[Reader-list] Why I Won't Be Turning Out My Lights During Earth Hour

[Pheeta Ram]

Very, very interesting! I don't need to sound pedantic to underline the
politics of the "earth hour."
Its...its...i don't know! Its the worst form of dirty politics that i can,
atleast, think of!  EARTH HOUR!
But, guy! I don't have any electricity in my thatched home that i call a
home. Neither any water supply!
I have always drank from the springs and never have had any government
representative come to my hut to
fetch my children for school! I am told, India, that people call their
country, was under foreign rule, and its only now
that it has managed to come out of the yoke of the British. But, as far as i
know and so do my ancestors and their ancestors
 before them, the things have always been like this. No body has bothered to
provide us with clean water, a better dwelling place
as also a "school" as they name a place where children are groomed to be
'obedient' citizens. Now, these government representatives come to our huts
and have the temerity to bark at us that we are the 'subjects' or 'citizens'
of a country called 'India' and we need to get out of the places our
ancestors have been staying for, i don't know, centuries. Some of us who are
grown up enough or to rephrase it in academese: are thoroughly co-opted or
reified, tell me that i, and my father who is living in our ancestral home
in the forest, need to observe the 'Earth Hour.' Now i am at loss, as also
my parents and my relatives and all the people who have been living in the
forest for centuries now! I am told there is something called AC in the
city, a gadget which helps in keeping the city dwellers at ease. It doesn't
matter for them whether they are in their office or in a mall or in their
home: the temperature remains constant. At their service, as though. If i am
being kept at ease because of the AC, it certainly means that i am putting
hundreds of people at unease, whether i acknowledge it or not! And i won't
acknowledge it! And if you have the temerity to tell me that i need to pay
my electricity bills then, let me tell you, i am an obedient citizen of the
Indian Union, and i pay my taxes in time as also my electricity bills! How
dare you ask me or rather accuse me of all this apathy against my fellow
citizens! Holier than thou?
You pay your taxes, so do a beggar! my dear! Even if a beggar buys a
matchstick, he pays the state the taxes it levies on the matchstick. But who
are these amenities being built for! Flyovers ( they fly-over all of our
problems as also their ethical responsibilities!), metros, discotheques,
parks, airports, subways and what not! I am at loss! Frankly! I don't know
what to say. I can't say anything that endangers my existence itself! I
can't utter a word that eats me away! Verily, all the discourses in this
world, and this is the primary condition for a discourse to exist and have
its say, perpetuate themselves only as far and as long as they don't eat
themselves away, that is, what's the utility of calling for my beloved if my
words eat her up! Every discourse is engaged in the politics of perpetuating
its lifespan. And any effective counter-discourse, if it really deserves the
epithet "counter", should effectively decimate, annihilate, destruct the
hegemonic, oppressive, immoral, inhuman discourse that comes before! In all
likelihood, the history threatens to repeat itself, but so should the
counter-discourses or revolutions. All ye who are afraid of the word
"revolution" may kindly, please, raise their hands up!


On Sat, Mar 27, 2010 at 11:42 AM, Nagraj Adve <nagraj.adve at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> http://www.greenlightdhaba.org/2010/03/earth-hour-guest-post-delhi-activist.html
>
> Why I Won’t Be Turning My Lights Out During Earth Hour
>
> Earth Hour is upon us again. “Cities across the globe”, says an ad
> today in the Hindustan Times, “will switch off lights between 8.30 pm
> and 9.30 pm.” Millions across the world will doubtless join in. I
> won’t be among them.
>
> Don’t get me wrong. Taken by itself, I’m not against symbolic acts
> such as these. For one, they take issues like climate change,
> sustainability, urban consumption, energy saving, etc to a whole lot
> of people, young and old, some of whom may possibly not have engaged
> with these issues before. Actually participating in such an event
> helps many people engage even more deeply. Two, by being observed
> across the world, it hints at the worldwide nature of some of these
> problems and the recognition that these issues are being debated all
> over.
>
> Having said that, events such as these may give many the feeling that
> they are doing something to save the environment when actually the
> direness and urgency of the crises suggest that a lot more need to be
> done. When someone is having a heart attack, one does not take a
> Dispirin, we rush them to hospital and intervene to the degree
> necessary. Well, the Earth is having a heart attack. How has it been
> manifesting itself? In climate change.  In ongoing loss of species, at
> a rate so staggering that Edward Leakey and other folks refer to it as
> the 6th mass extinction of species in history (the fifth was when the
> dinosaurs were wiped out). In the loss of biodiversity. In peaking oil
> production, which is imminent. In declining groundwater, deepening
> across India. In stagnating food production. In polluted rivers. It
> has been having this multi-pronged heart attack for a while; some very
> respected folks talked about some aspects of it 20 years ago, some
> even earlier. And what are we doing 20 years later? Turning our lights
> out for an hour.
>
> The second thing that bothers me is that the Delhi government is
> actively involved in this. It promoted it last year. This year, the CM
> Sheila Dixit is inaugurating the main programme at India Gate. She
> heads the very government that is emitting tonnes of CO2 by spending
> crores on useless events like the Commonwealth Games, that has been
> cutting trees to widen roads for cars, and to build parking lots. The
> Indian government’s policy for two decades has been completely
> directed towards higher carbon emissions via consumption by the rich.
>
> Governments and elites tend to play up such symbolic events to hide
> the systemic nature of issues like climate change. By systemic I mean
> the system of industrial capitalism, which is at its core. Unless we
> take that head on, collectively, there’s no way that we are going to
> be able to deal with climate change or any of the other ecological
> crises it engenders.
>
> So I’m not saying turning your lights out is a bad thing. I’m saying
> one needs to do a lot, lot more. (And by that I mean us better-off;
> the poor are anyhow consuming less and emitting less CO2 than is their
> right.) At an individual or household level, doing more would mean
> identifying all the daily things that consume a lot of energy, water,
> etc. Taking the bus where possible instead of an auto or car, the
> train instead of flying. Speed is bad. Cutting out or minimizing the
> use of gadgets that consume high levels of electricity. It may make
> life more boring for a while but there are no shortcuts to cutting
> consumption. The elites promote shortcuts and call it energy
> efficiency; it does not work.
>
> Doing more also means doing things collectively. Now, that is not easy
> in this fragmented world we live in. But there’s little option, as
> that is possibly the key way large social change happens. If we want
> the BRT bus corridor to extend beyond Moolchand, if you don’t want
> trees cut in your neighbourhood to make way for car parks, if we all
> want adequate water harvesting and cycle lanes, we need to get
> together and make sure it happens. And all these things are only a
> start if we want to intervene in large issues like climate change.
> Switching off one’s lights is nice, but we need to do a hell of a lot
> more. Urgently.
>
> Nagraj Adve
> 26 March 2010
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