Yes Your Actions Matter, So You Better Say Yes to Less!

“Mangalore and Udupi are facing enormous water shortages, despite many rivers flowing in this landscape”, the tweet took me aback. I know these places, they are dearest to my heart. All that can be remembered about these places are the heavy rains that never let us play continuously for fifty minutes of our handball match but still, it was the same ‘mungaru male’  (monsoon rains) which made our journey from Udupi to Sagara a memorable one. This exotic journey of ours would encompass the lush greenery, rivers flowing all along, crickets chirping, leeches,that never let us urinate underneath a tree, and malnad filter coffee at Babanna’s shop. Kuvempu's poem, “Heaven, if you are not here on earth where else could you be!” (ಸ್ವರ್ಗವೆ, ಭೂಮಿಯೊಳಿರೆದಿರೆ ನೀನು ಮೇಣೆಲ್ಲಿಯೂ ನೀನಿಲ್ಲಾ ಇಲ್ಲಾ!), best describes the place.I was surprised! How could Mangaluru and Udupi face such a disaster? I had to know why. And what I found was appalling. River Netravathi, the lifeline of Dakshina Kannada, was completely drying up. Industries, capitalistic tourism and disastrous developmental plans undertaken by the government had abused the Netravathi and its nine tributaries, damaging their sources by building resorts, constructing roads, building hydel-power projects and other water supply projects in the Western Ghats1. It’s the sheer anger against each of these agencies that forced us to write this article.

World Environmental Day is around the corner. One expects bourgeois environmentalists2 (“urban environmentalists”) to plant saplings and deliver long speeches on how to save Mother Earth. Their upper-class concerns, that revolve around the quality of their leisure and the aesthetics of the city, obfuscate the real problem. Environmental concerns cannot be understood in isolation. Every action of ours has consequences. The company we buy ice-creams from, the brand of clothes we wear, the soft-drinks we are fond of, the food we order and the flights we board- everything has a consequence on the environment as well as on the lives of hundreds and thousands of poor people, who constitute a major labour force in the manufacture of these products. It is always the poor who are severely affected by catastrophes ike water and air pollution. Hence, it is of paramount importance to be inclusive while we talk of environmental problems.

Problems like those faced by Mangaloreans is not new to India. Every year, two large states of our country, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, are set on fire for their share of water from the river Kaveri, resulting in the loss of lives and livelihoods. Yet in both the states, Coca-Cola, our favourite fizzy drink, uses 400 litres of water to produce a single litre of coke. In July 2018, the New York Times published an article titled “In Town With Little Water, Coca-Cola Everywhere. So Is Diabetes.”3 San Cristóbal de las Casas, one of Mexico's rainiest places, gets water only for two hours a day, that too highly chlorinated and not potable for all practical purposes, while the Coca-Cola plant extracts 300,000 gallons of potable fresh water in a day. Similar is the case with textile industries in India and elsewhere. Neither do they adhere to labour laws, nor do they care about the water and air they pollute. And, it’s again the labourers, poorest of the poor, who have to suffer for the unnecessary comfort and greed of the urban rich who have miserably failed to sympathise with the destitute. More or less, this is how capitalists have treated citizens in every developing country: by exploiting their own labour, land, water and air.

In a society where we have fallen for ads which out rightly describe black as filthy (cosmetic industry) and tell us it’s the clothes and shoes we wear that decide our identity, when our government is controlled by a few capitalists, with documentaries like “Wild Karnataka” (a documentary on the wildlife in the Western Ghats) ironically being funded by mining companies set up in the heart of the Ghats, where Adivasis are displaced from their own land like pests to build resorts and recreational spaces for the urban rich, all we can say is “Mother Earth and humanity are in safe hands”.

- Swastik P G and Naanavanalla