Green musings

GREEN THOUGHTS will not sprout if there are no seeds of poetry. However, G Satya Srinivas’ Telugu book is not a collection of poems on the environment, but an anthology of 26 critical essays classified under different chapters—the Roots of Soil, Environmental Movements, Destruction of Environment and the Revolution of Urbanisation. These essays examine the efforts and expressions related to environmental concerns. In this attempt, the author borrows concepts and conditions from various contexts. He not only discusses the articulations by writers and activists, but also translates passages from their writings.

The author says that natural environment means an expression of life in creative terms; thinking poetically and applying it; growing up and bringing up like a tribe of songs; holding a mirror to the rights and wrongs in life; and, remaining a picture of song-life in the last stage. He describes how environmental poetry became a movement in the context of the Silent Valley agitation and other similar campaigns. He says such poetry triggered a dialogue as well as became a cosmic sound of the environment—between the outer and the inner space. Forest, for him, is a mystical crystal. He defines environmental poetry as the bird’s eye view, sitting on an earthen carpet, travelling in the paths of the skies to find expression on the process of understanding trees, hills, water, fire, air and earth.

Most of the examples he chooses are from indigenous contexts, be it Indian or African or Latin American. He admires the way nature becomes one with people in indigenous communities and expresses his admiration by focusing on indigenous art, medicine, culture, livelihoods and belief systems. He deconstructs the State’s notions of the environment, its conservation programmes and the government’s idea of development and inclusive policies.

This book brings back memories of the Bhopal tragedy, the endosulfan tragedy in Kerala and other environmental disasters that affected millions of people in order to learn lessons from the past and preserve the environmental balance in the future. The author describes the consequences of urbanisation and the disappearing silence in jungles. This book is a valuable introduction to environmental poetry that is closely associated with the ecological concerns and the environmental movements.

(The writer is professor, Centre for Women’s Studies, University of Hyderabad)

Environment is a story of everything and everyone   G SATYA SRINIVAS speaks to Down To Earth You are a writer, artist and photographer. How do you choose your themes and expressions? I was driven to pursue environment and development for 30 years because of my passion. I like documenting the lives of the people I have met and with whom I have been working. A single medium is a limitation rather than an advantage, so I have adapted to different mediums. I choose my medium that best depicts the intensity and enormity of the subject. Each medium and subject is an ocean and thus I take a stride at a pace which gives time and space for me to know about the medium as well as the subject. My poetry is like a sequel of poems because when I visit and revisit the places where I work, it follows the trend of nature as a cycle, rather than a linear approach. I do portraits in watercolours of tribal people, rural women, mothers and grannies depicting their unheard voices. My photography captures nature and places as a medium of aesthetics and documenting those sites over a period of time. Writing essays is about narrating incidents, anecdotes and events. This makes me a complete individual in nature and form. I believe the environment is a story of everything and everyone. When did environment become the concern of your artistic/imaginative expression? What drove you towards ecological debates? After completing of my post graduation in sociology, I got into development and environmental campaigns. In the course of time, I worked with grassroots organisations, international organisations, academic institutions, advocacy and lobbying groups and the media. My area of interest is building community-based resource management institutions, research, and capacity building. My thrust area is community-based forest management. The people I worked with, especially tribal and rural communities, have taught me how to perceive nature and to live with it. In due course, I found conflicts in environmental conservation. Today, green is not green; it has more shades of red. So this path has turned me into a social ecologist with an eye to know the truth towards resolving conflicts. Who is the major influence in your writings? The most influencing people are the tribal and rural communities with whom I work. There have also been several activists, writers, artists who work silently.

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