Episode 29 - Communicating Climate: Demystifying vs Greenwashing The India Energy Hour https://podcasts.apple.com/in/podcast/episode-29-communicating-climate-demystifying-vs-greenwashing/id1549673056?i=1000575732757 ..Aarti Khosla launched what can be said to be India's first dedicated climate communication platform Climate Trends. Khosla is also Director, CarbonCopy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9w8-M0jJhrA
Response by Leo Saldanha
Aarti Khosla of Climate Trends & Carbon Copy makes the case here that India requires fundamental education on climate change, & the pathway to it is by addressing “influencers” & not the “bottom of the pit”, i.e., the wide public. This phrasing might attract attention; particular of “influencers”, who I have begun to notice of late include a variety of international foundations that are keen to pushing India’s mature Envtl jurisprudence to subordinate to market forces.
Aarti’s narrative here does more disservice to multiple efforts that have been underway to ensure there are fundamental transformations that the country will adopt to not contribute to global warming, as AKN Reddy, Anil Agarwal, Vandana Shiva, etc. have eloquently argued already in the 1980s, and I fear mocks the extraordinary struggles Medha Patkar, Vimal Bhai, Dr. G D Agarwal, Sundarlal BAHUGUNA, Madhav Gadgil, etc. have initiated based on a deep understanding of the short term and long term implications of extractivist, capitalised & hegemonic developmental choices.
Through all this, the public at large have not been the “bottom of the pit”, as Aarti chooses to characterise them. Instead they are to me farmers, pastoralists, adivasis, fisherfolk, etc., who by building political landscapes of their lived awareness and who by their very way of living, have contributed immensely to save this planet.
If the country is the way it is, it is not because the political, corporate and bureaucratic sectors do not know the implications of their decisions. They do, and have known for decades, ever since Nehru warned the country of the “disease of gigantism”, and Kumarappa argued for an economy that would build wealth ground up.
Taking all this into context, it would really help if influencers like Aarti did duly extend credit where it is due, and not, as is the narrative in this podcast, present a view that the media in general, and the public at large, do not know of global warming (or it’s politically neutral sexed up expression generated by American corporations- climate change).
Everyone does. And I have learned immensely from such awareness in the corridors of bureaucratic and political power, in grasslands of Challakere, in the coastal commons of Padubidri, in the high reaches of Munsiari, from the most subtle lives of fishing communities in Loktak, from the landfill impacted communities in Bangalore, etc etc. And this is not recent. I have learned how Nagesh Hegde has written for decades in Prajavani and Sudha about such matters, in Kannada, a scheduled language of India which is unfortunately dubbed as so called vernacular.
Indian environment, public health and social justice movements have for long articulated the need for a socially just, ecologically wise, economically inclusive, culturally rich and democratically deeply decentralised process to ensure humanity thrives without hurting the planet, and the consequences of global warming one of which is climate change, is well articulated and for long
TERI - The Energy and Resources Institute may have come of late into such awareness and that’s good. But to present that institution as the bulwark of environmental renaissance in the country, is clearly an act that does great disservice to the wealth of experience and knowledge that is everywhere.
If all this is not finding place in powerful centres of decision making which are ruining the nation and its futures by their socially unjust and environmentally harsh decisions based on extractivist beliefs in GDP growth in perpetuity, the problem lies in the political process, not the lack of awareness amongst the people.
