"The Environment is not a Spectator Sport. Get Involved."
Bittu Sahgal, conservationist and editor of Sanctuary and Cub gave an interview to Abhishek Thakore. Excerpts.
What is the solution to our energy crisis?
India has actually put together one of the world’s most ambitious renewable energy blueprints. By merging new scientific initiatives such as hydrogen energy research with traditional genius, we can cover virtually all our bases. Options, including biogas, biomass, solar energy, wind energy, small hydropower and scores of other emerging technologies would thus be open to us.
With every passing day, alternative energy projects considered too expensive are looking more attractive because the environmental and social costs are being tabulated. Investments must be weaned away from economically and ecologically failed experiments such as nuclear energy.
Why?
By exposing humanity to extra, persistent, high and low-level radiation through reactors, wastes and other toxic by-products, the proponents of nuclear power are bequeathing increased ill-health and cancer risks to generations unborn. In my opinion, the very idea of generating electricity through a process, which causes random cancer, is tantamount to murder by proxy and should be repugnant to any civilized society.
Do we need to rethink our attitude to food production?
The Aral Sea in the erstwhile Soviet Union has shrunk by over 50 per cent in size in the past three decades. This is because too much water was extracted to irrigate cotton fields. Pesticide-laced dust from the dried Aral bed now blows across farms and fields and reaches as far as the Arctic circle. Intensive agriculture has resulted in Stalinization and water logging across two-thirds of Uzbekistan and Turkmen where a massive irrigation master plan involving 10 million hectares of irrigation was implemented. Every drop of water from the Amu Dar’ya and Syr Dar’ya, the largest rivers in Soviet Central Asia, was diverted for the purpose, but all that has been achieved in the long run is the creation of a vast salt-encrusted desert where nothing, not even pasture grass, now grows. In Uzbekistan now, 10 times more fertilizers must be used to get the same level of crop as farmers used to, two decades ago. In many parts of India we are being presented with similar circumstances.
Is organic farming an answer?
The Green Revolution has browned our bread-basket, Punjab and Haryana. More than 50 per cent of the flood-irrigated soils of this region are about to go out of production. Many mothers in Punjab feed newborn infants 40 times the level of DDT considered safe by the World
Health Organization.
In less than three decades the wisdom of a thousand years (traditional farming), which was based on respect for soils and seeds, was overrun by agro-industry which `mined` soils through the application of mega-doses of water, fertilizers and pesticides, genetically engineered ‘super seeds’, leading to water logging, soil salinity and pesticide poisoning. Today organic farming is starting to make a comeback, but institutions like the World Bank and their co-conspirators—the large pesticide, seed and fertilizer multinationals—are fighting such trends.
"The Environment is not a Spectator Sport. Get Involved."
Bittu Sahgal, conservationist and editor of Sanctuary and Cub gave an interview to Abhishek Thakore. Excerpts.What is the solution to our energy crisis?
India has actually put together one of the world’s most ambitious renewable energy blueprints. By merging new scientific initiatives such as hydrogen energy research with traditional genius, we can cover virtually all our bases. Options, including biogas, biomass, solar energy, wind energy, small hydropower and scores of other emerging technologies would thus be open to us.
With every passing day, alternative energy projects considered too expensive are looking more attractive because the environmental and social costs are being tabulated. Investments must be weaned away from economically and ecologically failed experiments such as nuclear energy.
Why?
By exposing humanity to extra, persistent, high and low-level radiation through reactors, wastes and other toxic by-products, the proponents of nuclear power are bequeathing increased ill-health and cancer risks to generations unborn. In my opinion, the very idea of generating electricity through a process, which causes random cancer, is tantamount to murder by proxy and should be repugnant to any civilized society.
Do we need to rethink our attitude to food production?
The Aral Sea in the erstwhile Soviet Union has shrunk by over 50 per cent in size in the past three decades. This is because too much water was extracted to irrigate cotton fields. Pesticide-laced dust from the dried Aral bed now blows across farms and fields and reaches as far as the Arctic circle. Intensive agriculture has resulted in Stalinization and water logging across two-thirds of Uzbekistan and Turkmen where a massive irrigation master plan involving 10 million hectares of irrigation was implemented. Every drop of water from the Amu Dar’ya and Syr Dar’ya, the largest rivers in Soviet Central Asia, was diverted for the purpose, but all that has been achieved in the long run is the creation of a vast salt-encrusted desert where nothing, not even pasture grass, now grows. In Uzbekistan now, 10 times more fertilizers must be used to get the same level of crop as farmers used to, two decades ago. In many parts of India we are being presented with similar circumstances.
Is organic farming an answer?
The Green Revolution has browned our bread-basket, Punjab and Haryana. More than 50 per cent of the flood-irrigated soils of this region are about to go out of production. Many mothers in Punjab feed newborn infants 40 times the level of DDT considered safe by the World Health Organization.
In less than three decades the wisdom of a thousand years (traditional farming), which was based on respect for soils and seeds, was overrun by agro-industry which `mined` soils through the application of mega-doses of water, fertilizers and pesticides, genetically engineered ‘super seeds’, leading to water logging, soil salinity and pesticide poisoning. Today organic farming is starting to make a comeback, but institutions like the World Bank and their co-conspirators—the large pesticide, seed and fertilizer multinationals—are fighting such trends.