said, explaining that this meant a tree being cut down on our street will feel like a blow to our heart and not remain a newspaper story. The phrase, ‘local living world’, is a beautiful expression that localises the environment and places human beings within the natural world. We are not saviours of the planet but just one element that exists within its gamut. Consciousness that gives us a sense of our ‘self’, emotional relationships we have with other human beings, and our connection with nature cannot be placed in silos. This construct suggests that to really feel for the world around us, a cultural transformation within is inescapable.

Culture is a complex bundle of material and non-material impressions whose strands are so intricately intertwined that we cannot strip or adjust one and believe we have changed. Each of us is defined by such a composite mix. Change will require a complete breakaway from this understanding; a revolution within. When we comprehend environmentalism in terms of such a renaissance, we enter the realm of an uncomfortable struggle that needs patience and deliberated action. Conversely, this understanding also points to the dangers of addressing the ecological crisis as a mere problem of pollution.

This is in contrast to the way phrases such as climate change and environmental activism are commonly used. For the middle and the upper-middle classes, environmental activism has become a convenient trope that allows them to participate in public life in a sanitised, unsullied and unreflective manner and win brownie points for doing so. This is because the environmental issue has been reduced to simplistic placard-holding slogans such as ‘Stop Pollution’, ‘Don’t Use Plastic’, ‘Plant Trees’ and ‘Conserve Water’. No one can refute any one of these messages or ignore their urgency. Consequently, when people with privilege share pictures of them using cloth bags, segregating waste, or growing their own vegetables, they are applauded for contributing to environmental conservation.

While these individual lifestyle changes do play a cumulative role in cleaning up our surroundings, they are only the alphabets of the language that needs to be learnt. Letters have to come together and form aural and semantic patterns that correlate with objects. These have to grow into phrases, sentences, essays, poems and songs, give meaning to every aspect of our lived experience, connect all our lives, open spaces for imagination, empathy and, at the same time, create knowledge. If we do not follow this path of learning, we will remain in a cocoon, unable and even unwilling to participate in life as a whole.

The danger of the use-cloth-bag kind of activism is that it provides an escape hatch for all those who do not want to learn this messy language. This learning requires courage and the recognition that we have created and actively participate in an unequal world, acknowledging that the aspirational model that we today debunk is a product of our avarice and that giving up things is always easier for those who have economic stability or are socially networked. The moment the birds and the water bodies are linked with the lives of the disenfranchised and with those of us who take it all for granted, we realise environmental activism cannot be a ‘we cleaned the beach’ placebo.

I repeatedly encounter passionate proponents of environmental conservation who shy away from the knotty questions of caste, gender, race and colour. Many speak of the marginalised as an uneducated lot who are dirtying the world. One person narrated a story of how their house help refuses to segregate waste even after months of training. The conclusion they came to is simple: ‘These people do not care.’ The fact that the privileged rarely travel with the waste that they generate allows them to judge ‘the rest’. There is also a socio-pollution correlation that they perpetuate. The social, occupational, and locational identity of people is placed alongside grades of cleanliness without taking into account the oppressive and marginalising practices that are inbuilt in cultural, political and civic systems. This automatically allows for the justification of discrimination, which is packaged into health concerns. It is this convoluted mind map that gave people the audacity to justify untouchability in terms of physical distancing when Covid-19 was ravaging the planet.

On the international stage, overarching statements about the need to save the world for the sake of humanity are also dangerously hypocritical. The world is one place that we all share and any downward spiral affects all of us. But, as we all know, it does not affect everyone equally. Therefore, we cannot falsely equalise all the people and natural habitats. We live in a world where Africa and Asia continue to be exploited for profit while simultaneously being treated as dump yards. In such a situation, when white people stand up and speak of saving the planet without an iota of self-criticality, it is hollow. Just as the socially privileged criticise those who are excluded for their ‘dirtiness’, the white man blames us for our Third-World filth.

The underbelly of all these perceptions is the construct of visible purity. When things look clean, spick and span, the belief is that ‘good’ is being done. If there are visible indications of waste, then it is presumed that the place is unsustainable and polluted. Who pollutes, why, when, how and who gains become irrelevant in this battle to look good. This is exactly why the word, ‘development’, never conjures images of environmental disaster. In our mind’s eye, we visualise six-lane, cemented highways, bridges, sleek-looking fast trains, and glassed airports. Development’s positive imagery allows people to get away with murder. We react only when the murder becomes visible through images of ugly affluents, degraded and flattened land, carcasses of animals or disease among people. We still do not respond to the problem; we only want to do away with the disgust that the images trigger.

We cannot tackle the ecological crisis staring at us without digging deep and coming face-to-face with our inherently adversarial and power-hungry nature. It is this primitiveness that drives our modes of association with every aspect of the local living world. This requires hard self-work and humility to unlearn all that we have been conditioned to believe as the truth, starting anew on a clean slate.

Compartmentalisation, therefore, is a non-starter. It allows for feel-good thoughts and actions designed to make us feel better. This is exactly why the axiom — ‘there can be no environmental activism without social justice’ — has to be at the foundation of our engagement.

T.M. Krishna is a leading Indian musician and a prominent public intellectual