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Women Go Green By - Rina Mukherji Rina Mukherji has spent more than one a half decades (17 years to be precise) in the Indian print media. She has written on practically every topic under the sun- business, politics, science, gender issues, child rights, the environment, films, literature, public health and human rights so far. She has worked for several national newspapers in Mumbai and Kolkata, and freelanced for nearly all major newspapers and magazines in the country. She also holds a doctorate in African Studies, and has several academic articles to her credit

For the first time, the Nobel Peace Prize has gone to an African woman, and a green activist at that. More than anything else, the Nobel Committee’s awarding of Dr Wangaru Maathai is the recognition of the work women have been putting in to save the environment in so many different continents. It is not always that you have a woman taking the lead. We may have someone like Dr Maathai, Dr Medha Patkar or Dr Vandana Shiva on occasion, but it would do well to acknowledge the efforts of the nameless rural women who have made governments, administrations and the powers- that- be seeing reason. Sunderlal Bahuguna’s efforts to save trees from destruction would never have worked without Pahari women sticking on to trees to save them from the axe (hence the name-Chipko to the movement). In West Bengal, rural women in Habra, Hoogly and elsewhere are gradually ushering in a silent revolution by using vermiculture composting to grow vegetables and supplement their incomes.

Community workers of the Calcutta Urban Service (CUS) do admit initial cynicism when they tried getting these women to accept the idea. But the scene is quite different today. One finds the women more than happy with the result. “Our vegetables sell off the moment we take them to the market,” they tell me.

Devoid of chemicals from synthetic fertilizers, the vegetables are tender and sweet. The brinjals are seedless, and extremely tasty, and the spinach has a milky soft tenderness. What is more, the simple composting methods are easy for women to emulate, and the soil gets rejuvenated easily after each crop.

Conservation, of course, is nothing totally novel to indigenous tribal communities. Tribals all over the world, whether in India or Kenya, have always been actively protecting virgin forests as the abode of spirits who ought never to be disturbed. The forest-dwelling Lodhas and Sabars, and the Sunderban-dwelling Beds of Bengal have always lived on forest produce. Honey, wax, shellac are products that cannot be collected unless the forests survive. It is this that prompts these communities to believe in their forests.

Unfortunately, settled urban civilizations have never thought anything of preserving this natural heritage. Forests have been cut down with impunity, towns have come up at the expense of agricultural and forest land, bringing with it a lowered water table and climatic changes which we do not have the means to cope with. Today, global warming is manifesting itself in the form of storms that threaten our very existence. The few degrees of change in temperature in Gangetic West Bengal has gone hand in hand with severe storms that are eroding off farm land in the southernmost deltaic parts of Bengal, rendering farmers destitute.

Big dams have similarly tried to harness nature, causing severe erosion and loss to farms and homes in places like Malda and Murshidabad. We refused to learn from the lessons taught by the Koyna Dam in Maharashtra, which unleashed a severe earthquake in the late ‘60s by disturbing the tectonic plates in that region-the Tehri Dam actually followed in the same footsteps of its predecessor and unleashed a cataclysmic seismic wave of terror. The human toll of modernity affects women and families the most. Witness the Narmada project. Perhaps, that is why we have women working hard to save this earth and their habitat. About time, too.

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