Sublime

Guha, who first visited the United States in the 1980s, has reflected on his experiences with the chauvinistic attitudes of deep ecologists like Roderick Nash, author of Wilderness and the American Mind. His response to Nash, who hoped that “the less developed nations may eventually evolve economically and intellectually to the point where nature

Although Guha later came to regard his own version of environmentalism to be similarly chauvinistic, his work triggered major debates in environmental studies, which remain with us today.

and the Jamuna are effectively dead. India and China have also witnessed, in recent years, the large-scale depletion of groundwater aquifers, the loss of biodiversity, the destruction of forests, and the decimation of fish-stocks.

One person who was willing to risk political suicide was the visionary systems thinker Donella Meadows – one of the lead authors of the 1972 Limits to Growth report – and she didn’t mince her words. ‘Growth is one of the stupidest purposes ever invented by any culture,’ she declared in the late 1990s; ‘we’ve got to have an enough.’ In response to

crisis of government in

The doyen of Indian environmental history, Ramachandra Guha, observes that since the strongest forces of environmental destruction lie not in premodern societies nor in religions – whatever they may say or do – it follows that the relationship between religion and environmentalism will be tested only after industrialization has proceeded.