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Religion and Environmental
Pollution Published on February 13, 2007 It was many years ago when, in
school, I wondered why people threw corpses into the Ganga in the belief
that they went to heaven. As a schoolboy, I had learned that rivers
flowed out into the sea. We also knew that rivers provided valuable
drinking water and, living in a city like Madras that was perennially
starved of water supplies, it was incredible to see thousands of people
throwing corpses into the river and dirtying it up even as they claimed
that it was a sacred river. I talked to my friends about it in school
and they did not seem to want to talk about it. They were probably
scared to even think about something like this because it could involve
a reprimand or even a thrashing at home. And then there was the question
of rituals - a friend’s father, a scientist at a nuclear facility,
conducted a yagna at their new home. We were all invited and dutifully
went there though out interest was more in the grand lunch that would
follow. The temptation of sweets and good food was definitely a better
thing than a ritual that would leave several of us coughing from the
smoke that ensued and some others asleep from the Sanskrit mumbo jumbo
that was chanted. The friend whose father was conducting this ritual
told us that the flames would release “good things” into the air and
that was why they were conducting this ritual. I suspect, to this day,
that this was directed at me and a friend of mine who is a hugely
successful entrepreneur in South India these days. While I smiled at
this statement, my skeptic friend asked our host whether the carbon
dioxide and carbon monoxide that came out of the flame were the “good
things” that he was talking about. It was funny, how religions that
claimed to work for the world and to improve everything in life were
singularly destructive of vital necessities for life like water and air.
And their destructiveness as far as the environment is concerned went
much further. Several festivals in South India involve the smashing of
pumpkins and other vegetables on the streets, leaving rotting, stinking
neighborhoods for days sometimes, sometimes even longer. Who knows what
diseases this spreads even while those who have obviously been blessed
by this kind of activity reap their rewards in disease and, when they
have borrowed money to perform these rituals, in poverty as well? The most ridiculous festival of
all was India’s most celebrated one - Diwali. The sheer noise pollution
from millions of firecrackers being set off day after day, their eye and
nostril burning smoke that pollutes entire cities more than all the
automobiles and cigarettes in India put together and the filth from
banana trees chopped down and tied outside homes and left to rot has to
be seen to be believed. At the hospital where my father practiced and
where I briefly worked, there were always people with their fingers
blown off by these firecrackers and some blinded by them for life. And
yet, the madness would go on with a religious passion, year after year,
polluting and dirtying the city and injuring and maiming more and more
people. And, this was not confined to
Hinduism alone. Christians jumped on the pollution bandwagon in India -
they already had a tradition of using incense in their churches, incense
that is known to contain several carcinogens, and they too use
firecrackers aplenty in their festivals in India these days. While they
do not throw their half smouldering corpses into rivers, they bury them
in the ground, making large stretches of land in a perennially land
starved, crowded place like India completely unusable. And, as
Ahl-E-Qitab, they were enthusiastically joined by the Muslim community
in degrading the soil. I wondered whether they believed that they would
be privileged if they were buried in their sacred places - Jerusalem or
Mecca like the Hindus preferred being thrown half burned into the
Ganges? And I don’t even want to talk about India’s Zoroastrian minority
and their custom of inviting vultures to feed on their deceased before
throwing the bones into lime pits. It is clear, through all of this, though, that religion does play an important role in degrading the environment through it’s rituals. It encourages waste - India is a country where some 300 million people live below the poverty line, surviving on one meal a day. In these circumstances, the waste of food - pumpkins smashed on the streets, the throwing of corpses into rivers when there is a shortage of water and the horrendous noise and air pollution do suggest, at the very least, a need for pressing reform. But then, one comes to Shaw’s dirty water and clean water analogy from his “Black Girl in Search of God” where he suggests that dirty water and clean water be kept separate, that adding clean water to dirty water in any proportion would not make the dirty water safe to drink. Amen!
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