BOOKWATCH
State of the Environment Report
BY ANITA JOSHUA
Anil Agarwal Reader 1-3, Centre for Science and Environment.
SOME of his thoughts border on the anarchic. Here's a sample: "If you want to improve this country, take my advice. Get rid of the government and take governance into your own hands." That was the founder-director of Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), Anil Agarwal, writing in the editor's page in the fortnightly Down to Earth in March 1999. Increasingly, this radical idea of his is gaining currency, to the extent that even governments have begun paying lipservice to participatory democracy.
Week after week, like an astrologer, Agarwal would write about the environment and the price posterity would have to pay for the sins of the present. His writings between 1991 and 2001 have been put together by CSE in three volumes and could easily double up as a State of the Environment Report. So what if cancer forced him to sign off in 2002, but he was so ahead of his times on the issue of environment that much of his warnings hold good five years after his death.
Given his preoccupation with the environment and the missionary zeal with which he sought to protect it, the Anil Agarwal Reader — by CSE's own admission — is a tad repetitive. But, it offers a ringside view of the environment debate in the country from its early days when talking about the environment was seen as a Western fad.
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