How Much Should a Person Consume?: Environmentalism in India and the United States

If you are interested in India, and especially if you are interested in the environment in India, then Ramachandra Guha's work is probably your best first stop. But this book should probably not BE that stop.Guha's most recent book,  India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy , is a masterful account of India's politics and culture since Independence. It's just a shame that he didn't give this work nearly the same care.On the contrary. How Much Should a Person Consume? is really not a BOOK at all; it is, instead, a collection of essays written over the last thirty years or so, tied together with the frailest of strings. As chapters or assorted essays, many of them work and have real value. But as parts of a book, they are totally scattered. Here, we see an account of peasant protests concerning centralized forest policy; there, an appreciation of Lewis Mumford as an ecologist; elsewhere, some autobiographical notes; around the corner, a critique of western environmentalists.That critique itself might have had purchase 20 or 30 years ago; today, it is really shallow. Guha's essential argument is that western environmentalists have embraced a "wilderness ethic" that neglects the needs of real people in the developing world, particularly poor people in the developing world. The sourcing is abysmally thin, but even so, it completely neglects developments in US and European environmental organizations since the mid-80's. Many of these groups, think-tanks, and academics have spent years and much thought attempting to make environmentalism work for low-income people throughout the world, and have developed some of the most sophisticated models and accounts of how to do so. But you will not find them in Guha's book: instead, he restricts himself to isolated statements from individuals with broad assertions about their representativeness and precious little evidence. It says something when chapter after chapter that purportedly deal with US "environmentalism" fail to mention NRDC, EDF, and the entire disciplines of environmental economics or ethics. And no, it is not good enough to say that the essays were written a while ago: the book purports to be up to date, and was published in 2006.The book's major value, at least for me, was its historical examination of the shameful history of forest degradation and ignoring of poor populations, especially indigenous tribes of India. But even there, it seems oddly disconnected from reality: there is no discussion of climate change policy, the WTO, or even contemporary Indian environmental politics. And I suppose that that is because these issues do not fit into Guha's quite trite division of environmental ideologies: agrarianism, nostalgia, scientific conservationism, and the wilderness ethic.Toward the end of the book, Guha draws an intriguing contrast between "omnivores" and "ecosystem people", arguing essentially that the latter are subsidizing the former. This may well be true. He criticizes both what he calls "romantic economists" and "romantic environmentalists" and argues quite sensibly that we need some sort of new way of thinking. What he ignores is that lots of people, both inside India and outside, have been doing this. Are they right? Wrong? Misguided? Visionary? Guha cannot answer this question because he does not ask it. He does ask the question that is the title of his book. That is a crucial, seminal question. But he should try, at least, to answer it, and give credit to those who try to as well.

With new clarity brought about by climate change, global disruptions, political revelations and the damage of our poor past decisions staring us in the face, the solid near-prophetic relevance of this text calling for micro-environments to preserve threatened species (bees for one example) along with greener use of scarce resources and safer energy alternatives has become crystal clear. Massive number of references, written at least a decade before the world was ready to read, let alone consider Guhu's recommendations and analyses seriously. Everything you think you know about environmentalism, Guhu turns on its head. A must read.