转发张淑兰博士"中印环境政治之比较"

qK&l-R$o-{0    很高兴能够在此转发笔者的同事、印度政治问题专家张淑兰博士的“中印环境政治之比较”一文。在很长时间内，我们总是自觉不自觉地把西方发达国家作为中国的比较对象，无论是经济还是政治都是如此。这种比较的最大问题就是，我们往往忽视了二者之间存在着的巨大历史文化与自然地理差异，而试图追求二者之间在经济、社会和政治制度方面的趋同或“国际化”，结果，我们往往发现的是自己经济社会发展方面的“巨大差距与潜能”，然后就有了一个接一个的“翻番计划”，也就预定了我们已经面对并将继续面对的生态环境危机。张博士的文章再次提示我们一个观察与思考的新视角，即中印之间也许有着远比我们已经认识到的更多的共同性（好的因素与坏的因素），而且我们可以从这种共同性中发现更多的人类走向未来的智慧与策略。正值印度总理访华之际，让我们共同从人类未来的角度而不简单是双方经济合作利益的角度做些思考，也许有着特别的意义。

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taxw0　看完第一条新闻，我的第一个念头是印度有几个人、那些人当选呢？随后我查阅了相关的信息。众所周知，中国当选的四人分别是：国家环保总局副局长潘岳、科学家施正荣、环保人士马军和电影《三峡好人》导演贾樟柯。印度当选者有五人，一位是自发地为子孙后代储存种子、从而保存了女性知识和农民文化的女农民Bija Devi，一位是依靠自己的行动筹集资金来挽救老虎的12岁男孩Madhav Subrmanian，一位是水资源保护学家Rajendra Singh，一位是首创为那些从来没有接受过正规教育的人提供上大学机会的教育家Bija Devi。

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　可以看出，两国的当选者有一个共同的特点，那就是都有科技文化界人士。拯救地球，保护环境，科技的发展与教育的普及是关键，不可或缺。
,w3i y*XG~Z0但两国有两个不同之处。一方面，中国的“可以拯救地球的人”是一个由政府、市民社会（非政府组织）、科技、文化界人士组成的团体，基本局限在精英阶层。而印度当选者的身份如同印度这个混沌的国度一样的复杂多样化，从目不识丁的农村妇女到学识渊博的科技文化界专家，从幼弱的小学生到62岁的教育家，差距很大。与中国当选者形成了鲜明的对比，这说明环境意识在印度已经渗透到广大的民众中去了。印度的普通民众有了强烈的环境意识。我想，这是印度环境运动与欧洲同步、早于美国的最有效的成果。

　另一方面，两国当选者的身份还有一个不同，那就是中国有一位即使在50人中也非常独特的英雄——政府官员。中国有一位政府官员来推动中国的环保事业，比如每一个省都要建设一个生态示范城，在未来30年要建设出400座真正的生态城，等等。我们的这一生态文明的发展思路令世界感叹，当选的50人中，英国的公民设计师（civil engineer）Peter Head对此感慨颇深。他目前专门负责中国生态城市的设计与发展。在中国，环保事业的发展，政府的决策与推动是关键。而印度，主要依靠民众的力量来推动环保事业的发展。当然，这是由两国的不同国情决定的。印度是一个联邦制国家，中央的地方的政府权力掌握在形形色色的政党手中，中央的决策很难在地方得到贯彻实施。而且印度的市民社会发达，政党生命的维持赖以选民的支持，如果选民不支持，掌握政权的政党不会轻易推出重大的环保项目。可以说，两国已经并将形成不同的环保发展模式。 齐鲁公社2W:|*\ Y-_|([R
      BBC和中央电视台关于塔塔集团最便宜汽车的新闻播放，令我感慨颇深。中央台的新闻联播在播放时只是引用专家的话，即担心它可能给印度的交通带来很大的问题。我国的主流媒体主要关注的是与经济相关的问题。而具有左翼倾向的《卫报》等西方新闻媒体对塔塔集团的“人民汽车”给予了较多的环保方面的评论。塔塔集团尽管对外宣布，其对环境的污染不会比摩托车严重，为了降低尾气的排放而拖延了汽车的面世，但很多问题的尚待宣布，恰恰证实了环保主义者对该汽车的安全性能和排放标准的怀疑。明显一例是它的市场面向问题，塔塔宣布将首先满足于国内需求，然后出口到非洲、拉丁美洲和东南亚国家。因为印度的尾气排放标准本来就比欧美国家高，如果要达到欧美的标准，汽车的价位不可能如此之低。

"V0\F FE]T0　毫无疑问，在发展中国家，民众是国家发展的根本驱动力，政府的主要职能是发展经济，提供民众的物质生活水平。这也就是，为什么，在经济、实业界很难产生出“可以拯救地球”的英雄，在两国当选者中间，没有一位是经济、实业家出身，反而是科技界人士投身于实业。然而，经济是基础，环保事业的发展离不开经济的支持，更需要企业界人士这一社会中坚力量的合作。“可以拯救地球的人”，意味着他们的行动能够激励人们去拯救地球，具有可能性和可行性，但毕竟还没有拯救地球。我想，要拯救地球，还需要一个关键的角色和环节——经济、实业界人士。 齐鲁公社*rp4]"q z"d@ R

　　
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XbS:y0注：当选“可以拯救地球的50人”中的印度人为5名，他们是：齐鲁公社"IF
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Madhav Subrmanian齐鲁公社.tX&KM:U,[
Schoolboy齐鲁公社J0q2AKG4\0h%w1M
Madhav Subrmanian is the next generation's face of conservation, a 12-year-old Indian boy who goes round Mumbai collecting money for tiger conservation. With his friends Kirat Singh, Sahir Doshi and Suraj Bishnoi, he set up Kids For Tigers which works in hundreds of schools. He writes poems, sings on the streets, sells merchandise and has collected Rs500,000 (￡6,500) in two years. Conservation awareness is growing in middle-class India, largely through young activists like him.

G3Ra*i|/`N0Rajendra Singh
+?E:QzX#_0Water conservationist齐鲁公社M+p#yT4l-d2i/G]
In 1984 Dr Rajendra Singh, now 49, was working in the semi-desert Indian state of Rajastan. He planned to set up health clinics in the rural villages, but was shocked when he went to a place called Gopalpura. "This area was devastated and people were fleeing, leaving their children, women and older people behind," Singh says. "It was then an old man told me that they needed neither medicines nor food. He said all they needed was water.齐鲁公社$_1H2v8Z0h+c![
"It moved me so much and I started finding out ways to help. But the region was arid, all the rivers were dry and the land was parched. The only source of water was rainwater, but that was scarce and there was not nearly enough for all the needs of the region."
%{$M M2i/T;da0A mix of modern technology and villagers simply neglecting traditional ways of conserving water had led to an ecological disaster. Singh found that the villages no longer used small earth dams - or johads - to collect surface water but instead now relied on "modern" tube wells. As they bored their wells deeper and deeper into the ground and sucked out ever more underground water, so the water table had dropped alarmingly and ever deeper wells were required.齐鲁公社Gc%g$D)@ E%@ J$N
Lower water levels meant that the wells were not full, the forests and trees were dying off, and erosion was worsening. It was a vicious circle. With less irrigation water, farming declined and men migrated to cities for work. Women and children then had to spend up to 10 hours a day fetching firewood and water, and the shrinking labour force sapped people's will to maintain the old johads. The whole region faced disaster.齐鲁公社3|[(q0@7m u
Singh and his colleagues began digging out an old johad pond in Gopalpura. Seven months later, it was, almost miraculously, nearly five feet full of water. And once the rains eventually came, not only did it fill to the brim, but a nearby long-dry well began flowing again. The following year, the village joined in to rebuild a second dam, and by 1996 Gopalpurans had recreated nine johads that between them held millions of litres of water. Meanwhile, the groundwater level had risen to 6.7m, up from an average of 14m below the ground. The village wells were full again.齐鲁公社-AS Q2AsK dF0r
"It was only due to political reasons that the [johad] system fell apart," Singh says. "We worked for four years in Gopalpura and slowly a huge area turned green. People came back, they started farming again and the visual impact was so impressive that people from adjoining areas started calling us for help."
5n&x&tK0h]u1G0Singh is now known as the Rain Man of Rajastan, having brought water back to more than 1,000 villages and got water to flow again in all five major rivers in Rajastan. He has so far helped to build more than 8,600 johads and other structures to collect water for the dry seasons. The forest cover has increased by a third because the water table has risen, and antelope and leopard have returned to the region. It has also been one of the cheapest regenerations of a region ever known - in Rajastan, villages have been brought back to life sometimes for just a few hundred pounds, far less than the cost of the single borehole that almost destroyed them.
.C(Y[.TUu'F_xf0"See the earth like a bank," Singh says. "If you make regular deposits of water, you'll always have some to withdraw. If you are just taking, you will have nothing in your account."齐鲁公社 ~&z1TQ K'R+G T
Erratic rains and longer droughts are becoming more frequent around the world with changing weather patterns and climate change, and the lessons taught by Singh in Rajastan are now being applied all over India and Africa. In the next 30 years, water "harvesting" is expected to become an essential way to save water everywhere from England to Uganda and Arizona. In south-east England, there is barely enough rainfall now, let alone for the expected population within 20 years. Procedures likely to be introduced will include gadgets that ensure you can't leave a running tap, baths that hold less water, gutters that collect water, systems for using waste water for gardens. "It's the same principle everywhere, but we all have to learn it," Singh says. 齐鲁公社w6uEt3H f

Jockin Arputham齐鲁公社D(Z^k!Q2bmZ
Urban activist齐鲁公社TX G)]^
Jockin Arputham, 60, has lived in a slum outside Mumbai since 1963. As president of the National Slum Dwellers Association and Slum Dwellers International, he is rallying the world's poorest city dwellers to improve their environment. Urban squalor is one of the biggest problems of the age, and by 2030 the number of slum dwellers is projected to reach two billion - a recipe for poverty, disease and political instability. Arputham has pioneered a way to help the poor negotiate with city authorities to secure land ownership - the greatest barrier to improving slums. Dozens of other new urban groups are working in 70 countries and hundreds of thousands of people have benefited. Global urbanisation is inevitable, and these new federations will have more and more ecological influence.

Bija Devi齐鲁公社'l(iCx MR
Farm manager
sJ5rP.jz7R0Bija Devi saves seeds for future generations. She already has in her "bank" 1,342 types of cereals, pulses, fruits and vegetables, though she has no idea of their scientific names. She has worked as a farmer since the age of seven, never went to school and has never heard the words "wheat" or "turnip". Yet she now heads a worldwide movement of women trying to rescue and conserve crops and plants that are being pushed to extinction in the rush to modernise farming. And in so doing she is helping rejuvenate Indian culture.
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V6t#~{y0Apart from collecting and storing seeds from all over the country, Devi is teaching farmers, distributing seeds and experimenting with them. It's called the Navdanya (Nine Seeds) movement because it was inspired by a southern Indian custom of planting nine seeds in a pot on the first day of the year. Women would take the pots to the river nine days later to compare and exchange seeds so that each family could plant the best seeds, thus optimising food supplies.齐鲁公社4U*P&clC1b^7p
Today, Devi has farmers queueing up for seeds at her project's base, a 40-acre farm in the foothills of the Himalayas in Dehradun. When she started 14 years ago, with ecologist Vandana Shiva, she had to plead with the farmers to accept that ecological security was of fundamental importance, and that there were advantages to sowing older, indigenous seeds rather than the newer, high-yielding "hybrid" or GM seeds. These give larger crops but require considerable input of pesticides and fertilisers, and more water.
3o i/}$A$nM*Ab0Women are responsible for sowing, harvesting and storing food, while it is up to the men to prepare the soil. "There was no tangible benefit for them in using our seeds," Devi says. "But over time they realised how the soil was retaining its fertility, how the crop was free from diseases and pests. Now they come to us on their own."
(xhhJ njsm,l*EZs3t0She now has 380 varieties of rice seeds alone. There are something like 200,000 people benefiting from 34 similar community seed banks set up in 13 states across the country. The banks are seen as an insurance against changing conditions, such as climate, new pests or consumer demand. People who receive the seeds pay nothing for them, and in return pledge to continue to save and share them. "Indiscriminate use of chemicals has harmed the soil to an enormous extent," Devi says, "but we can still restore fertility and conserve water if we act now."

JS1qN0Wh"|0The work is backed by Dr Debal Deb, an ecologist who has established the only gene bank of indigenous rice in India. The Green Revolution was environmentally disastrous in India, he says: "In the 80s, the drastic erosion of the genetic diversity of rice and other crops was irreversible. Thousands of rice varieties no longer exist in the farms where they evolved over centuries. They are extinct for good and not even accessed in the national and international gene banks." This, he says, translates into a threat to the country's food security.齐鲁公社~.N3WO4v\h+y
Collecting seeds from a large and diverse country such as India is no easy task. "I depend on the traditional knowledge of the farmers and go to different corners in the region in search of new varieties," Devi says. "The farmers explain the qualities of a particular strain and how to cultivate them. We then collect the seed, cultivate it on an experimental basis and note down the results. If it is satisfactory, we distribute it among the other farmers. We also need to sow the seeds regularly to continue with the strain. Today, traditional knowledge is almost lost in the euphoria over new varieties."

Bunker Roy
HcMO]W0Educationalist
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_1`4N'C:q:Kn0Bunker Roy, 62, set up the Barefoot College in India, the only school in the world known to be open only to people without any formal education. Roy's idea is that India and Africa are full of people with skills, traditional knowledge and practical resourcefulness who are not recognised as engineers, architects or water experts but who can bring more to communities than governments or big businesses. The college trains the poor to combine local knowledge with new green technologies : 15,000 people have learned to become "barefoot" water and solar engineers, architects and teachers. It has helped hundreds of communities across India - and now in seven other countries - install water supplies and solar voltaic lighting systems, develop bicycles that can cross rivers and design buildings that collect every drop of water.
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