One of the most extraordinary dramas of protests is the political explosion of the margins. The margins — whether indigenous tribes, subsistence farmers or migrants — have held some of the most creative political protests, bringing attention to questions on nature, the death of oral language, the reappearance of commons. These protests as performances highlight the drama of stories, of lives the global world has forgotten. The culture of the margins is a culture the mainstream world seems to have forgotten. For decades, this battle of memory against forgetting centred around forests. But today a new set of protests is emerging, conveying a new poignancy. One sees it in the little reported story of the boat people fighting to save their livelihood all across the Gujarat coastline. Corporations are not just a threat to the aboriginals owing to their mining interests, but they are also a threat to fishermen as the coastline becomes corporate property. During the recent cyclone in Kochi, an activist priest told me, “the tragedy begins in Delhi. Delhi thinks like a landlocked regime, from land to a distant sea. For us, the sea is our home. We think from sea to land.” It is a difference in perspective Delhi will not understand.
The power of such a perspective was brought out during the battles waged by Tahitian islanders protesting against the French government’s nuclear testing in the Pacific, pretending that the sea and the deserts are a no man’s land. It is the failure of conscience that Tahitian leaders like John Doom were challenging. Islands in the sea have their own imagination, their own ontology of living, that the French in their arrogant and arid imperialism did not understand.
This efflorescence of protests — the drama of the coastline — has also found a theoretical resonance in the writings of scientists like Isabelle Stengers, Ilya Prigogine, Lynn Margulis, who are challenging ethnocentricity in three forms. They are challenging the idea of Anthropocentrism, that man is the centre of history and the universe. Margulis complained that despite the fact that the Darwinian and Copernican revolution decentred man, his narcissism is still so marked in history that Margulis was planning to start a Trade Union of Bacteria to remind man of the role bacteria play in history. Evolution, she implies, teaches man the limits of his role in history.
There is a second kind of ethnocentricity which is imperial, colonial or Western. Such an ethnocentrism had no place for non-Western knowledges, which were dubbed as traditional or non-modern or judged as mere superstition. The battles for cognitive justice, the right of different forms of knowledge to their own epistemic citizenship, have been ranging for decades. The dialogue of medical systems in India testifies to the power of this struggle.
There is a third form of ethnocentrism, which ignores nature as a person, which talks of man’s interference — intrusion — in the planet. In today’s world, Anthropocene is a serendipitous recognition of the havoc man has created in changing the ecology of the world. Questions of climate change and the vulnerability of marginal groups, whether in Tahiti or Bangladesh, have become central to the global imagination. The return to the Anthropocene combines caring and science to create a caring science. This has been the work of scientists like Stengers, Matthieu Ricard, the Buddhist monk and biologist, and James Lovelock. Their work is a testament of this wisdom. But global leaders have not been responsible to the early warning, freezing these acts of ethics and science into clerical bureaucracies. The protest of the Swedish schoolgirl sitting alone, worried about climate change, captures the indifference of power to the future. Luckily, what was a voice crying in the wilderness of a school has now become a worldwide movement of children demanding to refocus attention on climate change. Strangely, world leaders behave like Rip Van Winkles when it comes to issues like climate change; the responses are stereotyped, belated and yet protesting innocence.
The recent protest of Torres Strait Islanders against the Australian regime might sound quixotic but it raises, once again, the issues of trusteeship and responsibility. Eight islanders from four different islands claim that the impact of climate change is clearly visible in the form of coastal erosion, tidal surges, and changes in the well-being and livelihood of marginal groups adhering to traditional modes of livelihood. Climate change will create a new generation of refugees stripped of their land, language, livelihood and culture. The tribals have challenged the Australian government’s benign neglect of the problem, of favouring carbon kings over marginal islanders. It is also a battle of democracy against the current ideas of development.
The importance of making questions of climate change a human rights issue is clear in the immediate sense, but one needs an imagination beyond the concept of rights, which is still Anthropocentric. One needs an idea of planetary commons where nature, children, the future, the neglected coastline all have a voice and a representation. It is a demand for a different idea of governance where democracy confronts the fact that when it comes to ecology and climate change, stock holders like carbon kings are over represented but stake holders like islanders and tribes are quickly forgotten. The petition of indigenous Australians is a wake-up call to the governments of the world.
India as a nation state has been lethargic about climate change. As a government, we have been bogged down by a short-term nationalism, which blames affluent nations for our problems. While true, this attitude fails to recognize other forms of marginality, of voices disappearing from official narratives.
The question is what can we as citizens do when our government is literally cold or indifferent to climate change, about the paradigmatic problems of the Anthropocene based on an economic policy that cannot think of nature except instrumentally as a commodity of resources. Today, we have to consider citizenship as involving ecological responsibility, not reduced to a spectatorship of protests from aboriginals to Swedish schoolgirls. One of our most powerful and inventive laws was engineered by the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan under the leadership of Aruna Roy and Nikhil De. It is time to expand the right to information as concrete data to a right to knowledge and ask what our government is thinking about the Anthropocene, about climate change, both theoretically and practically. The recent floods in Kerala where Madhav Gadgil, one of our leading ecologists, raised the issue of bio-diversity, was one such lost opportunity. The question of climate change is a wide one. As citizens, we have to begin proactive legislations and create ethical start-ups around the Anthropocene. One thing we need to file as citizen legislators is a right to knowledge on the Anthropocene, a right, an entitlement to knowledge, which can no longer be restricted to experts and states. A right to the Anthropocene, to its paradigms, to crisis management, to laws about consumption should become part of the everydayness of democracy.
As citizens, we have to ask what plans the government has for lowering carbon emission. We have to look at the relationship among life, livelihood and lifestyle and treat vulnerable groups as part of the trusteeship of communities. For the silence of our regimes on ecological issues in corroding democracy, an RTI on the Anthropocene would be a fitting start to citizen politics after the emptiness of the current election.
The author is an academic associated with Compost Heap, a network pursuing alternative imaginations
