The Third Citizens' Report on the State of India's Environment, which looks into the causes and effect of the annual floods on the lower plains of the Ganga-Brahmaputra basin, has attracted some decidedly hostile reviews. But the criticisms therein are disturbing more for what they reveal about the health of the Indian environment movement than for the considered analysis provided by the authors of the report.
The Third Citizens' Report represents a step ahead for CSE in many ways. Researchers concerned with upland-plains ecological linkages have long understood the correlation between various types of floods and deforestation in specific areas of the Himalaya. Unfortunately, the confused correlation put forward by Erik Eckholm, an American researcher and journalist, fired popular imagination and seriously set back public understanding of the ecological processes at work. Eckholm arrived two decades ago and in 1976 published a simplistic treatment of Himalayan soil loss which related all lowland floods with Himalayan deforestation.
What Eckholm had to say was of course a distortion of Himalayan ecological studies. It was a bad joke on the Himalayan population, yet his doomsday predictions in articles and in his book, Losing Ground (Worldwatch, 1976), encouraged the growth of know-all environmentalists in all the Himalayan countries. Truth and seriousness lost out to reductionist treatment and sensationalism. The report is a courageous attempt to marsh all available research to fight such sensationalism. Is it any wonder that the active champions of reductionist environmentalism in India are alarmed? There is need for holistic thinking about floods in the Ganga-Brahmaputra plains, and the CSE has produced a useful document which will encourage the earnest peruser to read further.
Were the authors, in preparing this report, aware of the fundamentalist thinking among Indian environmentalists? Perhaps they were not, or they might have introduced the reader to the types of floods in the Ganga-Brahmaputra basin and described how changes in land-use in various parts of the Himalaya affect them. Perhaps they should have known better, because for many plains-based lovers of the environment, floods are of one kind and are caused solely by the cutting of trees in upper catchment areas, Those who do not find it necessary to. read, would not know any better.