Environment as a social problem

Environmental problems are also social problems. How they affect people depends on social inequality: status and power decide how far people can protect themselves, and the 'solutions' of the powerful can make things worse for others. The book's case is water scarcity in Kutch, Gujarat.

• Some concerns seem to be in everyone's public interest, like cleaner air or saving biodiversity. But how priorities are set and pursued may serve powerful groups and hurt the poor and politically weak, as debates over large dams and protected areas show.

Social ecology holds that social relations, especially the organisation of property and production, shape how people see and use the environment.

• A Forest Department trying to maximise revenue by supplying bamboo to the paper industry sees a forest very differently from an artisan who cuts bamboo to make baskets. Their interests clash, producing environmental conflicts.
• So environmental crises have their roots in social inequality. Solving them requires changing relations between social groups: men and women, urban and rural people, landlords and labourers.
• Murray Bookchin, founder of the Institute for Social Ecology, argued that nearly all ecological problems arise from deep-seated social problems: economic, ethnic, cultural and gender conflicts.

Sustainable development. For 300 years, development has stressed controlling and exploiting nature for some people's benefit, causing the extinction of thousands of species.

• The Brundtland Report (1987) defined sustainable development as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs, giving priority to the essential needs of the world's poor and recognising limits set by technology and social organisation.
• Development today is driven by consumption: old things are thrown away so new ones can be sold. The environmentalist Sunita Narain warns that this makes the poor look like failures in a 'survival of the fittest' world.
• The 193 UN member states agreed on 17 'Global Goals' for sustainable development, with 169 targets, echoing former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon: 'there can be no Plan B, because there is no Planet B'.
• Mahatma Gandhi warned that if India took to industrialism in the manner of the West, it would 'strip the world bare like locusts'.

Two conflicts where environment and economy fuse:

• Farmers' suicides. The journalist P. Sainath showed that thousands of farmers in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra killed themselves because of combined environmental and economic pressures. Cotton is a high-risk crop needing irrigation and pest control; both became costlier as water reserves fell and pests resisted pesticides. Exposed to world market swings and with less government support after liberalisation, farmers borrowed from moneylenders at high interest; when crops failed, they faced ruin.
• Urban space. Migrants who cannot afford legal housing settle on public land, which is now wanted for malls, hotels and infrastructure for the affluent. Poor workers are evicted to the city's edges. Land, air and water are all contested in the city (sociologist Amita Baviskar on Delhi).
• Example (new): when a city beautifies a riverfront for joggers and cafés, the fishers and washermen who worked on its banks for generations may lose both their homes and their livelihoods.