Introduction

Following the influential article by Garrett Hardin titled ‘Tragedy of the commons’, it is part of both popular and scholarly belief that unless natural resources are strictly in the domain of private or state property, their fate is an inevitable ruin (Hardin 1968). Closer examination of the actions of lowincome communities who depend on natural resources for their daily livelihoods has recently brought to the fore a more positive view about human proclivity for caring and nurturing common resources found in nature.

A good example is found in the state of Kerala, in India, where small-scale, community-based fisherfolk initiated collective action to invest in rejuvenating the natural assets of the sea that had been destroyed by the incessant fishing operations of large-scale bottom trawlers in the region. They went about erecting artificial reefs at the sea bottom in coastal waters to create anthropogenic marine environments. Reefs act as fish refugia and become sources of food for them as the structures are soon covered with bottom-dwelling biomass. Artificial reefs placed in strategic positions in the coastal waters can in time increase the overall biomass and the fish stock in the local ecosystem. An unintended side-effect of sufficiently large artificial reefs is that they act as barriers to the operation of bottom trawl nets, effectively performing the role of a sea-bottom fence against incursions of trawlers into coastal waters. Such reefs have not yet healed the wounds inflicted on the coastal ecosystem of the area, nor can the fishing communities depend exclusively on them as a major source of livelihood.

Introduction

In the 1980s, a photograph of scavengers, some of them children, picking through garbage at Manila's ‘Smoky Mountain’ dumpsite came to represent poverty in the Philippines. In 1995, the government closed the over-filled dumpsite, announcing plans to convert it into a low-cost housing development and an industrial zone. But the 1997 Asian financial crisis caught up with the project, and the promise of a better life for the scavengers remained unfulfilled.

The closure of Smokey Mountain threatened to deprive scavengers and their families of their only source of livelihood. A year before the closure, they were already following the re-routed garbage trucks more than 20 kilometres away to what is now the largest dumpsite in the country — Payatas in Quezon City (Rivera 1994, 53). If the garbage mountain represented poverty, why did the poor follow it? The reason is that to the 4,000–8,000 families who depend on the Payatas dumpsite, garbage is not a symbol of poverty: it is an asset (Tuason 2002, 1).

This chapter describes how poor families living in the Payatas dumpsite earn an income and create jobs for their neighbours by recovering and recycling wastes. A few, who have become traders and small producers, have managed to penetrate the country's biggest supermarkets and even the export market with their recycled products. The scavengers of Payatas have shown that waste recovery and recycling can simultaneously help to reduce poverty and protect the environment.

Nancy Armstrong, in Desire and Domestic Fiction (OUP, 1987), and Catherine Gallagher, in The Industrial Reformation of Fiction (University of Chicago Press, 1985), examine the modes in which the ideology of domesticity functions in the nineteenth century. Both assume that portrayals of domesticity have nothing to do with any persistent facts of human nature, but rather constitute an attempt to invent the very idea of such facts as a tool for the naturalization of attitudes that are really shaped by ‘political history’ and the class struggle. Their studies share one particular angle on the more general argument that, in nineteenth-century fiction, the focus on the domestic serves as a rhetorical evasion of social problems.

Significant though their project is, it requires no consideration of fiction's reflection of and influence on the shape of real families, or of the political impetus of the shape of family, considered not only as a discursive figure in relation to public and class politics but as a real determinant of the course of people's lives. Because, in other words, they assume that even to engage with the idea of ‘domesticity’ or ‘human nature’ already implies a displacement of the political, they overlook the political struggles that go on over the very terms of that engagement. As I have argued, however, given that that engagement is not one that any political discourse can evade, the negotiation of its terms is really the focus of the political action.

Introduction

Across the United States, a vibrant social movement for ‘environmental justice’ has emerged. Based initially on the recognition that US minority groups have borne a disproportionate burden of environmental hazards, environmental justice (EJ) advocates have long since shifted from simply resisting ‘environmental racism’ to embracing a positive concept of equal access to environmental and social goods.

The connection between this movement and the asset-building framework has been limited, however, in part because of the nascent nature of the latter, in part because of the immediate preoccupations of the former. Resisting hazards would seem to land one squarely in the usual deficit model: the community is characterized by its lack of clean water, or by the higher risks induced by toxic pollutants in the air. Moving from resistance to the challenge of defining a wealth-building strategy is a useful next step for both the EJ movement and the asset-building framework alike.

In this chapter, I sketch a bridge between the United States environmental justice movement and the asset-building framework. I begin by reviewing the broad political development of the movement and the research on which it has been based. As we will see, there has been some debate over the extent of environmental inequity and this is an issue that even those who are sympathetic to the movement's aims and basic assertions must address in a straightforward fashion.

Introduction

This chapter addresses community-level natural resource management and rural poverty, first by re-examining the mainstream view that blames the poor for natural resource degradation. This is followed by a comparison of the traditional and present-day systems of natural resource management in mountain areas. This helps in the identification of factors and processes contributing to resource degradation. Lessons from past systems and successful experiences of new initiatives on community forest management in Nepal and India are synthesized to suggest possible approaches to rebuilding communities' natural assets. The final section of the chapter looks at concerns and uncertainties relating to new forest-centered initiatives, and at possible ways to address these.

The crucial role of natural asset building in reducing poverty — by conserving, regenerating, upgrading and equitably harnessing natural resources, particularly, forests, pastures and crop lands — stems from the contributions of these resources towards enhancing the livelihood options of the poor (Dasgupta 1996). These include direct availability of seasonally and spatially varying supplies of bio-fuel, fodder, fiber, food items, timber and high-value products such as medicinal herbs, honey, mushrooms and vegetable dyes. The indirect services provided by forests and other natural ecosystems include stability of the micro-environment and the flow of moisture and nutrients to sustain productive farming systems.

This facilitative role of forests is all the more important in mountain regions, where due to limited accessibility and relative isolation, people's dependence on local resources is very high.

Prologue

I first learned about global warming in the late 1980s. My colleague Anil Agarwal and I had spent over two years traversing Indian villages, searching for policies and practices to reforest wasted common lands. We quickly learned to look beyond trees, at ways to deepen democracy so that these commons could be regenerated. In India forests are mostly owned by government agencies, but it is poor communities that actually use them. It quickly became clear that without community participation, afforestation was not possible. This is because our forests are not wilderness areas, but habitats of people and their animals. For people to be involved the rules for engagement had to be respected, and to be respected, the rules had to be fair.

At the time, India had a ‘green’ environment minister. Data released by a prestigious US research institution had convinced her that it was the poor who contributed most substantially to global warming — they did ‘unsustainable’ things like growing rice and keeping farm animals. Anil and I were pulled into the global climate debate when a flummoxed state Chief Minister called us. He had received a government circular that asked him to discourage rural people from keeping animals. ‘How do I do this?’ he asked us. ‘Do the animals of the poor really disrupt the world's climate system?’ We were equally puzzled. It seemed absurd. We had been arguing for quite a while that the poor were victims of environmental degradation.

In 1988, DA Miller made an influential diagnosis of ‘a radical entanglement between the nature of the novel and the practice of the police’. His book, The Novel and the Police, was designed to challenge what he saw as a politically conservative ‘consensus’ in departments of English that ‘literature exercises a destabilising function in our culture’. In opposition to that ‘consensus’ a new school of critics, authors of books with valiant titles like Resisting Novels, set themselves to argue that the function of literature was to act as vehicle for ideological control. The irresistible conclusion was that this was particularly true of literary forms distinctive of the bourgeois era, and thus of the Victorian novel above all.

Dombey and Son takes the chaos of history as its structuring theme. However, the very use of ‘theme’, or the combination of realism (fiction presenting what seems like a picture of the familiar world of experience) with the organised, overarching significance and unity of plot, has been interpreted as in some way already a concession to an imperio-historical conception of history as a unified, significant and teleological progress. Lennard Davis, for instance, suggests that ‘plot in narratives, and most particularly novels, helps readers to believe that there is an order in the world’, so that ‘we might say that the idea of plot is part of an idea of history – that history and novels share a certain faith in plot’. Needless to say, for the reasons suggested at the start of the last chapter, this is a very bad thing as far as Davis and like-minded critics are concerned.

I have suggested that there are elements in Dombey that resist being subsumed by the progression of plot and its structured import.

Introduction

Participatory forest management in West Africa became institutionalized during the 1980s as part of the movement towards decentralization under structural adjustment programmes. Most nation states in the region have implemented forest-sector administrative reforms that give greater roles to communities in forest management, and that recognize the importance of building partnerships between communities and forest departments (Brown 1999).

The idea that community participation is central to effective natural resource management has been endorsed in a number of international environmental conventions. It was given a prominent place in both the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and the 1994 UN Convention to Combat Desertification. It was embraced again in 1997, in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Forests' Proposals for Action, which called for the establishment of participatory mechanisms to involve all interested parties, including local communities and indigenous people, in policy development as well as implementation.

Although most West African forestry services now have moved beyond previous exclusionary approaches, participatory forest management still generally is situated within a technocentric, top-down framework. The goal is to get rural communities to participate in the programmes designed by global and national agencies, rather than to enable rural people to make their own inputs into natural resource policy. The main concerns, rooted in neo-liberal economic philosophy, are the need to make forestry management more efficient and to lower transaction costs by involving communities.

Introduction

In many parts of the developing world, poverty is not so much about a lack of money as a lack of natural resources. For rural people who live off the land, prosperity means plenty of water, crops, animals and timber. Improving the ‘gross natural product’ is far more important than increasing the gross national product (Agarwal 1985). Building and sustaining a base of natural capital is the key to a robust local economy.

This chapter presents case studies of four rural communities in India that have succeeded in mobilizing natural and human capital to generate economic wealth and well-being through improved management of natural resources. All four studies come from hilly and plateau regions of India, with semi-arid to sub-humid climates (500–1,250 millimetres of rainfall per year). In all cases, important natural resources are held as common property. From the colonial era until recently, these resources were managed, or mismanaged, by government agencies. The key to ecological restoration has been the restoration of community control.

In these regions, watershed management requires cooperative solutions above the level of the individual farm. The ancient art of water harvesting needs to be revived and modernized to provide adequate water for irrigation and household needs. Water harvesting means capturing the rain where it falls by collecting runoff from rooftops, constructing check dams and small reservoirs to capture runoff from local catchments, and replanting degraded watersheds, so as to reduce runoff losses.

Introduction

In agricultural economies, land is the single most important asset. With access to arable land, rural people at a minimum can feed themselves and their families. Yet ironically, world hunger is concentrated in the countryside. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO 2004, 25) reports that land-poor and landless households in rural areas account for 80 per cent of the people who are chronically hungry in the world today.

Land reform — here defined as the reallocation of rights to establish a more equitable distribution of farmland — can be a powerful strategy for promoting both economic development and environmental quality. Across the globe, small-scale farmers consistently tend to grow more output per acre than large farms. At the same time, when small family farmers hold secure land rights, they tend to be better environmental stewards, protecting and enhancing soil fertility, water quality and biodiversity. For both reasons, democratizing access to land can be the cornerstone for sustainable rural development.

This chapter provides an overview of land reform as a natural assetbuilding strategy. First, we sketch the wide variety of changes in agrarian structure that fall under the rubric of ‘land reform’. To illustrate, we review the experiences of China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan after World War II, where land reforms helped to set the stage for rapid economic growth. We then describe of one of the most vibrant land reform movements of the present day: the Landless Workers' Movement of Brazil.

The mid-Victorian realist novel is the medium par excellence for an exposition of a sympathetic politics of care, and an effective vehicle for the perpetuation of the conditions for its realization. Its realism is orientated towards the caring conviction, which Gilligan observed in her female subjects, ‘that the solution to the dilemma will follow from its compelling representation’. Its personal focus, its realist enumeration of particularities and its emotional function make it a form that emphasizes connection and that cultivates the virtue of human sympathy, that weighs the subjective and emotional value of quotidian experience in dense and human terms, and that makes visible the delicate, fragile and underground lacework of social mycelia connecting the autonomous man-mushrooms of civil space. Even when its overt ‘message’ is individualistic it is led, by the very skill with which it mobilizes its fictional conventions, into an emotive revelation of human connection.

This same revelation is embodied, in different ways, in every novel to which I have turned my attention. It bursts the channels cut for it by any rational scheme of rights, and any rationalistic legitimation of or resignation to the status quo, and it bears the reader inexorably on to a hopeful and active desire for the social realization of human sympathy.