Sunita Narain will present "Changing Nature in an Unequal World," the third lecture in this year’s E. N. Thompson Forum on World Issues.The opinions contained in this essay are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Thompson Forum or the sponsoring organizations.

By Sunita Narain

Years before India became independent, Mahatma Gandhi was asked a simple question: Would he like free India to be as 'developed' as the country of its colonial masters? Britain? "No," said Gandhi, stunning his interrogator, who argued that Britain was the model to emulate. He replied: "If it took Britain the rape of half the world to be where it is, how many worlds would India need?"

We need to learn our Gandhi today. Now that India and China are threatening to join the league of the rich, there is growing hysteria. What will be the impact on the environment of Indian and Chinese joining the world’s consuming classes? What if every Chinese owns a car? Every Indian owns a refrigerator?

But this should make the rich world think. Think not just about the impact of our populated nations on the resources of our planet. But think, again, indeed all over again, of the economic paradigm of growth that has led to much less populated worlds pillaging and degrading the resources of this only Earth.

For instance, the industrialized world may have cleaned up local air pollution in its cities. But its emissions have put the entire world’s climatic system at risk and made millions, living at the margins of survival, even more vulnerable and poor because of global warming. In other words, the West not only continues to chase the problems it creates, it also externalizes the problems of growth to others, those less fortunate and less able to deal with its excesses.

It is this model of growth the poor world now wishes to adopt. And why not? The world has not shown any other way that can work. In fact, it preaches to us that business is profitable only when it searches for new solutions to old problems. It tells us its way of wealth creation is progress, and it tells us that its way of life is nonnegotiable.

But I believe the poor world must do better. India, China have no choice but to reinvent the development trajectory. When the industrialized world went through its intensive growth period, its per capita income was much higher than the South’s is today. The price of oil was much lower, which meant the growth came cheaper. Now the South is adopting the same model: highly capital-intensive and so socially divisive; material and energy-intensive and so polluting. But the South does not have the capacity to make investments critical to equity and sustainability. It cannot temper the adverse impacts of growth. This is deadly.

Let’s stay with the challenge of air pollution. Some years ago, the organization I work with argued the city of Delhi should convert its public transportation system to compressed natural gas. The move to gas would give us a technology jump start as it would drastically cut particulate emissions. Delhi today has the world’s largest fleet of buses and other commercial transport vehicles running on natural gas. The result is that the city has stabilized its pollution, in spite of its huge numbers of vehicles, poor technology, and even poorer regulatory systems to check the emissions of each vehicle. In other words, Delhi did not take a technology-incremental pathway of pollution control on the basis of fitting after-treatment devices on cars and cleaning up fuel. It leapfrogged, in terms of technology and growth.

Now, with ever-increasing numbers of private vehicles crowding the roads of each of its cities and pollution attacking the lungs of its people, the question remains: Can it reinvent the dream of mobility so that it does not become a nightmare? Can it make new ways to the future city — combining the convenience of mobility and economic growth with public-health imperatives? In this hybrid-growth paradigm — which combines the best of the new and old—cities would run on public transportation, using the most advanced of technologies.

In other words, even as the whole world looks for little solutions to pollution and congestion, we must reinvent the answer itself. The case of water management is the same. India and China cannot afford to first become water-wasteful and then efficient. They cannot afford to pollute and then clean up. They have to invent the water-management paradigm — in India’s case, borrow from past traditions by building millions of local and decentralized water management structures to augment its resources. It must practice rainwater harvesting as it will build its water reserves. At the same time, it must borrow from the future by investing in water-efficient technologies for recycling and reuse. It must, for instance, reinvent the flush system, which is both capital— and material—intensive and uses water as its carrier and discharge pathway: It cannot afford to build sewage networks and treat human waste, today polluting its rivers and lakes.

The question, then, is if all this is possible. The fact is that the environmental movements of the rich world happened after the period of wealth creation and during the period of waste generation. They argued for containment of the waste but did not have the ability to argue for the reinvention of the paradigm of waste generation itself.

On the other hand, in our world, the environmental movement is growing during the period of wealth creation, in the midst of enormous inequity and poverty. In this environmentalism of the relatively poor, the answers to change are intractable and impossible, unless the question is reinvented.

But there are two essential prerequisites. Firstly, a high order of democracy, so that the poor and marginalized can demand change. Secondly, change will demand knowledge: new and inventive thinking. The most adverse impact of the current industrial growth model is that it has turned our planners into cabbages: believing they have no answers, only problems, for which the solutions lie in the tried and tested answers of the rich world.

It is here that the rich world must learn its Gandhi. It must learn that it cannot preach because it has nothing to teach. But it can learn, if it follows the environmentalism of the poor, to share the earth’s resources so that there is a common future for all.

This article is an edited version of the preface published in State of the World 2006, Worldwatch Institute, Washington, D.C. The author’s lecture will take place November 12 at 7 p.m. at the Lied Center for Performing Arts, 12th and R Streets, Lincoln, Neb. The lecture is free and open to the public but tickets are required. Contact the Lied Center Ticket Office, 402-472-4747 or 800-432-3231 for tickets. The lecture is also streamed live on the UNL Web site, www.unl.edu. For more information on this year’s Thompson forum, go to enthompson.unl.edu.