Guest post by ANUPAM PANDEY

“The government said, “If they only planted trees, we wouldn’t bother with them. But they also plant ideas. And I say, it’s true”

Wangari Mathaai (1940-2011)

When the death of Steve Jobs evoked such unprecedented emotions of manic proportions in India which is not even a market of consequence for Apple, it is astounding that the passing away of Wangari Mathaai (a few days before Jobs’ death) did not even create a ripple of interest. But then, in the power hierarchy of global capitalism, what is the worth of the life of an ecofeminist compared to that of the one which is associated with one of the most popular consumer brands in the world?

For all those who have this remote image of an ecofeminist being a loony, tree-hugging hippie, with very little relevance to “real life”, the work and legacy of Nobel laureate Wangaari Mathaai serves as the perfect anti-dote. While an ecofeminist may well be seen hugging trees in order to protect them from poaching contractors, most ecofeminists hardly fit this stereotypical image of self-indulgent agents. Rather, ecofeminists today comprise the bottom-most rung of society in the global hierarchy and are coloured women of the “Third World” who are impoverished and over-worked beyond human capacities, subsistence-farmers who are forced to take on the responsibilities of female-headed households. Their bid to protect and conserve nature is a manifestation of what is best understood as an “environmentalism of the poor”, a strategy devised to ensure the very survival of their own selves and that of their families. Wangari Mathaai gave a voice and a face to this vast invisible majority of women that is solely responsible for keeping most of Africa and Asia alive. In Mathaai’s words, “Protecting the environment is often seen as a matter of luxury, when it is a matter of life and death”.

In my conversations with the womenfolk of the villages during my research trips in the seemingly idyllic Garhwal and Kumaon Himalayas, the most common refrain was how they have to walk further and further (sometimes as much as 8-10 kms) to fetch water because the streams had dried up and the hills receive far less rain than when they were growing up due to denudation, and how the snow no longer reached their village and was restricted to the upper-most reaches of the mountains. Women start their day at 4 am and start trudging up the hills to gather fodder, water and fuel from their ever-dwindling forests of oak trees.

Oak, which is integral to the subsistence of the region has been rapidly replaced by pine which is commercially more lucrative but is useless to these women who are dependent on these forests for their very survival and that of their families. As early as 1950, Mahatma Gandhi’s favoured and trusted follower, Meera Behn wrote a detailed account of the harmful effects of the changeover from banj (oak) to chir (pine) throughout the hill region. A change in the agro-forestry system has also meant a transfer of community-owned common property resources of the people to the state, which has not borne well for the health of the forests. While that was a classic example of colonial interference with existing traditional silvicultural practices of the natives, today we are witnessing globally, a far more violent destruction of nature, greatly accelerated by the forces of globalisation and capital, which are actively in collusion with the Third World state.

The stories across the poorer parts of the world are strikingly similar. Thus, when Wangari Mathaai returned after completing her university education from the USA in the 70s, she was shocked by the proliferation of commercial plantations of coffee and tea which had replaced the sacred fig tree, which is the cornerstone of the Kenyan subsistence economy, and the streams fostering the biodiversity had all but dried up. While the men embraced the export-oriented model, the women were left outside the pale of this “development”, and struggled to keep their families alive.

Maathai was roused into starting the Kenyan Green Belt Movement, which, went onto plant an unprecedented 30 million trees.

What India needs at present is something akin to the massive advocacy and educational campaigns that Mathaai built, which mobilised hundreds of women’s organizations and ripped out coffee plantations and planted fig trees in every bit of available space in schools, churches, yards and public places.

After all, India is the birthplace of the icon of all ecofeminist movements i.e. the Chipko in the 1970s, which continues through the Gandhian Mahila Seva Sanghs (women’s organisations for the welfare of the forests) established in the villages of Uttarakhand even today. Lesser known is the tree plantation movement called “Maiti” which literally translates into “mother’s home”, symbolising the forest, where unmarried girls plant nurseries and trees in the Himalayas of Uttaranchal. Once these girls are married and leave the village, it is the collective responsibility of the village and the parents of the girl to look after the trees as a sacred memory and symbol of their daughter. However, these endeavours are localized and often marginalized instead of being promoted and emulated throughout the country.

Moreover, as Mathaai had recognized, tree plantation was not just about afforestation; it was about women’s empowerment and challenging entrenched patriarchal set-ups, where these women made choices which they considered beneficial for their communities and environment. For instance, in India, a struggle that needs serious attention from the state and civil society is the women peasants’ demand for owning land in their name. Despite the fact that they are very often the “main worker” on the farm, the land continues to be in the name of the male members of the household and women lack control over key aspects of decision-making. If in the whole of India, women contribute from more than half to two thirds of the agrarian work, in some regions like the Himalayan hills, the labour expended by women is a phenomenal three times than that of farm animals and more than twice that of men.

Tree-plantation, as in Kenya, should become an entry point in to pro-democracy and human rights activism, and a platform of protest against corrupt and repressive regimes which are busy stripping people of their resources, livelihoods and traditional eco-friendly lifestyles. It is equally pertinent in the context of global environmental racism in which regulations like Kyoto Protocol force the selling of, as in Africa, large tracts of land as carbon sinks to the Western world. Its people, then, denied of the right to use their own forests and grow food, the resources instead handed over for mining to MNCs for petroleum, lumber, diamonds, bauxite, etc. and the production of export crops of cocoa, tea and coffee.

Again, a chilling parallel to what is happening in India where we are witnessing tribal populations being dispossessed of their natural lands and resources through mining or big dams in Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa or Gujarat.

The obvious support from these people for the Maoist insurgency is a clear manifestation of the increasing frustration of those whose rights have been bartered away by the coalition of the state, international funding agencies and big business. It is unfortunate that in India, we have failed to give due cognizance to the work of activists such as Medha Patkar or even Arundhati Roy who champion the cause of the poorest of the poor and are often even misunderstood as “anti-development” or “anti-national” just because they harbour a different notion of development or patriotism.

Mathaai’s life and legacy of ecofeminism offers the crucial link between between nature and culture where she resurrected the pride of a heritage of an ancient tribe through reclaiming historical, traditional knowledges, logics, and eco-friendly lifestyles; between ecological and social justice by showing that they are two sides of the same coin. Ecofeminism embraces a Gandhian form of protest as well as sustainable way of life that situates itself within the organic whole and finds its fulfillment in its spiritual and material union with nature. It offers a world where the prosperity of one would not be built on the exploitation of the weak and the voiceless but instead on caring, nurturing and symbiotic relationships. Quite simply, Wangari Mathaai’s life itself was her message and India would well to emulate the same. When an ecofeminist dies, her ideas live on long after, in the seeds of hope and justice that she had planted in the hearts of the meek.

(Dr. Anupam Pandey teaches gender and development at St. Mary’s University, Canada.)