Research for Change

Before and in the beginning of my postgraduate study in the United Nations University in Tokyo, I misunderstood environmentalism to be primarily a First World issue. While I recognize there can be significant consequences with climate change, deforestation and loss of biodiversity, I despise it as a distraction from the age-old shattering inequality and injustice around the world - the persisting problems of poverty, exploitation and oppression, which seem hopelessly bizarre in this modern age of abundance. Somehow I thought that environmental sustainability discourse, while challenging ‘business as usual’, is less radical and critical of the current power relationships, between the rich and the poor, the industrialized and the developing, the urban and the rural, the capitalists and the workers, the men and the women. After all, one can promote the use of technology to reduce pollution and increase resource efficiency. While there might be more regulations to meet and people to answer to, there is no threat to the underlying power structure. The legislation and enforcement of clean and safe technology are ultimately lying on the hands of the corrupt governments worldwide. The responsibilities are not on those who seek to pollute.

The various environmental solutions being discussed along the line did not help at all to ease my skepticism. Some proposed geoengineering – large-scale intervention in the earth’s climate system to moderate global warming. Other market-based solutions such as carbon trading and payment for ecosystem services were proposed and adopted. But I view them as perpetuating monetary values and incentives as solutions, creating new means of dependency and intricacy between the rural poor and marginalized (or rather the authority reaping the benefits), with the current market system, pushing radical but necessary changes further and further away. I don’t see a genuine proposition to transform lives for all, but more of a patching up whichever parts recognized as problems, with the same kinds of approach which created the problems in the first place. It was painful to watch a large group of people occupying themselves with the symptoms, but few want to confront the root causes.

However, as I further delved into rural poverty issues, it became increasingly evident to me that environmental problems are social problems, and problems of poverty and justice. Peasants around the world are heavily dependent on their surrounding natural resources for livelihood and health. Indigenous groups are removed from their ancestors’ land in the name of development. People such as those in the Niger Delta suffer from hazardous oil spill or other industrial pollution which could have been minimized with tighter regulations. Factories extracted and polluted resources in the ‘developing’ countries to produce materials for faraway consumers in ‘developed’ societies. Climate change disproportionately affects the poor and vulnerable living in areas affected by extreme climatic events. E-waste is dumped in poorer countries exposing people to dangerous toxic. The list goes on. Indeed, environmental issues are not about animals running wild in the Safari, but concern the lives and deaths of many. Subaltern Environmentalism is embodying issues of poverty, exploitation and oppression. With this perspective, environmental issues are no more distraction, but an essential ingredient to advocate for change, as unlike poverty, environmental issues affect everyone.

In my advisor, Michael Bell’s “An Invitation to Environmental Sociology’, he stated that “Environmental sociology is the study of community in the largest possible sense. People, other animals, land, water, air – all are closely interconnected”. I think such viewpoint is refreshing and critical. We could not possibly think that any study of society could be meaningful without including its environment. In fact, for many indigenous populations, there is no separation between the self and the environment – they are one and studying one but not the other will not make any indigenous studies complete. Thus, environmental sociology does not merely branch out from sociology, it is cross-cutting to all sociological studies. It calls upon all who study societies to recognize that environment must be an integral component.

My journey in environmental studies only began in 2011, when I was doing my postgraduate research. My own society in Malaysia is one obsessed with a narrow range of professions such as medical doctors, engineers, etc., which are believed to provide dependable career prospects – a typical phenomenon in the developing country. I still remember people ridicule courses such as ‘Forestry’. This is ironic since the environment and natural resources are one of the richest capitals of my country, as well as many other developing societies. Rapidly developing societies are quick to grab the constructed value of money and what it symbolizes, but estrange themselves easily from the physical nature which one can see and touch. Having myself approved of the subaltern environmentalism, I did my postgraduate study on water resource management in Sri Lanka, where I lived with and delved into the perspectives of farmers. Community-based management is not inherently equitable and sustainable, though they are the ones who understand their own needs and environmental changes well at the local level. Just as politics play the prominent role globally, power relation also affects natural resource management at the local level, either within communities themselves (between the different castes, classes, newcomers vs latecomers), among the representing politicians (who sometimes only serve a very specific group of supporters/constituents at the expense of others), among competing resource users, between users and the government, among different ministries within the government, and between resource-dependent communities with the external market forces. It only makes perfect sense that environmental studies are also called political ecology. Apolitical, technical solutions are insufficient in resolving the environmental issues we face today, and missing the point in the case of subaltern environmental problems.

While our world is plagued by so many old and emerging problems, it is not hard to see that they stem from the same value system – the system which promotes endless growth and neoliberalism, and the tenacious belief that material success defines lives, more than one’s sense of integrity, moral obligations, relationship with others, mother nature and all live forms on the planet. My research and work is to challenge this value system, because it is not only deteriorative to the humanity as a whole, but also fails to make individual lives fulfilling.