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For decades, environmental politics in Kerala lived at the fringes of power. Scientists warned about the destruction of the Western Ghats, wetlands vanished under concrete, rivers were mined and poisoned, hills were blasted open for quarries, and tourism spread recklessly across fragile landscapes.
Governments listened politely and then returned to the familiar grammar of roads, resorts, real estate and politically profitable “development”. Environmentalists were treated as obstacles. Ecological concerns rarely shaped political decision-making.
That political landscape may now be changing with the rise of V D Satheesan, a politician whose public life has long carried an unusual environmental streak within Kerala’s mainstream politics.
Satheesan’s elevation is not merely about a leadership transition within the Congress. It marks the arrival of ecological politics into the centre of governance in a state repeatedly devastated by floods, landslides, coastal erosion and climate-induced disasters over the last decade.
For years, Satheesan occupied an uncomfortable position in Kerala politics. He was neither a conventional environmental activist nor a full-time ideologue of conservation.
Yet he consistently raised questions that most mainstream politicians avoided. He spoke against quarry lobbies when quarrying enjoyed bipartisan protection. He defended the controversial Gadgil report when almost every major political party rejected it. He questioned destructive infrastructure projects and repeatedly warned that Kerala was moving towards ecological collapse.
What distinguished him was that these positions came long before environmentalism became electorally fashionable after the floods of 2018. People close to Satheesan describe him as a politician emotionally shaped by forests and wilderness. His engagement with nature reportedly began during his student years in the early 1980s when he travelled through forests and tribal regions including Silent Valley, Parambikulam, Periyar, Agasthyarkoodam, Muthanga and Kabini.
Those journeys appear to have left a lasting impact on his political imagination. Unlike many politicians who discovered the language of climate and sustainability after Kerala’s environmental disasters became impossible to ignore, Satheesan’s ecological concerns were rooted in decades of observation and engagement.
The defining moment in his environmental politics came during the fierce controversy surrounding the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel headed by ecologist Madhav Gadgil. Popularly known as the Gadgil Committee, the panel submitted its report in 2011, recommending stronger ecological safeguards across the Western Ghats, one of the world’s most fragile biodiversity hotspots.
The report called for restrictions on mining, quarrying and polluting industries while proposing decentralised environmental governance and graded ecological sensitivity zones.
Kerala erupted in protest soon after. Powerful church groups, plantation interests, quarry operators and political parties portrayed the report as anti-farmer and anti-settler. Fear campaigns spread rapidly through the hill districts. Farmers were told they would be evicted from their lands. Entire communities were made to believe that the Gadgil report would destroy livelihoods and paralyse development.
Most politicians retreated in fear of electoral backlash. Satheesan did not. As an MLA, he publicly defended the need for a scientific debate on the report and accused vested interests of spreading panic and misinformation. At a time when even parties that now speak about sustainability either rejected or diluted the Gadgil recommendations, Satheesan insisted that Kerala could not ignore scientific warnings indefinitely. Environmentalist Sreedhar Radhakrishnan says Satheesan’s stand during the Gadgil controversy remains politically significant even today. “Almost everybody surrendered before the organised campaign against the Gadgil report. Political parties were frightened of losing votes in the high ranges. Satheesan was among the very few mainstream politicians who openly argued that ecology cannot be sacrificed for short-term political gains,” he says.
The floods of 2018 and 2019, followed by repeated landslides in Wayanad and Idukki, fundamentally altered public perception about ecology and development. Scientists increasingly linked the scale of destruction not merely to extreme rainfall but also to quarrying, slope destabilisation, deforestation and unregulated construction in ecologically fragile regions. Gadgil repeatedly described many of these disasters as “human-made”. Suddenly, environmental concerns were no longer confined to activists and academics. They became questions of survival.
During the 2011-2016 period, Satheesan emerged as part of a small but vocal group of younger legislators within the Congress-led United Democratic Front who raised environmental questions consistently inside the Assembly. Along with leaders such as V. T. Balram and T. N. Prathapan, he questioned environmentally destructive projects, opposed water privatisation, highlighted wetland destruction and raised alarms over unregulated quarrying and land conversion. Within political circles, he began to be described as Kerala’s “Green MLA”.
One of his most politically sensitive interventions involved the issue of illegal land occupation in Nelliyampathy. Satheesan argued that forest lands occupied by private plantations and estates with expired leases should be reclaimed by the state. The demand challenged entrenched plantation interests that have historically enjoyed political protection cutting across party lines in Kerala. Environmental activist N Badusha says that intervention revealed a rare willingness to confront powerful economic interests. “Environmental politics in Kerala usually stops where business interests begin. Plantation capital, quarrying and tourism have enormous influence over all political parties. Satheesan at least attempted to question some of these structures publicly,” he says.
As Leader of the Opposition, Satheesan later became one of the strongest critics of the SilverLine semi high-speed rail corridor proposed by the Left government. He questioned the project’s ecological impact, financial viability and land acquisition model. Critics argued that the project threatened wetlands and paddy fields while pushing Kerala into unsustainable debt. Satheesan attempted to articulate an alternative language of development centred on sustainability rather than indiscriminate construction-led growth. Some of his most practical environmental engagements are unfolding quietly within his own constituency. Satheesan has been assisting Equinoct, a science research collective attempting to mitigate tidal flooding rampant in Paravoor near Kochi and surrounding areas. The low-lying coastal belt increasingly faces tidal inundation linked to sea level rise, wetland destruction and climate change. Researchers associated with the collective have been studying salinity intrusion, flood vulnerability and scientific mitigation strategies for the region. Writer and environmental observer Veena Maruthur says such local interventions matter because Kerala’s climate crisis is becoming intensely localised. “People are experiencing climate change through flooding inside their homes, disappearing ponds, saline intrusion and unbearable heat. Ecological politics can no longer remain abstract. It has to address lived realities in places like Paravoor and Kuttanad,” she says.
Yet the mythology of a “green chief minister” faces enormous contradictions. Kerala remains deeply dependent on environmentally destructive economic sectors. Quarrying sustains infrastructure expansion as well as political financing. Hill tourism continues to expand aggressively across fragile regions like Munnar, Vagamon and Wayanad. Wetlands disappear every year under urban expansion. Coastal erosion intensifies across fishing villages. Rivers continue collapsing under pollution and sand mining. Any government serious about ecological governance would eventually have to confront politically influential lobbies involving mining, construction, plantation capital and tourism.
Satheesan himself has often walked careful political lines. On eco-sensitive buffer zones around forests, for instance, he attempted to balance scientific concerns with anxieties among settlers and farmers fearing displacement. Such balancing may appear politically pragmatic. But Kerala’s ecological crisis may ultimately demand decisions that are deeply unpopular. That is the larger challenge before him now. Kerala has long celebrated environmental rhetoric while continuing environmentally destructive governance in practice. The real significance of Satheesan’s rise therefore lies not in symbolism but in whether ecological concerns finally move from speeches into state policy.
For now, Kerala has elevated a leader who cannot claim ignorance about environmental collapse. He has spent years warning about these dangers from the opposition benches. Now he must govern through them.