Echoes of Eco September, 2016 Vivekananda Kendra- nardep Newsletter Vol:8 No:7

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1 Echoes of Eco September, 2016 Vivekananda Kendra- nardep Newsletter Vol:8 No:7 Extracts from our book Samagra Vikas Development with a Human Face ECOLOGY - SOCIOLOGY - SUSTAINABILITY Prelude Shri.N.Krishnamoorthy The Ruler: Rama, there is a very skewed and lop-sided loading of various sections of the society with social problems. Emotion versus logic, women against men, the poor warring against the rich, Nationalism opposed to internationalism, etc. Much of our energies are wasted in settling the claims of the special interest groups, and reconciling their claims. In the process, the society has very little energy left for productive and creative work. Tenali Rama: To look upon social, natural and biological transactions as conflict induced is a typical Cartesian mindset. Marx, Newton and to certain extent biologists grabbed the mo del and based their social sciences, physics and biology on that basis. Every attempt to broaden the fields of human understanding has shown that all conflicts - apparent ones all -are embedded in a subtler and more fundamental substratum of harmony and co - operation. You don t quarrel with a philosophy or a person with In this issue: Extracts from our book Samagra Vikas The Happenings Visions of Wisdom: How you grow and what you eat? Respect the Nature s Limit Self Awareness The whole of existence Prayer for Universal Friendship Matter and Spirit were in Harmony. Beauty was incarnate. Consciousness alone sported everywhere and there was Bliss undivided and intense - Manu. In doing something, do it with love or never do it at all Mahatma Gandhi

2 First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win Mahatma Gandhi which or whom you cannot communicate, relate. All communications, relations presuppose harmony, oneness and bonding at a subtler level. If we stop going outward and forward and start looking inward and rearward, a kind of simhavalokan, we will be able to find more and more threads of harmony and relatedness. At that level of greater awareness emotion reconciles with logic. Women do not become a special interest group fighting men, they start looking upon their problems in a broader human context. The rich begin seeing their greater good in sharing their goodies with the poor. The Ruler: The scientists claim that they have a monopolistic claim on truth. They decry all emotions as sentimentality. Tenali Rama: In the early years of industrialization, science was thought of as the panacea for all problems. Analytical knowledge, measurable parameters, logical thinking were enthroned. Now the scientists are veering round to the recognition that the ultimate truth after all may be a product of Synthesis not mere analysis. Emotional intelligence is extolled. Tagore talks of lifting human mind to higher level of unity, where the contradictions of the lower level are reconciled. The importance of love, bhakti etc. are being realised more and more nowadays. Alvin Toffler wrote: one of the highly developed skills in contemporary Western civilization is dissection: the split up of problems into their smallest possible components. We are good at it. So good, we often forget to put the pieces back together again. This skill is perhaps most finely honed in science. There we not only routinely break problems down into bite-sized chunks and mini chunks, we then very often isolate each one from its environment by means of a useful trick. We say center is paribus-all other things being equal. In this way we can ignore the complex interactions between our problem and the rest of the universe. This complex interaction is called by Swami Vivekananda the wise poetic vision - kavi s gnanadrishti the integrating vision. The Ruler: Be it so, for the present, our womenfolk are up in arms. They want a larger size of the social cake than they are getting now. Tenali Rama: For the last three or four decades, the World is realising more and more that women are not getting their due in fields such as education, health, social power, share in wealth etc. But we should realise, that empowerment of women for which the world cries today, is really the empowerment of mothers, empowerment of family, empowerment of communities and larger social groups. Otherwise women will become another group, with their interests in conflict with the overall interest of humanity as a whole. We have to learn to look upon a woman, a man or a child in a social context and reconcile the individual interest with that of the whole. Wherever the family structure has weakened, the crime rates against women have soared. When a rowdy element comes to know that a woman is without the protective shield of the family, sisters, mothers, brothers or parent, the woman is looked down upon as a target. The Ruler: It is the duty of the society and the state to protect them. Tenali Rama: Can the State or law have greater strength or concern than the family or immediate community in protecting women? The Ruler: A large number of empowered women alone can solve the problem.

3 The Rich must live more simply so that the Poor may simply live - Mahatma Gandhi Tenali Rama: In History such empowerments have not meant much to woman as a group. A Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi could become what they were, not because they practiced great feminine values, but, because, they copied men and outsmarted men in their own game. Mary Anne Dolan once editor of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner (a traditional male bastion) quotes At a conclave held in February 1988, at the University of Southern California to examine the effects of the women s movement on the media, Anne Taylor Flaming, a writer and television commentator, addressed fellow panel members at the summary session of the meeting, we talk a lot about women getting access to male worlds the power and the money but a part of me is saying Do I want that? Is that what we Want? Didn t we want to refine that the terrain? Didn t we want to figure out a way to help men be more genteel, more gentle? I don t see it happening... What I worry about is that along with making the break throughs we are acceding to the styles of male behaviour. I think it bodes ill certainly for women, probably for men and for all our children. The Ruler: You want our women folk to gain power with the family as the ultimate beneficiary. Will you apply that condition to men too? Tenali Rama: Certainly, every individual can grow and prosper within the norms of the larger social units family, community and Nation. One more thing, the roles of men and women in the social context should not be competitive but complementary. Even the greatest sociologists of the world, many of them women, do not accept the dynamics of gender convergence- the male and the female of a species behaving similarly. They stress the fact that in a family the minor children are in a parental emergency, where the parents have to play their separate divergent roles, a mother as a mother and the father as a father. Only when the child crosses the age of adolescence, do the rights of the individual parents as to what they are free to do come into play. The Ruler: How do you respond to the call of ecofeminism? Tenali Rama: It is a reaction to the shift towards masculine values in the last 500 years. This shift was brought about by the colonial aggressors. From the present position of the world, it would appear that reality lies in the direction of moving towards the feminine. But the ultimate Reality is neither Feminine nor Masculine, but that which unites the virtues of both. The Ruler: What about the yawning gap between the rich and the poor. That is the problem. Women aping men glorify men and concede the territory to them depriving the world of the badly needed feminine touch Sneha (friendship) Prem(love) Daya(compassion) and Bhakti (devotion). Tenali Rama: The sooner it is closed the safer it is for society. The greed of the rich has to be diffused by the force of law, pressure of public opinion, appeal of Dharma and the inescapable logic of sharing. Otherwise we are in for big trouble. The Ruler: Some of the economists say, growth first, sharing later, and that without growth, sharing only means equal distribution of poverty.

4 Be the change you want to see in the world - Mahatma Gandhi Tenali Rama: Environmental degradation linked to growth, the limits to growth imposed by limited supply of resources etc. have settled the problem. When the growth already achieved has not meant anything to the poor, what right do we have to ask them to await greater pulses of growth before they get their share? The poor are losing all interest in growth and development, because they have not gained anything. Further if we equate growth with progress and evolution and equate sharing with communication, new relations are emerging. In the evolution of biological species, communication is inalienably linked to evolution, that is sharing is a must for growth. And the culture of sharing, for long the backbone of our country s culture, can be given up only at our peril. The Ruler: Talk of culture! They say man seeks money first, power is his second priority and culture comes last, when his other needs have been met! Tenali Rama: No, Sir. It is the poor and the deprived, the lowly and humble in our country who keeps our cultural flag flying high. They keep our temples crowded, our social structure stable, and our tirths alive. They patronize our folk and classical music and theatre. The poor and the lower middle class people, the majority by and large practice truth and honesty, keep the crime rates low. Their habit of saving a small portion of their income provides the economic ballast for our National Ship. Their families, customs, usages, rituals, smooth ended into shape by aeons of flow of our National stream give India its National identity. The social interactions of the people and their mutual faith and common faith, reduce the transaction cost of economy by lubricating the frictions away. The world is coming to realize more and more, the economic, legal educational and political functions of the social capital of the society. Culture does matter everywhere, from the crudest economic field to very subtle spiritual fields, where a totally non-quantifiable value system obtains. land man made, artificial, imposed, ideologies as political. It is George Bernard Shaw who said The Indian way of life provides the vision of the natural real way of life. We veil, ourselves with unnatural masks. On the face of India are seen tender expressions which carry the markof the creator s hand. Attempts to evaluate Nature s assets in human intellectual languages and to apply corrections entered man s life very late in history. Some say it started with the agricultural revolution 8000 years ago. Man then shifted campus from the position of a food gatherer to that of a food producer. Others say that the artificial intellectual political interference by man into Nature s free flow came about with the industrial revolution-the steam engine and later. Some would put the date at Francis Bacon s act of convert ing science from a tool for reasoning for truth into a manipulative tool. Throughout the history of man, he has been fighting to throw away the mask and reveal his natural, real face. All arts, spirituality and literature are attempts to this de-inhibition. Stanislaw Graf says even drug addiction was a wrongly made attempt at this deveiling. Anyway politics is a man-made system inhibiting nature. Capra comes close to this idea when he says The origin of our dilemmalies in our tendency to create the abstractions of separate objects including a separate self and then to believe that they belong to an objective, independently existing reality. To overcome our Cartesian anxiety, we need to think systemically, shifting our conceptual focus from objects to relationships. Only then can we realize that identity, individuality and autonomy do not imply separateness and independence. As Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan remind us Independence is a political, not a scientific, term. The Ruler: And what of politics? Tenali Rama: A time has come in the history of mankind, when politics should serve the cause of integrating man with Nature. For the purpose of argument, we can describe, egoless, natural, evolutionary aspects of life as Nature, and unnatural

5 The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others - Mahatma Gandhi Political usages such as independence where nature functions in interdependence have very limited usefulness. Perhaps the future may say that equality is a political usage born out of market based culture, where any object can be exchanged for another, or two articles may have the same money value, though they may have widely varying functional values like honey and rat poison. But in Nature s eyes each living being is unique, has a specific function, display a complementary role to others and is irreplaceable. The Ruler: If everything is going to be politicized, commercialized, governed by market mind-set and market forces, the transactions costs are going to spiral and life will be very expensive and worthless. I know the political and governmental way of doing any work is the most expensive way. Tenali Rama: True! All over the world, people are realising that they are handing over more and more of their civil rights, religious rights and economic rights to the governments. And governments have gained notoriety for nonperformance. We may have to go back to Plato who said that government is best that rules the least. Marx too dreamt of the government withering away in a self governing community. And Swami Vivekananda advocates a society that controls itself. He talks of a country inhabited by men and women who are spiritual and moral and good. It is not strange to think of that country as being above and beyond all law. Today people talk in terms Disengagement of government for sustainable development. The role of Non Governmental Organizations, voluntary sectors, etc. is being valued more and more. NGOs have greater flexibility, less political colour, and have greater contact with the society at grass- root level. They can be used for testing the social ideas, their acceptability on a large scale later on etc. NGOs can serve as a pioneer for projects and programmes, so that the experiences gained on testing them on smaller scales, can be applied elsewhere on a larger scale. The Ruler: If self-governing social ideas are going to weaken the state at the highest level, and if NGOs are going to nibble away the role of the Government at the grass-root level, what will happen to the state, our pride in our Nationalism? Tenali Rama: Sooner or later concepts of nations have to be defined in the language of cultures. The emerging trends indicate, that Nations are defined by their cultures and the State s purpose is to defend that culture. In the immediate context, Nations have to define themselves by their culture of consumption, population control, attitude towards Nature and biodiversity the overall spiritual culture. Herman Daly says, Individual Nations- not the globe- will control consumption by limiting both populations and per capita consumption. Different National strategies for limiting total natural consumption cannot coexist in an integrated world economy dominated by full trade, free capital, mobility and free migration. The use of tariffs and a general backing away from global integration towards relative self-sufficiency will be necessary. But as far as Indian Nationalism is concerned, it is ever embedded in the good of the world, the good of all human beings, the good of all living beings. VASUDHA EVA KUTUMBAKAM.

6 I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet - Mahatma Gandhi Happenings this month: Sustainable Agriculture Happenings this month: Water and Sanitation Happenings this month: Shelter, Green Health Home Training programme Training programme Training on "Organic programme farming" "Cost was effective held Biomanure" Technology was held Resource at Technology Center Resource on 3 rd at Center September. on th participants May. 21 attended participants the attended training. the Smt.S.Premalatha training. Shri.S.Rajamony and was the resource person. Shri.S.Rajamony were the resource persons. One day awareness programme on "Ferro Cement Technology was held at Technology Resource Center on 27 th September. 36 participants attended. Shri.V.Ramakrishnan was the resource person. Training programme on "Decentralised Water Management" was held at Technology Resource Center on 13 th September. 29 participants attended the training. Shri.V.Ramakrishnan was the resource person. Training programme on "Terrace Garden was held at Vivekanandapuram on 24 th September. 20 participants attended the training. Smt.S.Premalatha and Shri.S.Rajamony were the resource persons. Workshop on Workshop on Low Cost Soakage Pit" was held at Kuzhithurai, Kanyakumari Dist. on 28 th September. 65 participants attended. Shri.V.Ramakrishnan was the resource person. Participants eagerly listening the lecture Participant clarifying their doubts by asking questions Shri.Ramakrishnan interacting with the participants Green health home which is very popular with the local communities worked for 6 days and treated 166 patients.

7 The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated Mahatma Gandhi Happenings this month: Renewable Energy Happenings this month: Networking Happenings this month: Paper Presentation Training programme on Solid waste Training management programme & Bio-methanation "Cost effective was Biomanure" at Rajakkamangalam was held at Technology on 13th September. Resource held Center 40 participants on 24 th attended May. 21 the participants training. attended Shri.V.Ramakrishnan the training. was Shri.S.Rajamony the resource was person. the resource person. One day Training programme on Biomethanation Plant was held at Technology Resource Center on 24th July. 02 participants attended. Shri.V.Ramakrishnan was the resource person. Construction of Bio- Methanation Plants Portable type 1 cum 1 Fixed type 100 cum - 1 V.Ramakrishnan presenting the paper on Green Rameswaram Participants eagerly gathering the information regarding Bio-methanation technology Students from Kanyakumari Public School, Karuniapuram, Kanyakumari visited our J.C.Bose Nursery on 26th September and learned Sustainable agricultural technologies International conference on Environmental Sustainability for Food Security was held at Sree Ayyappa College for Women, Chunkankadai, Nagercoil on 22nd to 24th September. Shri.V.Ramakrishnan presented a paper on Green Rameswaram and Smt.S.Premalatha Enhanced fish amino technology Fixed type Shakti Surabhi plant at Chennai 100 cum capacity with Generator for producing electricity Students taking notes TIDES Leadership Summit Making the Difference was held at Hotel Residency Towers, Coimbatore on 3 rd September. 450 participants attended. Shri.G.Vasudeo presented a paper on Green Rameswaram Project. The programme was organized by Confederation of Indian Industry, Coimbatore VK-Nardep stall at Ayyappa College during International Conference

8 There is more to life than increasing its speed Mahatma Gandhi Visions of Wisdom How you grow and what you eat? People in rich countries eating and drinking themselves into the grave. The kind of food that we eat is also important. In the USA it takes ten times the energy to produce 270 calories of beef as it does to produce 270 calories of corn. And to produce 270 calories of corn itself it takes about 2800 calories of energy at all or enough to feed an average Indian for one day. More incredible is the fact that about 16 kg of soyabeans cattle feed go into the making of one kg of beef! So in effect whenever an American eats a kg of beef, he is eating enough grain to feed sixteen or more people in India. Therefore, both, what we eat and how we grow are of crucial importance. P. Makarand Indian poet and professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi Respects the Nature s Limits The original concept refers to nature s capacity to support life. Sustainability in nature implies maintaining the integrity of nature s process, cycles and rhythms. It involves the recognition that the crisis of sustainability is a crisis rooted in neglecting nature s needs and processes and impairing nature s capacity to rise again. In a finite, ecologically interconnected and entropy-bound world, nature s limits need to be respected; they cannot be set by the whims and conveniences of capital and market forces, no matter how clever the technologies summoned to their aid. Dr.Vandana Shiva Environmental activist and author of antiglobalization Self Awareness The whole of Existence Frugality and austerity are neither defects nor misfortunes. They are even at times the signs of divine choice. The vow of poverty testifies to the desire for holiness. According to the Stoics, true richness consists in limiting desires. Most schools of wisdom, and in particular Buddhism, which still prospers, define the acquisition of self-awareness as the goal of existence, and regard moderation in pleasure and attention to an equilibrium between different values, and never the unlimited accumulation of a single value, as the secrets for a happy life. Serge Latouche A French Economist and Philosopher. Author of Farewell to Growth Vivekananda Kendra nardep, Kanyakumari Phone: