Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev

It is a rare opportunity indeed to meet someone who deeply understands the connect between ourselves and the living planet, and is taking direct action in terms of mobilising people into planting millions of trees, whilst simultaneously giving the practical tools to profoundly change one’s own inner wellbeing.

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, founder of Isha Foundation talks to us in Singapore recently (Video below) about Project Green Hands, the largest tree planting effort in India in the state of Tamil Nadu, and the work that’s being carried out to enable its progress. The project received the “Indira Gandhi Paryavaran Puraskar award,” the highest environmental award in India in 2010.

Sadhguru travels around the world spreading his message of peace and the need for ‘inner engineering’ or change – from global forums such as the World Economic Forum at Davos, World Peace Congress and United Nations Millennium Peace Summit, right to villages in the heart of rural India.

On Earth Day 2012 Sadhguru had said,

“How audacious that we can even think that we will allot a day for the earth! Both day and night happen only because of the revolutions of the earth. Our very body is an extract from this planet. Everything that we are is earth. For human beings who have forgotten that they have just temporarily come out of the womb of this earth and that they will one day be sucked back into this earth, for them, this day is a reminder that you are a part of this earth. If humanity has to live for a long time, you have to think like the earth, act like the earth and be the earth, because that is what you are. 

I am often asked by people, “Why is a spiritual leader, a yogi, planting trees?”  Why? Because trees are our closest relatives. What they exhale, we inhale; what we exhale, they inhale and keep our lives going. It is just like the outer part of our lung. You cannot ignore your body if you want to live. The planet is in no way different from that. What you call “my body” is just a piece of this planet.

The video interview:

Video link here

Here is the edited transcript for the above video interview with Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev: 

Bhavani Prakash:  Thank you Sadhguru, for speaking to us at EWTT, it’s a real honour for me to be here with you today. At EWTT, we raise awareness about environmental issues and also share stories of positive change.  Sadhguru, you have spread peace and joy to millions of people all over the world and have specially initiated Project Green Hands, which is the largest tree planting initiative in India in the state of Tamil Nadu, with the objective of planting 114 million trees that will raise the tree cover to 33% (Sadhguru: We are not anywhere near the number!)

Bhavani Prakash: Why and how did you start the Project Green Hands? What is the progress so far?

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev:  In the year 1998, United Nations- certain agencies from the United Nations made a prediction that by 2025, 60% of Tamil Nadu will be a desert. I did not like it, I don’t like any prediction because predictions take into account only the cold facts, not human aspirations. What is beating in human heart is ignored completely. But I wanted to confirm, so I drove around Tamil Nadu to see if this is true. Then I came to the conclusion that they are wrong because in my estimate it wouldn’t go upto 2025, it would happen much faster.

Rivers which have been there for thousands of years have evaporated in the last twenty years; water table has sunk over thousand feet in many places and desertification is bound to happen very very rapidly. So I thought, what is the best thing to do? The simplest thing to do is, with global warming, temperature rise is happening. We made a calculation if there is increase in half a degree centrigrade of temperature, how many millions of tons of extra evaporation will happen to the oceans. If that many tons of water get evaporated where does it go? It all becomes cloud cover. One of the things that happens is the peninsula which is southern India, will receive excessive rain. When rain happens, without the necessary vegetative cover over it, without the green cover over it, the top soil will go away very quickly and the run off will create deserts very fast. It’s not ‘no rain’ which creates desert, it’s excessive rain without green top (that) will create. So the simple solution was to increase the green cover.

Tamil Nadu green cover on that day was 16.5%. National aspiration is 33%, so we made a barefoot calculation. If we need to make it 33% for the area of Tamil Nadu, we needed 114 million trees. So when I said 114 million trees, people thought I don’t know what the number is. We have over 62 million population. If all of us plant one tree, nurture it for 2 years and plant one more, we got the number. But such things never happen because efforts are never made in that direction. But people thought this was an impossible number.

So as a demonstration, I wanted to just give them the thrill of doing something which works.  The mountain where we are, we are at the foothills of a mountain, this particular hill which immediately behind ashram turns brown in the month of April and May. Because in this mountain, there is no single tree over 20 years of age – they have removed everything. The rest of the mountain is very thick rain forest, this particular hill is like this. Because there was illegal furniture industry taking away the timber we kind of stopped that process. It took a certain amount of social upheaval to stop it but we did. So then I devised a way of planting over this hill during rainy season.

It just took us about 22 to 23 days, about 4 to 5 thousand volunteers and I had to just provide them 2 meals a day and just had to create a song to keep the enthusiasm up and we planted up this hill.  Over 6 million seeds, we planted  in a certain way ensuring that the sprouting would be almost 100%. But because of the wildlife certain amount will die. This whole hill became green in 2 years time. Today, if you come and see, you will see in summer months, it will not turn brown.  Our temperatures have come by at least 3 degrees in summer because of this 22 days of work. So I gave them a demo that you don’t have to give up your life to do this. Making a mountain green, they thought they have to give up their life – so it was a kind of a demo and then they got enthusiastic.

Then I went about speaking to farmer groups and villages.  The simple message that I gave them is just this. As you sit here and breathe, what you exhale the trees are inhaling, what the trees exhale you are inhaling. This is a partnership. This is a relationship without which you cannot do. You can do without any other relationship but this relationship you cannot break or in other words, one half of your lung is hanging out there in the tree.  So it’s not a tree, its part of your breathing equipment. So this message went across to people. They emotionally felt that this is something they have to do because one part of the lungs is hanging out there in tree and have to take care of it. If they want to healthy, if they want to be happy, if they want to live well, if their children have to live well, this has to be done. This is something they understood.

Today, I think we have close to 17 million surviving trees which has  brought in almost over 7% green cover back to the state. This is the official figure. The google maps say it’s much more. So a big movement started and many people started planting. The awareness that this has to happen has almost reached the whole population. The media and people came out in big numbers. The call for green hands planting this year – this is our 30^th year – I told them you have to plant 30 lakh trees, that is 3 million trees, but people came back with a plan and said they will plant 6 million trees. So I said fine. This year they are planting 6 million trees, so about 1,100 nursery across the state in private lands and donated lands, no government help. Planting is not happening in government land – all on private land. We convinced the farmer that he has to convert 10% of his farming land into trees. More food should come out of trees than crops. Right now the proportion is disproportionate so that’s what we are working towards.

Bhavani Prakash:  In another interview, you had said that you spent a lot of time, many years, to work on planting trees in people’s minds…..

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev: Yes, that is the most difficult terrain (laughs).

Bhavani Prakash: ….. before you got them to plant trees in soil.

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev: Planting trees in the soil is easy because soil likes trees and trees like soil (laughs). But planting trees in people’s minds was the big job. The first six years that’s all we did – planting trees in people’s minds. But now that it’s rooted in people’s minds,  it’ll happen on the land quite effortlessly as six million trees in not a small number.

Bhavani Prakash: How did you do that? How did you engage with communities and also what do you see the impact now on these communities?

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev: As I said, it became an experiential process, people understood that their existence is not separate from the trees. We put it across in an experiential way through skits, through plays, through songs, through videos and celebrities coming and talking about it. We organised whole events across Tamil Nadu, so it became clear to people, ordinary people, village people, people who are everyday struggling for their livelihood. These are the people who did it, it’s not some big corporation or some other great sponsorship, it’s ordinary people on the street.

Bhavani Prakash: One question that is asked about tree planting initiatives is the choice of trees and the long term maintenance of the trees. So how does the program ensure this?

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev: The choice of trees in not our choice, its indigenous trees. We have chosen 108 indigenous trees – only trees which are local. We don’t bring anything from outside.  The survival rate is because we don’t allow anybody to plant more than 2 trees. 2 children will plant one tree in partnership. So right now, we have taken up this in the schools is a big way, where 2 children in partnership will grow one tree – which is doable. If you make a person plant a hundred trees or a thousand trees, invariably he is not going to take care of it unless he has resources to do it. But 2 trees is something that he will take care of,  so generally give them 3 and say you must plant 2 and encourage one more person to plant one.  So this has set forth a whole culture today. You will see in Tamil Nadu in weddings people are giving away saplings instead of coconut.  People are coming and taking from us, which is a significant change. How many of this (the) wedding guest will actually plant? The thing is we don’t just give it away, we are also kind of encouraging as to how to plant, what to do and things. Even if they don’t, just the shift in culture from giving a coconut or a fruit or something else, they have shifted to give a live sapling. When a grown plant is given to you, you can’t just throw it like this and go. There is a certain involvement in that and plantings happen. So we are also making sure that they receive that and if they say ‘I don’t know where to plant,’ we take it and plant it for them.

Bhavani Prakash: We spend money in so many frivolous ways, and as you mentioned, in unwanted gifts for various occasions such as festivals and birthdays and anniversaries. How can we encourage our friends and families (to plant trees instead)?

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev : You must do it. It’s very, very important, that sensible and meaningful gifts are given, not frivolous and meaningless gifts. So we have set up a website which says “Give Isha.”  So through giveisha.org/pgh people can (donate) either for their own birthday or friend’s birthday or children’s birthday or other occasions.

Bhavani Prakash: Apart from the scientific importance of trees which are important for combating climate change, recycling air and water…..

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev: No, no, we are not combating climate change -yes, that will be a consequence. We plant trees because we understand it’s deeply, deeply connected with our lives, so the science of breath for one and in many other ways is connected. So the relationship is far more than just its utility, it’s life. Without our life they can survive, without their life we cannot survive.

And as you know in the past, most people got enlightened under a tree so we are also building infrastructure for your enlightenment.  You better plant one now, just in case you are planning to get enlightened. At least you must have a decent tree to sit under. Otherwise nobody will believe….

Bhavani Prakash: I’ll do a Bodhi tree then. (Laughs)

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev: (laughs) If you got enlightened in your bedroom, nobody will believe you. At least you must be sitting under a tree. (Laughs) 

Bhavani Prakash:  In Asia and in most ancient cultures of the world, we grew up with a feeling of reverence for nature and mother earth and that’s fast disappearing in this new age on consumerism and greed, fuelled by rapid economic growth. How can we regain the emotional connect, that love and respect for the earth?

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev: It has to be brought forth in children, in the education systems. We are looking at the planet as a commodity.  We are not looking at it as a source of our life, which is a serious, serious mistake and an extremely crass way of existence. So, if you look at your mother as a delivery system for you, it’s a very gross way of existence. If you look at the planet as commodity, it’s a very gross way of existence. It’s time this is conveyed to the children of the planet because they are the future generations and if that has it happen, then this generation has to get it too first. It has to spread the message it’s very, very important.

Bhavani Prakash: If we continue business as usual it is estimated that by end of this century …

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev: A century…you think it will last that long? (laughs)

Bhavani Prakash: (laughs and continues)…it’s expected that the planet will become warmer by 4 to 6 degrees Celsius …

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev: Singapore won’t exist (then) (laughs)

Bhavani Prakash: What action needs to be taken urgently by every sector of society – by individuals, organisations, communities, policy makers? What action needs to be taken to prevent catastrophic consequences? Can we avert calamity? Is it inevitable? Do we have enough time to act?

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev: One thing is (that) the way we consume the planet has to change. You can’t stop it.  It has to change for which breakthrough technologies need to happen. Another important thing is and one of the most immediate things is to plant trees. Particularly planting trees is effective only up to 33 degrees from the equator, north and south. But south of the equator there isn’t much land to plant, expect Africa and certain parts of America. Nowhere else there is land, but in the north, there is plenty of land. So southern India or large segment of India falls into that, Singapore in that range and many other countries are there. Upto 33 degrees from the equator is the most effective place to plant trees.  If you plant it in temperate climates, it will not contribute in a very big way to the climate change process. But maximum impact happens here so that is where we need to plant. These lands which are within 33 degrees on either side of the equator, this is where we must plant maximum trees. Because this where it makes the difference.

This is an immediate remedy or (rather) it’s not a  remedy, it’s a small correction. But if we don’t even make this small correction then (with) other things such as technological breakthroughs, nobody can predict the time. It may happen this year or it may happen a century later. We don’t know when it will happen. We definitely need to invest in that direction but there is no guarantee as to when it will happen. So planting trees is something we can do and see that it happens and the impact is immediately visible. Consuming less in so many ways has to be done, technologies have to be improved but those things will not happen immediately. They can take time.

Bhavani Prakash:  I suppose we must also conserve what we have?  We are losing so much forest within this tropical belt….

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev: That’s what I said. You cannot reduce consumption without technological advancement, it will not happen. You can only talk about it. It’s not going to happen, because you cannot curtail human aspirations. But you can curtail human population. The tree population should increase, human population has to come down.  We have bred irresponsibly.

In the last 100 years i.e., in the beginning of the century we were just 1.5 billion. Today we are 7 billion plus. United Nations is making predictions that by 2050 we will be 9.6 billion people. 9.6 billion people means we will have to live with 40% less resource than what we are enjoying now. When I say resource, I am not talking about oil or gold or something. I am talking about food that you eat, water that you drink and air that you breathe.  This is going to be serious problem. So 9.6 billion people in another 40 years, not even 40, in 36 years,  is a dangerous bomb sitting in front of us. Either we curtail this consciously or Nature is going to do it to us in a very cruel manner.  If we do it consciously we can call ourselves human beings. If Nature does it us, we are just creatures on this planet.

Bhavani Prakash: Sadhguru, what is true happiness and joy…..?

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev:  No, no this is not ecological. (Smiles)

Bhavani Prakash: (Smiles) No, I am going to link it…

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev:  How can you sit on a tree and be happy? You have to be a monkey. (Laughs)

Bhavani Prakash: How can we connect this notion of individual happiness and joy to the wellbeing of all fellow human beings, the wellbeing of all species on this planet, the health of all ecosystems?

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev: Don’t worry about the happiness of other beings, if you keep this one being happy (pointing to himself), no really…. If you are in a certain state of pleasantness within you, you will be pleasant to everything around you, invariably isn’t it?  When you are happy, are you not nice to people around you? But when you are unhappy are you very nice?   So people are too concerned about fixing the world. No, you fix this (pointing to himself), if this is feeling pleasant, it will naturally be pleasant to everything. So the problem is always – we want to fix the world and then fix this (oneself). It won’t happen, it’s only going to be talk.

Bhavani Prakash: Finally, there is saying that goes like this:  ”Hope without action is just wishful thinking.” Conversely, action without hope is impossible to sustain. So how can those who are really passionate about doing better for the world, encourage others to take action, impactful action, without losing hope.

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev: The thing is, your action should not be based on hope. Your action should be based on your clarity of vision. You know this needs to be done, so you do it. Is it going to happen or not going to happen, that’s not your business. Your business is that you did everything possible that needs to be done. Is it going to happen or is it not going to happen? If you calculate that now,  you will give it up tomorrow morning.

That’s not necessary. (Whether) It is going to happen or not going to happen is subject to many things, but did you do what you could do or not,  is the basic thing. So every human being has to look at this. “Oh it’s ok, if I plant a tree, is the world going to change?” Whether it changes or not, it’s just that out your concern you have done everything that you can do. You have not left anything undone. Always this is so in one’s life. In every human being’s life,  if you do not do what you cannot do, that’s not the issue. If you do not what you can do, that’s a disastrous life. So my wish is that no human being should become a disaster.  Every human being should do what he can do. What he cannot do….nobody can do what he cannot do. (laughs)

Bhavani Prakash:  Thank you Sadhguru for your wonderful words of wisdom and guidance.

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If you wish to plant a tree via Project Green Hands (PGH) : Donate via www.giveisha.org/pgh
Visit Project Green Hands‘ website and join PGH on Facebook

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Further links you may be interested in:

EWTT: World Environment Day 2012: Support Project Green Hands

About the interviewer:

Bhavani Prakash is the Founder of Eco WALK the Talk .com.  She is a sustainability speaker, trainer and writer can be contacted at bhavani[at]ecowalkthetalk.com. Follow Eco WALK the Talk on Facebook, Twitter, Linked IN and YouTube

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Dr Tom Crompton

By Bhavani Prakash

Dr. Tom Crompton is a Change Strategist at World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) UK, and if you’re intrigued by his job description, suffice it to say he has been involved in some cutting-edge research on going to the heart of what should be the approach of communication campaigns – of environmental organisations and those of the non-profit sector in general.

Dr. Crompton stresses the importance of engaging people’s intrinsic or non-materialistic values, versus extrinsic or materialistic ones, to achieve lasting and positive behaviour change. He is one the people behind the project called Common Cause: The Case for Working with Cultural Values.  Much of his work can be found on the thought-provoking website called Values and Frames.org

EWTT: How did your interest in human psychology and environmentalism evolve?

Dr. Tom Crompton: I have worked at WWF-UK for ten years .The first five years, I worked on international trade and investment policy – for example, World Trade Organisation (WTO) law. I was convinced then and am still convinced now that the international trade regime is crucially important from the sustainability perspective to ensure that we are producing and trading in more sustainable products with lower carbon footprints. Several senior negotiators were themselves deeply convinced for the need for more fundamental change to the trade regime on a sustainability basis but they’d say, “look, our hands are tied, we don’t enjoy the political space, we don’t experience public political pressure for more proportional change” and as a result the change that we saw was small.

I think that forced us really to reflect on what is it that creates  political space and pressure for more proportional change, what is it that motivates people to engage with the political process, whether it is to lobby with members of parliament or to demonstrate on the streets or however else they may express their political frustration. Some social psychologists came back to us and said that one of the things they see as missing at the moment from environmental campaigning or indeed third sector campaigning generally, is an understanding of values and the importance of values in underpinning people’s commitment to engage in political process and to express concern about social and environmental issues.

EWTT: In this context can you introduce the work you do with the Common Cause Project? 

Dr. Tom Crompton: We’re working to open debate with a wide range of third sector organizations – not just environmental organizations but also development and disability organizations, children’s charities and animal welfare charities – about the cultural values that seem to consistently underpin expression of concern about a wide range of social and environmental issues.

One implication of this work is that we should be designing or shaping our campaigns and communications, and indeed our entire external engagement, in a way which helps to engage and strengthen those values. These are values which almost everybody seems to hold already. It’s a question of bringing them to the fore, because they underpin not just our concern about environmental issues,  but also the concern about a wide range of other social issues.

It seems that when we activate what psychologists call extrinsic values -which are concerns about things like wealth or social status or image, those values tend to suppress the importance that  people attach to intrinsic values, or values associated with social and environmental concerns.

So there is an antagonistic relationship between these two sets of values.  From that we suggest it is important that NGOs think carefully about the occasions in which they may be drawn to appeal to extrinsic values in the course of pursuing a particular campaign outcome. For example, drawing attention to the money that might be saved through increased energy conservation measures like turning down the central heating thermostat or drawing attention to the social image or status that might be achieved through buying a luxury hybrid car. These are messages that may be effective in encouraging uptake of that particular behavior but are likely to have collateral damages.

This work also points to the possibility of beginning to work across a wide range of NGOs in new coalitions, with groups which hitherto have not really collaborated. Many NGOs can find common cause to engage those more intrinsic values and begin to tackle and remove those things which tend to engage and strengthen extrinsic values.

For example, we might find common cause in tackling an influence which currently serves to strengthen unhelpful extrinsic values at a cultural level, namely, the impact of advertising. We have begun to build a coalition of NGOs working again on a very wide set of issues to ask what’s the role of advertising in potentially frustrating emergence of greater public engagements and more  stronger expressions of public concern on all of our issues. But we might also work to help strengthen intrinsic values – for example, working with those who set the standards for teacher-training to introduce work to help children reflect on the importance of kindness in their lives.

Image Courtesy: ValuesandFrames.org

EWTT: Our society has become so materialistic. Is there a danger that there may be no common ground if we don’t address the ‘what’s in it for me?’ Are people going to listen to messages for less materialistic values?

Dr. Tom Crompton: There are several dimensions to that question and it is a very critical question.  You wouldn’t embark on what we are suggesting unless you are convinced that the problems we confront are really quite immense and will require really fundamental changes in terms of the level of ambition we show to respond to those problems.

If you really believed that a few behavioural changes in the private sphere in terms of domestic energy efficiency savings or a bit of green consumption were going to be sufficient to tackle a problem like climate change, or if you believe that increasing people’s willingness to donate to development charities was really going to be sufficient to tackle the problem of global poverty, then you probably look at what we are proposing and suggest that it is too ambitious.

So the first thing to say is that the scale of challenge that we are confronting at the moment would require an ambitious response and at the moment we are not seeing that level of ambition.

The second thing to say is that whilst it’s true that on some indicators, it seems that some cultures are becoming more materialistic, and are holding those extrinsic values to be more important, in most nations, people still hold intrinsic values to be more important. In the UK, if you ask people what’s important to them they first and foremost mention those intrinsic values. They voice the importance of the connection to friends and family, they talk about self- direction, the importance of self -determination and creativity, they talk about sense of social justice and the sense of environmental concern. Extrinsic values such as wealth or power rate less importantly.  The evidence also seems very clear that these intrinsic values are there in everybody to be engaged.

We recently conducted a study with psychologists from University of Cardiff where we took 750 ordinary citizens from the Cardiff community, and asked them what values were important to them, we gave them a value survey and we picked the top 10% for whom the extrinsic or materialistic values were most important.

We then asked half of these people to reflect for a few minutes on the importance of affiliation to friends and family, the importance of  broad-mindedness. We made no mention of the environment. We asked the other half to reflect on the importance of wealth or popularity. Then we interviewed each participant about climate change, amongst other things.  We transcribed the interviews and sent them a linguist who analysed the interviews without knowing whether a participant had been asked to think about intrinsic or extrinsic values.

We found  that even though these people were by disposition more inclined towards extrinsic values, simply asking them to pause for a few minutes  to reflect on the importance of affiliation towards  friends and family or broadmindedness led to a statistically significant increase in the extent to which they saw climate change as being something that they felt they had some personal responsibility to address and something that they wanted to see addressed because of its importance for a wider society and not just for their own self- interest.

What we take from an experiment like that, and it corroborates several other lines of evidence, is that those intrinsic values matter for a lot for people and that it’s possible to engage them even in the short term. We are not necessarily talking here about changing in values. It’s more about thinking carefully about which values people already hold, which of these underpin a greater commitment to express social or environmental concern, and engaging with these in the course of our campaigns or communications.

EWTT:  Companies often say they are bound by short-term results, such as sales targets or increasing shareholder returns, which relate to the extrinsic values you talk about. They tend to initiate sustainability initiatives only if it makes financial sense. How do you convince them to undertake them because it’s the right thing to do?

Dr. Tom Crompton: It is a challenge certainly. What we are suggesting goes beyond the business case for sustainability. It goes beyond simply pointing to those things that it’s in a business’s short-term economic interests  to do, for example increasing energy efficiency or supply chain efficiency in a way which will simultaneously save money. We need to move to a situation where the responsibility that companies have to the societies in which they operate is seen to extend beyond simply making money.

Many companies are already demonstrating willingness to go beyond the business case for sustainable development and are taking unilateral action. It is of course easier for family owned companies or cooperatives to do that than it is for publicly owned companies, but even in the case of publically owned companies there are examples where at the very least they come together and demand a regulatory intervention or legislative intervention in order to shift the level of the playing field.  In the UK, The Prince of Wales’ Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change calls of government to enact new and longer-term policies to tackle climate change. Members of this group recognise that some steps to tackle climate change incur economic costs. But if together they can change the level of the playing field then these competitive costs could be equally shared across the competitors.

The other thing is to widen our concept of what corporate social responsibility means, to recognize that companies have a responsibility not just with immediate material foot prints of their activities –  how much carbon do they produce, how much tropical rainforest is cut down in the course of them sourcing their raw materials – but also with what you might call mindprint. Mindprint includes impacts on cultural values, and that’s affected in a whole range of ways: the way in which a company advertises, the values that are activated in the course of using the products it manufactures, or how a company manages decision making processes. These include their HR practices and internally recognizing that many people work for business and that it is an important part of their lives. When you spend 40 hours a week in a business, the culture of that business is likely to impact your values as an individual. So there is a whole range of ways in which we are arguing businesses have a responsibility to look at not only their footprints but also their mindprint, which may be even greater than the impact that they have through their direct environment impacts – their footprint.

EWTT: Can businesses exploit intrinsic values in their advertising, and can this cause harm?

Dr. Tom Crompton: Many businesses are well aware of the importance of intrinsic values in building a loyal customer base and clearly those intrinsic values are the ones often reflected in terms of a company’s brand or its advertising. A lot of advertising appeals to intrinsic values in terms of strength of family relationships or connection to nature. The report we produced last year called ‘Think of Me as Evil’ was an attempt to open some of these ethical debates as they relate to advertising. Nobody knows for sure what the cultural or social impact of advertising that appeals to intrinsic values are, but some of the social psychologists we have worked with constructed quite persuasive arguments that actually such ads may be unhelpful. What these ads may actually serve to do is to increase people’s cynicism about intrinsic values or to create the impression that those values, when they come from elsewhere, are being deployed manipulatively in order to get them to do something; whether that’s to buy a product or to show some act of kindness.  So it seems that there are dangers in deploying intrinsic values in pursuit of commercial interest.

EWTT: What about the behaviour or governments? How do you convince governments to look for alternative indicators of growth outside of GDP or overcome their fear of losing competitive advantage?

Dr. Tom Crompton: I agree with you fully on this. Those were precisely the constraints we hear from senior policy makers or decision makers in the trade regime. We would be arguing that at least for us in the UK we should be taking a unilateral stand in multilateral negotiations in order to help change the regime. What we hear constantly is that, “Oh well, we don’t have the political capital”,  or “there would be competitiveness costs to the industry”: exactly the arguments which you have just been advancing. I suppose I just come back again to our starting point. One of our responses to that degree of political paralysis is that the change we need isn’t going to occur without far more vocal and powerful citizen engagement. It isn’t going to happen unless more people are writing to their MPs, or unless more people are out in the streets demonstrating; unless it is made clear to the political leaders that their own political future depends upon being more ambitious in responding to these things – even though there are economic costs. So our question at the outset was: What is it that underpins increased citizen engagement? What is it that underpins citizen concern? And this brings us back to values.  If a diversity of third sector organizations come together to ask how it is that our cultural values influence our collective responses to social and environmental problems, they could have a profound impact on public debate.

Policy makers don’t enjoy the political space and public pressure for more ambitious change. So this whole work from the outset has been premised on the grounds that we need to find ways to increase public engagement on these issues. I don’t think governments are ready to embrace the scale of response that is necessary to respond to the challenges. But that said, there are certainly opportunities for governments within this and we have been engaging several governments on precisely this agenda.

The Welsh government is, for example, currently asking what are the narratives they have set down nationally within Wales around sustainable development?  They have recognized that they have adopted a series of environmental policies in a piecemeal fashion, so we have a charge on plastic bags, for example, but they recognize as  well that there are some fundamental limitations to what you can achieve by picking individual actions which are often quite modest in terms of their environmental impacts. They see the need for some sort of national narrative around sustainable development. Should this be constructed around the economic opportunities early investment in green technologies such as wind provides, that might give a country a competitive edge? Or should it be built around a sense that Wales has something important to contribute to the world as a small country that is light on its feet and has a strong sense of community and social justice? Clearly, I would argue for the latter.

In the case of the UK government, we are hearing that they too are frustrated by the limitations of a piecemeal approach to reducing individual’s carbon footprint for example. So they are confronting the fact that whilst they may urge people to insulate their loft on the basis that they will save money, they are finding at the same time that if people are insulating their loft solely to save money, there is no particular reason why the money that they save shouldn’t be spent in turning the central heating thermostat up and enjoying a warmer house or flying off to enjoy a weekend break: all of which are more carbon intensive activities. We have to look carefully at the values we are appealing to in trying to change private-sphere behaviours.

EWTT: What do you have to say about the way one should engage on social media?

Dr. Tom Crompton:  Social media is only one way in which third sector organizations impact on cultural values, albeit an important one, and the most easily changed. I think that there are many others, including policies that they are campaigning for, the way in which they campaign, the way in which they organize their own organizations and their own internal policies.

Online groups might begin to look at the values that they appeal to in the course of constructing their online requests for people to sign petitions: what’s the impact of these values on the longevity of people’s engagement, and the success with which they encourage people to actually sign the petition?

My expectation would be that they would be likely to build a more loyal relationship with their supporters when that relationship is premised on connecting with people’s intrinsic rather than their extrinsic values. There may be instances where you can successfully encourage large numbers of people to sign a petition on the basis of their self- interest, but I would argue that those supporters are likely to express a less general, or less systemic concern about a wide range of social and environmental issues,  particularly where those depart from their immediate self- interest, and they are likely to make for less durable relationships. They are likely to be more fickle.

EWTT: How do you intend to take your studies forward? What’s the broader vision for the kind of work you do?

Dr. Tom Crompton:  Our aim is to engage in the first instance a wider swathe of NGOs in this debate. In the UK at least, there is a huge appetite for this at the moment. We have already run over 60 workshops for different NGOs in UK from a very wide range of different issue groups and interest groups. That work will continue in terms of engaging third sector organizations in this conversation. It’s increasingly becoming an international conversation. We recently ran a series of workshops in a number of Scandinavian countries as there is an appetite there to begin to put together hubs of NGOs who are working on these issues and building a conversation in those countries. We are going to be running workshops soon in Australia; we have got workshops in Brussels, possibly in Canada so there is an increasing international interest which we haven’t really gone out to court, this is interest which has come to us really.

Part of what we are doing is deepening our already extensive relationship with academics on the evidence. Hitherto that evidence base has been drawn largely from social psychology but we are aware that social psychology represents only one route into this discussion. So we want to increasingly work with people from other disciplines, political science, psychotherapy, anthropology, and neurosciences and we are beginning that process. We are doing more research ourselves in terms of taking real NGO communications and asking what the impacts of those are. For example, we have put together a consortium of all the main UK conservation groups and we will be working with a psychologist and a linguist to analyse our entire external communication over a 6 month period to ask “what are the values that we are activating at the moment in the course of those communications”.

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About the Interviewer:

Bhavani Prakash is the Founder of Eco WALK the Talk .com.  She is a sustainability speaker, trainer and writer can be contacted at bhavani[at]ecowalkthetalk.com. Follow Eco WALK the Talk on Facebook, Twitter, Linked IN and YouTube

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Further links you may be interested in:

WWF: Common Cause Report

Values and Frames.org 

Video link here

EWTT: Joe Brewer: An Interdisciplinary approach to understanding complex issues

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“It is the people who must save the environment. It is the people who must make their leaders change. And we cannot be intimidated. So we must stand up for what we believe in.”

-Wangari Maathai (April 1 1940 – 25 September 2011)

It was with immense sadness that we heard of Wangari Maathai’s demise after a long battle with cancer.

She was a leading environmental activist and became renowned the world over as an advocate for tree planting and a champion for social justice and human rights. She became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.  As founder of the The Green Belt Movement in 1977 which focuses on environmental conservation and community development, she worked relentlessly for the upliftment of women by teaching them their deep relationship with the environment.

Wangari Muta Maathai was born on April 1, 1940 in the village of Ihithe in the Central Highlands of Kenya. She graduated in the University of Pittsburgh as a biologist and returned to Kenya to be the first woman in east and central Africa to get a Ph.D.

While working with African rural women in the 1970s, she learnt first hand about their deteriorating environmental and social conditions, especially their lack of firewood and clean drinking water.  She encouraged them to plant trees, an initiative that would at once solve multiple problems of managing watersheds, improving soil, providing access to firewood and fodder for livestock and making women self-sufficient.

Maathai soon realised that these environmental and social issues were entrenched in the larger political context of corruption and erosion of community values.  She and other pro-democracy advocates fought valiantly with the dictatorial regime of Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi, who repeatedly harassed her and got her jailed. In December 2002, she was elected Member of Parliament in the country’s first ever democratic elections and later become the Minister of Environment. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace.

Much has been written about her and the numerous awards and honours she has been bestowed with, including her various involvements such as the United Nations Environment Program’s The Billion Tree Campaign, the target for which is now 14 billion trees.

I’d like to mention one important campaign in 1989 by Wangari Maathai against the construction of a 60 story skyscraper in Uhuru (“Freedom”) Park situated in downtown Nairobi, which is referenced here in the beautiful poem below.  It has been written by a young East African poet, Lorot Salem, on the occasion of  International Women’s Day on 8th March 2011.

You need no introduction, Mama
As lawyers will say, ” We take judicial notice”
For you are not only a household-name in Kenya
But also as far as Tajikistan.

I was at Uhuru Park the other day
And as I lay on green grass and stared at the blue skies
A nudging thought ate my mind:
What if your hair hadn’t been pulled?
What if you hadn’t been whipped and tear-gassed?
What if you hadn’t put your life on the line?

Hongera Mama Wangari Maathai
Thank you for that heroic act.

Oft-times I see you on telly
That broad smile, that motherly head-gear
You talking about our trees, our rivers
And our grandchidren
In you, I don’t see a person
Instead I see a generation of children unborn
In you, I don’t see Kenya
Instead I see our world and its beauty

Sadly, too, Mama
Behind you on the telly I see a shadow
Of an axe felling a forest,  Highrise building on a wet area
Behind you I see a plume of Greenhouse Gases
Behind you I see an Enviro-assassin, most devious
Most vile

But again, Mama, hongera
For fighting for Uhuru Park:
For in that one single act
We escape the concrete jungle
And if Nature be for us, we are on the right path.

In deed, you need no introduction
As the Nairobi morning sun kisses Uhuru Park
As the birds chirp, tired souls sleep on grass
As children row their midget boats
As the tranquility tiptoes to numbed minds
Somehow, your name is immortalized
Hongera Mama Wangari Maathai.

Hongera– A Kiswahili word for thank you, congratulations.
Mama– A Kiswahili word for mum, it is a respected title for a mother.

by Lorot Salem, Echoes of the Hill

Hongera Mama, Wangari Maathai, you will be deeply missed.  We shall never forget your words,
“I will be a hummingbird. I will always do my best.”

Video link here

And we hope that your message and work will be carried on by a new generation of enviornmental champions.

Further links you may be interested in:

1. Trailer of Taking Root, A movie on the vision of Wangari Maathai

Video link here

2.  Planting Ideas Action Guide to spread the Green Belt Movement

3.  Books by Wangari Maathai:

a. The Green Belt Movement: Sharing the Approach and the Experience (2003),

b.  Unbowed (2006),

c. The Challenge for Africa (2008),

d. Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing Ourselves and the World(2010).

4.  CNN Video: Wangari Maathai Revealed

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Pavan Sukhdev, unlike most economists, has a strong passion to make Nature count. He’s on an important mission to enable governments, businesses and communities incorporate a sense of the true worth of nature’s services which historically has been taken for free.

Pavan Sukhdev

Pavan Sukhdev is Special Adviser to UNEP’s green economy initiative and lead author of the path-breaking study called The Economics of Ecosystem Biodiversity or TEEB. He is often called the ‘Nicholas Stern’ of biodiversity, striving as he does to put a value on it the way Stern did for climate change.  All this while he’s on a sabbatical from Deutsche Bank where he is a senior banker.

His efforts may well provide a very important solution to the deep socio-environmental crises facing the planet – which he attributes to the triple factors of “market failure, information failure and institutional failure”. These have been a result of the obsession with economic growth, and the concomitant political systems which have evolved as a response to the industrial revolution and that are clearly out of sync with current environmental realities.

Sukhdev is not the first ‘environmental economist’ to put a price tag on ecosystem services or say that economic activity or prices do not fully reflect ‘externalities’ such as the cost of air or water pollution, or loss of oceans, atmosphere and biodiversity. Robert Constanza et al for instance, estimated the value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural capital at US$33 trillion in 1997.

However, Sukhdev is certainly behind a critical and visible momentum that is building up to operationalize this information and account for these ‘externalities’ in the National Income Accounting of countries as well as the balance sheet of companies, so that their true costs to society can be assessed and given weight.

This is also the first time a study the scale of TEEB has ever been done. Set up by UNEP in 2007 and steered by Pavan Sukhdev, the study was carried out with over 500 scientists and 225 co-authors. The report highlighted various dimensions to the issue of biodiversity, including the importance of investing in ecological infrastructure, and how critical biodiversity is to the poor of the world.

The Bank of Natural Capital is an advisory website that is part of the TEEB study. It shows how and why to value nature. The TEEB Synthesis Report , launched at the 10th meeting of the Convention of Biological Diversity, Nagoya (COP-10) , Japan illustrates how the various economic concepts and tools described in TEEB can assist society to incorporate the values of nature into decision-making at all levels.

So what is the world worth? Or rather why should we value nature and bring it into the balance sheet of a nation or of companies?

* We are operating beyond the carrying capacity of Nature, or the ability of nature to regenerate itself. For 2006, humanity’s total ecological footprint was estimated at 1.4 planet Earths – in other words, humanity uses ecological services 1.4 times as fast as Earth can renew them. This is like drawing down our bank balance of natural resources – by living off our ‘natural capital’ instead of from the interest.

* What we don’t measure we can’t manage. This is the reason we are losing invaluable resources in the form of ecosystem services. Unless you put a price tag on nature – its forests, coral reefs and mangrove swamps, we are not going to be able to save it.   The idea is beginning to catch up.Last year for example, the World Bank’s 5-year study to incorporate the value of ecosystems into countries’ national income accounts, was an outcome of Nagoya COP-10, Japan. Colombia and India are to be the first countries to value their natural capital. Even businesses are slowly warming up to the idea.

The EU isn’t far behind. Its 2020 biodiversity strategy is going to account for nature. According to UK government’s National Ecosystem Assessment, looking after all the UK’s green spaces is worth the sum of £30bn a year to the economy.  Bob Watson, chief scienific adviser to DEFRA and co-author of the report, said the assessment should be used to shape government policy at the national and local level. “Putting a value on these natural services enables them to be incorporated into policy in the same way that other factors are. We can’t persist in thinking of these things as free.”

* The top 3,000 public companies in the world were responsible for $ 2.25 trillion worth of environmental damage, which represent 33% of the profits of these companies. This is private profit at the cost of public wealth. Some pioneering businesses are taking the cue to calculate these costs. PUMA is one of the world’s first companies to adopt environmental accounting to show the full impact of its use of ecosystem services.

* According to TRUCOST, global environmental damage caused by human activity as estimated by UNEP Finance Initiative and Principles of Responsible Investment (PRI)  in 2008 cost US$ 6.6 trillion/year (or 11% of 2008 GDP). Those global costs are 20% larger than the $ 5.4 trillion decline in the value of pension funds in developed countries caused by the global financial crisis in 2007/8.

The global environmental damage is estimated to be $28 trillion by 2050. Five sectors account for about 60% of environmental costs – electricity, oil and gas producers, industrial metals & mining, food producers, construction & materials.  Certainly these are numbers not to be taken lightly.

* Economics only measures manmade capital, while ignoring human and natural capital. If we do not assign economic values to nature, society as a whole will be making wrong trade-offs. Sometimes the issue goes beyond economics into the realm of ethical choices. Take coral reefs for example.  Sukhev says in the video below called, “What is the world worth”:
“The problem is that at today’s targeting in Copenhagen, or for that matter in the climate process, we are targeting a level of carbon dioxide which most scientists believe is too high for coral reefs to survive on an ongoing basis.  Scientists have given us numbers of 320 ppm, 350, 380 ppm – only one has given us a number of 480, which is higher than where we are targeting.  So there is an issue here that, you know, we are probably making a societal choice, as a community, to not have coral reefs.  Can economics save this?  No, we can’t.  The last coral reef is probably worthless because, you know, it just is too precious to put a price on. So we can’t actually apply the logic of economics and marginal value when you’re coming to the last unit of what’s left.  And that’s where you need to make an ethical choice.  So here we have it.  We have an ethical choice.  Sadly, this is an ethical choice which we are making kind of unconsciously, if you know what I mean.  We’ve sort of stepped into it and made that choice without necessarily having thought through the consequences.”

* Nature is very important for the most vulnerable sections of society – a point that Sukhdev often makes. In Sukhdev’s words,” We may dismiss ecosystem services as only ’10-20% of GDP’, but they are actually ‘50-90% of the GDP of the poor’. Preserving ecosystem services is critical for the livelihood of the poor.

For a detailed understanding of the issue, do watch the excellent and comprehensive talk by Pavan Sukdhev at the Sydney Opera House. It was organised by Centre for Policy Development (CPD), Australia.

What is the world worth? from teeb4me on Vimeo.

The full transcript of the speech has been generously made available by CPD here.

About the writer:

Bhavani Prakash is the Founder of Eco WALK the Talk.com, an economist in her previous avatar, who also strongly believes that nature should be made to count. She’s a sustainability writer, trainer and speaker and can be contacted at bhavani[at] ecowalkthetalk.com Join EWTT on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Further links you may be interested in:

EWTT: Challenges and Prospects for a Green Economy

Teeb(The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity) report, TEEB website,Facebook page, Bank of Natural Capital website , Pavan Sukhdev’s blog

YouTube: Pavan Sukhdev on the Invisible Economy

Video link here

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Shailendra Yashwant (Photo by Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert)

Shailendra Yashwant is Campaign Director of Greenpeace Southeast Asia and founding member of the Greenpeace offices in India and Southeast Asia. The Southeast Asia office manages about 120 staff including campaigners and fund raisers.

Based in Bangkok, Yashwant currently oversees a range of campaigns including climate change, renewable energy, forests, clean water and sustainable agriculture in the Southeast Asian region. He is an award winning photojournalist, and has been involved with key environmental movements in India, Nepal and Bangladesh before he joined Greenpeace in 1998.

Greenpeace International, with offices in over 40 countries is one of the world’s leading non-governmental environmental organisations.  It takes no corporate sponsorship or government grants, with its entire funding sourced directly from the general public.

Yashwant talked to us during his visit to Singapore last month, where he had been invited as a speaker at the first ever Climate Change Summit for the Asia’s Insurance Industry.

BP:  How do you see the various faces of Greenpeace, whose activism can range from “in your face” demonstrations that often gives it an eco-terrorist image, to “pin-striped suit” negotiations with businesses and governments?

SY: Greenpeace celebrates its 40th anniversary in October 2011. Fortunately, our core value of non-violence is such a solid part of our profile for the last 4 decades that the eco-terrorist label never sticks – it’s like water off duck’s back, really .

Our campaigning has always been based on an IDEAL approach – Investigate, Document, Expose, take Action and Lobby. We are well known for our meticulous investigations and systematic scientific research.

We even we have an independent science lab based in the University of Exeter in England and in fact we are considering setting up a science unit for Southeast Asia in Singapore, if we get the permission to do so .

Lobbying is an important part of our campaigning style. In fact, we are as comfortable in our orange overalls while taking direct action as we are in pin-striped suits which we have to wear regularly to engage with executives of our targets companies, senior government officials and attend UN conferences where we have observer status.

I remember the first UN meeting I attended, when we demanded a ban on all F-gases. That’s the first intervention that Greenpeace or any international environmental organisation for that matter did on climate change. Greenpeace has even developed solutions like GreenFreeze , the world’s first CFC free refrigerator that is now a norm in the industry.

BP: How has Greenpeace evolved over the years?

SY: Our style of protests also known as direct action, has certainly changed and evolved. We still protest at the sites of environmental crime to show what is endangered or threatened , like chaining ourselves to bulldozers in forests or blocking pipes that release toxic effluents in rivers.

What has evolved in last four decades is the technology and lately we’ve begun using the power of social network to involve more people in our protests.

In 2009 we ran a hugely successful online campaign targeting Unilever. We made a spoof video of their television commercial for Dove soap, to bring attention to the fact that products like soap, shampoo, chocolates used palm oil, a product that came from forest destruction in places like Indonesia. We were demanding that multinational companies like Unilever, Nestle and others stop buying palm oil from companies that were involved in forest destruction for expanding their plantations in Indonesia.

It was amazing to see the video viral on social networks with more than 300,000 people writing to Unilever echoing our demands. The company had very little choice but to listen to the demands of their consumers.

We repeated this tactic with the Kitkat campaign targeting Nestle on the same issue with tremendous results again last year.

Our business is to communicate the environmental crisis, and to reach out to more and more people to engage on these critical issues. We think that reaching out to huge numbers is now possible.

[Click here for EWTT's summary of the Nestle KitKat campaign.

Read also the latest success of Greenpeace's campaign here to get palm oil conglomerate Golden Agri Resources, to commit not to clear peatlands and forests of High Conservation Value]

BP: Do you also find that the attitudes of governments and businesses have changed over the years, especially towards Greenpeace?

SY: Absolutely. This paradigm shift that everyone is talking about has already started happening. I think that governments are willing to listen because the impacts are obvious.

Industrial effluents at Vapi (Photo by Shailendra Yashwant)

For example, in the state of Gujarat in India, at what is known as the Golden Corridor that stretches from Vapi to Ankleshwar– a major hub of chemical industries , that manufactures intermediary chemical compounds for export.

We began investigating by first documenting impacts, by taking pictures of red cows and blue dogs, and farmers and fishermen suffering from skin diseases. Later we tested water in the rivers to discover high toxic content due to direct release of effluents from the chemical factories. We released the results of our investigations, including the pictures and then took direct action by blocking pipes that were discharging in the rivers. Nothing happened. We were pushed back from Gujarat.

A few years later, the number of women suffering from miscarriages increased dramatically and an alarming rise in health disorders were reported. That got people worried. Now they were calling for the reports that were released 10 years earlier about the harmful effects of dyes and chemicals released in the rivers. The local Pollution Control Board is actually now on our side. The first 5 years, they were against me. So you see these little shifts. They are not tectonic but they are happening. We are not anywhere near saving the planet yet of course.

[Vapi appeared in 2006 & 2007 in the Blacksmith's Institute's List of Top 10 of Worst Polluted Places and also cited by Mother News Network in 2011 as one of the 15 most toxic places in the world to live]

BP: How is your current campaign against deforestation in Indonesia shaping up in the context of REDD-plus?  What kind of legal or market frameworks would you like to see in place?

SY: First of all, we want all stakeholders to be involved. We can’t just have governments and businesses sitting down together without the indigenous peoples and communities, local government and civil society. These people have to be involved for any decision making. Don’t jump into the carbon markets and make promises, but involve all stakeholders. Don’t give any more new concessions till such a joint discussion takes place. Also, don’t allow the existing concessions to be cleared. Before anything else, we need to reassess what is really left, what can be protected, put a value to the forests especially when it is reduced to this size. These three are key: stakeholder involvement, a moratorium that allows a full assessment, and in many parts of the world we don’t want the REDD or post Cancun money that is coming in to become an excuse for developed countries to continue emitting.

In fact, we’re saying only those countries which have shown a track record of reducing their carbon emissions should be allowed to participate in these schemes.
Nothing much happened in Cancun, by the way. We’re focussing now on the bilateral deals, for example, the Norway-Indonesia deal and the Australia-Indonesia deal only because you have to show the Indonesian government and the local governments and players that there is a value to standing forests. You can actually make money from a standing forest. It’s unfortunately all about money.

[Click here for the joint Friends of the Earth FOE and Greenpeace's document, "REDD: The realities in black and white"]

BP: You’re also campaigning for increasing the uptake of renewable energies in the region. Where would you like to see change?

SY: We’d like to see governments revisiting their GDP projections, this growth-linked fossil fuel use projections. What are your real energy requirements, where are they going to come from? Stop thinking grid.

Netherlands is the best example of how each building or community has its own little energy production centre. They are therefore responsible for how it is run, whether it is polluting or not, whether it is green or not.

We want to see existing technology, not rocket science. Our Energy [R]evolution document shows there are existing technologies whether wind, solar, biomass, microhydro – all these alternative energy production systems that can meet our requirements.

[Click here to read more about Greenpeace's Energy [R]evolution campaign]

BP: What is the main impediment to the shift to renewables?

SY: It is government subsidies to fossil fuel. And you can see that in many countries – the coal industry is practically running the governments, for example in Indonesia. After a lot of campaigning in India, they’ve declared ‘no go’ zones in Indian forests.  The Indian Environment Minister, Jairam Ramesh’s latest statement that we will protect Indian forests from coal mining in forests, which is very good. However, Indian companies such as the state owned Coal India and Tata Power in the private sector are now buying coal mines in Indonesia.

BP: Because you’re in charge of the Greenpeace Southeast Asia, you’re able to see what’s happening at a regional level more clearly!

SY: Absolutely. The biggest impediment to renewables is the clout of these industries.

BP: What are you thoughts on the Nuclear Liability Bill in India which seeks to limit the maximum liability in case of a nuclear accident?

SY: Everyone who is worried about this bill is genuinely worried. This is not only about hazards associated with nuclear waste and accidents, it’s also about public finance. Whose money are you spending?

No new nuclear power plant in the last 15 years has been built within the projected costs or within the projected time.    Despite this, the massive public protest for the biggest nuclear power plant proposed in Jaitapur, India for 10,000MW is being suppressed.

BP: What are your ecological agriculture campaigns in Thailand and Phillipines?

Ifugao GMO free Rice Terraces in Phillipines

SY: While campaigning against GMOs, we’re working with a number of farmers in Thailand and the Philippines. On the rice terraces in Ifugao, Phillipines, we got the local government to announce it to be GM free. The area is a UN World Heritage site. The region has the best organic farmers for centuries.

Unfortunately, there are industries in the area waiting to sell their chemical fertilisers and pesticides, but we have blocked them. Right now our sustainable agriculture work is in blocking GMOs and spreading awareness about the effects of chemical fertilisers, not only on food, but also on water.

The biggest threat to water in Indonesia in fact, is the agriculture runoffs. So we’re still developing a larger campaign where we go beyond saying no to GMOs and talk about what organic and ecological agriculture really means, what sustainability actually means when applied practically.

[Click here to read more about Greenpeace Phillipines' anti-GMO campaign]

BP: What are your plans for the region?

SY: In Southeast Asia, we currently have offices in Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. In fact, Greenpeace Southeast Asia marked its 10 years of campaigning in the region in 2010. In the near future, we are looking into setting up offices in Singapore and Malaysia. We also have offices in India, East Asia which include China, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea.

BP: Could you tell us about the Mitra Foundation that you are personally involved with?

SY: Mitra Foundation is my pet project back home in India, where together with my wife and a few friends who call ourselves Mitras, have been helping educational campuses raise ‘energy conscience’ amongst their students by implementing energy efficiency measures while phasing in the use of renewable energy to meet the energy needs.

We have had modest success as at least 3 campuses in Bangalore and Pune, of the five that we have been working at. They have not only improved energy efficiency but also installed solar and micro wind energy systems.

We are very excited about setting up ‘solar libraries’ at Adivasi (indigenous people) schools of Dahanu in Maharashtra , who have no access to books or electricity. You can find out more about our work at www.mitrafoundation.org

BP: What gives you hope for the future?

SY: Personally, I get my energy from meeting young people around the world. It’s their dynamism, enthusiasm and excitement for a better tomorrow that keep me going.

You will agree that we have far more people alive today, due to better education and exposure to a variety of new ideas, techniques and methods. I believe that we have far more creative potential than ever before, which gives me hope that we can find whole new ways of living on the planet sustainably.

Links to follow:

Website:  Greenpeace Southeast Asia
Facebook: Greenpeace Southeast Asia (Thailand), Greenpeace India, Greenpeace Indonesia, Greenpeace Phillipines, Greenpeace International

Connect with Shailendra Yashwant through his blog and on Twitter

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About the interviewer:

Bhavani Prakash is the Founder of Eco WALK the Talk .com. She is passionate about the role of individuals and communities in bringing about the much needed change we need to see in the world. She was an economist in her previous avatar, and is now an environmental and social justice activist using social media as well as offline community participation in her advocacy of a greener, fairer and happier planet. She writes and conducts talks and workshops on sustainability and can be contacted at bhavani[at]ecowalkthetalk.com. Follow Eco WALK the Talk on Facebook, Twitter, Linked IN and YouTube

Further links you may be interested in:

1.        Environmental Justice – A Photo Essay by Shailendra Yashwant

Scribd link here

2. Breakfast Grille Podcast with Shailendra Yashwant , “ Saving the World Step by Step, Inch by Inch”

Shailendra Yashwant talks on this Podcast about Green Peace’s campaigns, strategies and some of its ‘wins’

3. Articles by Shailendra Yashwant:
The Nation: Indonesia’s bold attempt to prevent deforestation

InfoChange India News Toxic Tours – II: Alang: Death zone (Hazards of Ship Breaking)

4. BBC: Orangutan survival and the shopping trolley “Shailendra Yashwant, Greenpeace director for Southeast Asia, said this illegal logging is widespread and includes major suppliers to the UK’s food and household product market. ”We want the Indonesian government to immediately announce a moratorium on further deforestation…beginning with peat lands.”

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Sanjit Roy, popularly known as “Bunker” (his childhood nickname), is the brains and inspiration behind Barefoot College, a path-breaking example of how education can be simplified and yet made relevant for economically deprived and socially backward sections of society.

Barefoot College takes in illiterate or semi-illiterate men, women and children, often from remote villages and trains them to become self-employed as solar engineers, teachers, pathologists, IT workers, managers and accountants.

Barefoot solutions’  broadly cover “solar energy, water, education, health care, rural handicrafts, people’s action, communication, women’s empowerment and wasteland development.”

Originally founded in 1971 in Tilonia, a small village in Rajasthan, the solar powered College today has twenty centers in thirteen Indian states. In addition, it also serves countries such as Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Bhutan, and Sierra Leone.

The driving ideology for the College is the Gandhian belief that communities should be self-sufficient and autonomous. Roy believes that College graduates should apply their training within their communities thereby ensuring the development of these communities in addition to enhancement of their own status. Consistent with this belief, the College does not award formal degrees to avoid potential migration of its graduates to more economically rewarding opportunities.  He finds that women, especially middle aged ones to be better learners than men who are more impatient to use the knowledge to get a job in the city.

Although the College does charge a nominal fee for its services to ensure its own sustainability and a sense of value among graduates for their education, it ensures that this fee is totally affordable for its students. Only a quarter of its expenses are covered from the tuition fees whereas government grants and donations from institutional and individual donors take care of the rest.

In addition, the College strives to keep its costs low, a critical requirement for an enterprise of this nature. For example, graduates of the College’s programs are re-hired internally to the extent necessary, at modest compensations. The difference in compensations between the highest-paid and lowest-paid staff is not more than three times.

Roy’s accomplishments in creating this social venture are even more laudable considering his elitist roots. Born in 1945 to a well-to-do family settled in Burnpur, West Bengal, Roy was schooled in prestigious educational institutions such as the Doon School in Dehradun and Saint Stephen’s College in New Delhi , accumulating what in his own words was “the most snobbish, exclusive education any Indian could have had the misfortune to have”.

His enviable credentials would probably have helped him land any career of his choosing had he not had a life-changing exposure to the Bihar famine of the 1960s during a visit there. The suffering and misery he witnessed up close probably generated in him a conviction that education is valueless if not used in a positive way to benefit society. Despite the entreaties of his parents to take up a conventional high-status occupation, Roy chose to continue his association with the economically and socially backward sections of society, first by digging wells in villages around Ajmer in Rajasthan, India and later becoming social entrepreneur after conceptualizing  Barefoot College.

To date, the College has graduated thousands of individuals who would otherwise have never have made it through conventional colleges and universities due to the lack of prior credentials and the inability to pay requisite fees. Such is the power of social entrepreneurship to transform lives that profit-driven institutions have bypassed.

For his outstanding efforts to further social entrepreneurship at the grass-roots level, he was chosen as The 2010 Time 100 as one of hundred people who most affect our world.

Video link here.

To know more about Barefoot College and their initiatives, please visit their website.

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About the Writer:

Sanjukta Basu is studying her MBA in California State University with a possibility of a minor in Sustainability and Innovation. She likes Nature, photography and music, and lives in Berkeley, California, USA with her husband and two sons.

Photo Courtesy : Barefoot College on Flickr

Further links you may be interested in:

1. EWTT: Anshu Gupta’s GOONJ: Recycling Urban Waste for the Rural Poor

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Last year’s Nobel Prize for Economics award to the first woman ever, could well have been a prize for the environment. In the popular Table Talk series with Cheong Suk-Wai ( Senior Writer with “The Straits Times, Singapore’s National Newspaper) Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom explains how community management of resources can avert such a tragedy for shared common resources, with an outcome better than management by governments or private enterprises.

HELPING PEOPLE TO SHARE FAIRLY

By Cheong Suk-Wai

Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom

Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom reckons she has been in more police cars and jails than anyone she knows.  That is because Professor Ostrom, 77 devoted 15 years to studying police departments in 80 metropolitan areas around the United States to see which were more efficient.  She recalls: “I always rode a policeman’s full shift in his car, eight hours a day, and learnt a lot about what went on in which areas.”

The married don is one of the world’s most awarded social scientists, with 36 books to her name.  She now works at both Indiana University and Arizona State University.  Previously, she lived and worked for many years among the world’s poorest people, particularly in Nepal, helping them devise systems to share scarce resources in fair ways.  She showed that communities could often manage water, forests, and fisheries better than governments or private enterprises.

For her work, last year she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for economics, which she shared with transaction cost economist Oliver Williamson.

She was in Singapore a fortnight ago to speak at the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.  I asked her how her theory that communities can be trusted to share things equitably held up in reality.

Suk-Wai:  What got you interested in how communities run themselves?

Elinor: Well, I grew up in Los Angeles where we have an average of 30cm of rainwater a year, so it’s semi-arid.  If you’re going to provide water for a big urban population and you have only 30 cm coming down, it’s a challenge.  So they were drawing water from a groundwater basin – schwoop! – scooping it up.  And the groundwater in the basin was going down.  I watched them solve that through various institutional mechanisms, which took a long time.

Then Mancur Olson Jr published “The Logic of Collective Action” in 1965, and Garrett Hardin, The Tragedy Of The Commons in 1968, and everyone said: “ Oh, citizens can’t solve these problems;  you have to have the government come in and solve those for them.”  But I’d already watched citizens solve the basin problem. Tough, but they did it.  Not that everyone does; there are lots of failures.

Suk-Wai:  Is that because it’s hard to get people to agree on most things?

Elinor: Yup,  But then the problem for me was how do you do a theory that can explain this.  It’s taken a while to do, but we’re moving.

Suk-Wai:  What in your research surprised you the most?

Elinor : That when you test your theoretical argument on anonymous people, with no communication with one another and no knowledge of what the other was doing, they would over-harvest, or collect more natural resources than Nature could regenerate.  They over-harvested dramatically, even worse than we predicted.

But when people engaged in face-to-face communication, they did a bit better than predicted.  Now people are accepting that communication changes the structure of interaction a great deal and helps people do much better.

Suk-Wai:  So engaging others deeply convinces them to share fairly?

Elinor: Yes, We’d get proposals on the table and some discussion.  And they would use the verbal to sanction one another, like, “Oh, some scumbucket contributed more to the collective harvest than we agreed.  So I hope that scumbucket remembers he did this terrible thing.”

Suk-Wai:  But does your theory about self-organisation work in today’s I, Me, Myself world?

Elinor: It is possible.  It’s important to recognise that we do have a me-me-me world but, frequently, it was one theory that was predicting that the human being was just a me-me-me person.  So we modelled human behaviour as always maximising self-interests.   In the market for private goods, maximising personal profit does lead to outcomes that are better for all of us.  And so people then over-generalised because they could show that self-interest produced good outcomes for strictly private goods.  But water, forests and fishing are not quite private goods.  These are bundles and outcomes that affect us jointly.

Suk-Wai:  How long did you take before you had that “A-ha” moment?

Elinor: I never really had an “A-ha” moment. I struggled and struggled and struggled.

Suk-Wai: And now you have a Nobel Prize to show for it.

Elinor: Well, I’m very appreciative of that.

See, I’m concerned about the way we define democracy.  If it’s just voting, then the me-me-me model is either you don’t vote at all because it’s costly or you just figure out the selfish best option.  But if you create institutions where people have a real sense that they can make a difference, they may not adopt a me-me-me attitude in those circumstances.  I’m not saying voting is dumb;  it’s important. But it’s not the only thing that makes a system open, problem-solving and so on.

Suk-Wai:  Is too much education making people more me-me-me today?

Elinor: It depends on the education. What my colleagues and I are doing is trying to build the capacity to understand how and when people can self-organise and do better, as well as how to build research teams.  If you’re a good research team, you’re not doing a me-me-me.  I’m not saying you should never say, “Okay, folks, right now, I’ve got to take care of me.”  But in the long run, if that’s all you do, you’re in trouble.

Suk-Wai:  So what are caring communities like?

Elinor: They have some ways of communicating with, and meeting, one another.  They have some shared understanding of the problems they face and a sense that they have a common set of norms and rules that they will use.  And they monitor each other.  As it turns out, such monitoring is important.

A ‘nut head’ who believes in people
Here is feisty and forthright Nobel laureate Elinor “Lin” Ostrom on:

• Her research “My colleagues in the Department of Political Science never knew what to do with it.  They’d go, “Why is she sitting there?”

• How complex her work is “My collegues would say, “Lin, you know how to model, you don’t want seven diverse types of rules. Keep it simple, stupid!”

• Why she rarely advises governments “See, I’m a real nut head.  I’ve not done a lot of policy advice because many of my colleagues did so without the foundation for it – and I’m worried about getting the foundation first.”

• Why global institutions get little buy-in on climate change “If all are working on a global solution but doing so in the backroom, how do we get trust?

• The one thing she is sure about “ If anyone tells you that he has the answer, you should be a little sceptical”

• One-size-fits-all approaches “ If we really consolidate systems and make everything the same, think of what we’ve eliminated!  Not a good idea.”

• Why citizens should not depend on government for all solutions “We know that for investments, you don’t put all your bets in one place.  But frequently we think we’ll solve governance problems by putting all our eggs in one basket. No!”

• The deepest lesson she has learnt “ The huge diversity and the ingenuity of human beings – let the flowers bloom!”

Suk- Wai:  Isn’t that counterintuitive to trusting others?

Elinor: You have to be a little distrustful to make sure others are trustworthy.  And a little monitoring makes everyone very trustworthy.

Suk-Wai:  So it really begins and ends with trust?

Elinor: It doesn’t begin with trust because you have to build that.  And building that is tough.  Just think about a marriage:  Does just saying vows make for a good marriage?  So people who marry have to decide how to find ways to cooperated and there isn’t a formula.  Soemtimes the wife does all the cooking and raising of the kids and the husband does all the business stuff. Sometimes that works, but sometimes, it doesn’t.  And if each spouse says, “Why should he never have to cook?” or “Why should I always have to cook”, both are stupid.

My husband Vincent will be 91 years old in a few weeks, so he’s not cooking any more,  but he used to be pretty active at making soups, and I did a lot of book-keeping and taxes.  I wouldn’t argue that all marriages should be organised the way Vincent and I organised ours, but it’s been 46 years and we’re still very much in love.

Suk-Wai: So should we junk one-size-fits-all theories once and for all?

Elinor: Part of what I’m arguing is that people would want to have the best way to set up, say, a local government, but trying to use one formula everywhere in the same way doesn’t work.  See, I’m very nervous about saying that any design to help people engage with others is the best because what works in one setting doesn’t somewhere else, and what works at one time may not work 20 years later.  So I’m not saying htat self-governance – or what others call civic engagement – is always the best system.

But I am saying that having multiple levels of organisation, where you can have some oversight, gives you a better chance of having a more robust and adaptable system over time.  So if you have a dominant leadership system that is working, it might work for another 10 years, the basket that it would work for another 25 years.  Human history shows us that there have been enlightened leaders of systems, but they haven’t lived forever.

Many thanks to Cheong Suk-Wai for sharing this interview with us. The interview was originally published in “The Straits Times” on 31st August, 2010.  We are grateful for the permission given by Singapore Press Holdings (SPH), which owns full copyright to this article, to reprint this.

Further links you may be interested in :

Elinor Ostrom explaining how community governance can help avert “The Tragedy of the Commons”

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