Ramachandra Guha: Can India forge its own environmentally responsible path to economic growth?

In his 1994 book, The Age of Extremes, the celebrated Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm, wrote: “It is no accident that the main support for ecological policies comes from the rich countries and from the comfortable rich and middle classes (except for businessmen, who hope to make money by polluting activity). The poor, multiplying and under-employed, wanted more.”

More of what? Hobsbawm’s construction made it clear that he thought the poor wanted more material goods, more economic growth, in the realisation of which ecological politics were apparently a barrier and a hurdle.

When I first came across these words, I had spent the past two decades studying what I was now being told was a conceptual and practical impossibility – namely, an environmentalism of and by the poor. I had written my doctoral dissertation on the peasant protest movement in the Himalaya, known as Chipko, which blended a concern for social justice with an interest in the restoration of ravaged forest landscapes. The Chipko movement began in 1973; it catalysed a wave of similar movements across India in defence of community rights in forests, water, and pasture.

My work on Chipko brought me in touch with the ecologist, Madhav Gadgil, who combined a sharp analytical mind with deep...

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