Volume I, No. 1, Winter 2001

art and craft of teaching

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Students who have come of age in the American South often have little opportunity for exposure to the richness, complexity and diversity of the human and physical geography of the South Asian subcontinent. India s cultural diversity, the rugged terrain of Pakistan, or the complexities of urban life in Calcutta or Delhi, remain "exotic" and distant places in the imaginations of the majority of our students. As Ziauddin Sardar has argued, "Orientalism .has survived defiantly and remained dominant when alternative information has been readily available" (1999:19). Teaching the geography of South Asia to undergraduate students, whether as a regional geography class or as part of a broader course in the discipline, is therefore quite challenging. In particular I would like to discuss the necessity of overcoming preconceived notions, harbored by many students, of the relationship between environmental degradation and population pressure in the region.

I can only profess to speak from my particular social and geographic location, that is, as a white American academic teaching a largely white, Southern student body in an area with only a small South Asian population. I teach regional courses on South Asia for undergraduates and graduate students, and incorporate the region into my other human and environmental geography classes. The University of South Florida is a metropolitan-based research university serving about 30,000 students. My undergraduate teaching is concentrated on the St. Petersburg campus, where the students tend to come from the local community, and are often working fulltime in addition to attending school. Most of our students are white, with a small percentage of African-American students and an even smaller portion of non-U.S. born students. Pinellas County, where my campus is located, claims about 2% of its nearly one million residents are Asian, and I suspect the portion of that number that are from South Asia is quite small as well. In addition to strong academic training in the geography and history of South Asia (primarily at the University of Wisconsin-Madison), I have traveled widely in India, spending summers there in 1986, 1990, 1995 and 2000. My experience of the country has been shaped by my marriage to a native of Madras, and the hospitality his extended family has continually shown me during my visits.

The processes and structures that link people in the United States with peoples in other places are many, though they often remain hidden from our sight. In recent years, the argument that people around the world, despite their differences, are linked by common concerns for the global environment has grown in popularity. The notion that the resources of the planet belong to all the world s people has great appeal, and environmental concerns in general are popular among the students I have encountered at the University of South Florida. Concern about the degradation of soil, air and water pollution, deforestation, and loss of biodiversity are natural bridges to the South Asian region, sparking the interest of students in learning more about the human and physical geography of the area. There are some dangers, however, in building on the underlying assumptions students may hold about the causes of environmental degradation and their own hubris about their vision of environmental problems and solutions.

The danger these assumptions pose, if unchallenged, are twofold. First, as Ken MacDonald (2001) has argued, there is a powerful "global ecological paradigm" that has been developed by large environmental organizations which are based in the wealthy countries of Europe and North America. MacDonald discusses the ways in which this paradigm asserts the epistemological primacy of rationalist science, wildlife as a resource that exists in the global commons, and supports the conversion of nature from use value to exchange value as a conservation mechanism. The imposition of the global ecological paradigm on non-Western places, through the mechanics of parastatal global conservation agencies, distorts local ecologies, and forces a rearticulation of culture and nature that may, in the end, be beneficial to neither the local people nor the wildlife. Efforts of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature to "protect" the mountain Ibex in the Central Karakoram of Pakistan was based on the assumption that the wildlife of the region and hence the bioresources that belong to all the world s people was endangered by the subsistence activities of the local population. The international agency s solution to this perceived problem involved the conversion of subsistence value of ibex to exchange value through the introduction of exotic game hunting enterprises, which would then regulate use of the resource through the permitting process. MacDonald documents the ways that this scheme failed to regulate ibex takings, simultaneously disrupting traditional lifeways and political relationships in the region.

My concern here is the way in which the global ecological paradigm works to assert the complicity of local people in faraway places in the perceived degradation of resources that are said to belong to "all of us." Preserving global biodiversity resources has indeed become a siren call for young activists and students throughout the United States, Europe and Australia. This call is championed by a number of large, U.S. based environmental organizations (World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club) and often relies upon the emotional appeal of "charismatic megafauna" such as tigers, rhinos, and pandas to garner support for a variety of quasi-development conservation programs. Luke (1997) refers to this as the creation of "biocelebrity." For example, Luke notes how the World Wildlife Fund uses direct mail appeals "featuring [a] heart tugging photo of a recumbent African Rhino, complete with two tickbirds, and a disturbing command:  Stare into this face and discover 60 million years of evolution .which may well be lost in your lifetime  " (Luke, 1997:45).

Like MacDonald, Luke notes that the imposition of the global ecological paradigm on local places is a kind of eco-colonialism: "WWF-US still makes most of the big decisions about policy as one of the world s most powerful transnational parastatal institutions of green governmentality. Local people, like Nepalese game wardens, Belizean park rangers, or Rwandan sanctuary guards, man the frontlines of Nature reservation defense, but they simply are pointmen for the popular localization of global designs formulated in the WWF s Swiss and American headquarters" (Luke, 19897:44-45). Underneath this eco-colonial paradigm is "nature" as an essentialist category, best understood with the tools and through the gaze of "Western" knowledge and experience.

An important reinforcement of this paradigm came in recent years from the blending of environmentalism with U.S. foreign policy under the Clinton/Gore administration. MacDonald (2001) and Luke (1999) both point out that the popular perception under Clinton/Gore was that the predominant security threats faced by the U.S. were environmental, and that the projection of the U.S. as a global eco-cop was used to mask the latent need to assure access to rapidly diminishing and limited resources for American capital. Uday Desai, in chapter one of Ecological Policy and Politics in Developing Countries concurs, noting that for Western environmentalists, "The idea of  national sovereignty  has become a problem .They have even suggested that activities in one country that are detrimental to the environment of neighboring countries constitute  an international security issue " (1998:8).

Given the pervasiveness of this global ecological model, beginning American students of South Asia may easily conclude that land, water, air and biota are being destroyed at the whim of the people of South Asia. A corollary of this belief is that we, equipped with advanced technologies and scientific understanding of ecosystems, have the right and expertise to regulate that human-environment relation. Undergraduate students are often ill-equipped, in other words, to apply critical thinking to the myriad ways in which political and economic structures beyond the immediate control of local people may constrain and limit the actions of communities in South Asia vis- -vis natural resource management. Typical initial reactions of my students to the ecological dilemmas faced by the people of India, for example, is to immediately blame "overpopulation," "lack of education," and occasionally, "cultural inferiority" for the degradation of resources. These assumptions are well fortified by the work of international ecological parastatal institutions, according to MacDonald. In discussing the ibex project in northern Pakistan, he notes, " it has been the rural villagers who, far from being excluded, have been the primary  environmental managers  in the central Karakoram for centuries. From the perspective of the project, however, this does not matter, for its ultimate assumption is of a people without appropriate knowledge or skills" (MacDonald, 2001:21).

I encourage students to ask what circumstances have led people who have successfully lived on the land for thousands of years to resort to practices that are degrading to the very resources on which their lives depend. Students who tend to assume the superiority of European models of environmental management simply never examine the potential causes of resource degradation. My task in the classroom then, is to lead them on an intellectual journey that allows them to recognize faulty assumptions that may stem from the global ecological paradigm or from the "myth of the European miracle  (Blaut, 1993). Developing new, more humane and appropriate assumptions about the equal rationality and capability of human beings, in terms of Blaut s  psychological unity  for example, (1993:42), would help students to think critically about the global and local structures within which people make decisions about their environments.

Perhaps one of the hardest elements of this exercise is to introduce students to the realization that environments are historically and politically constructed and how they might be addressed as the basis of a politically engaged critique. Thus, to continue to use Ken MacDonald s example, the people of the Karakoram view ibex and the pastures that sustain them from a uniquely situated geographic and historical perspective. Having lived with and on ibex for literally thousands of years, the local people view this animal as a symbolic, mythic and material resource around which their lives revolve. Decisions about how to change the human-animal relationship if indeed such changes were required would best be developed by the people themselves within their own cultural framework, rather than imposed by international actors who view the ibex as a symbol of global biodiversity amputated from its local context. Illustrating that the human-environment relation is socially constituted is a challenge that I continue to struggle with in the classroom. Using local examples of differing interpretations of nature to illustrate the concept (conflicts over the spotted owl in the Pacific Northwest or differing reactions to alligators here in Florida, for example) before asking students to reconsider their own interpretations of the meanings embedded in natural environments by people in South Asia, has proven useful.

While students  assumptions about South Asia may share some similarities with their perceptions of other "exotic" Third World places in Africa or Latin America, it is likely that the image of South Asia in the minds of American students is particularly shaped by its high population density. As I mentioned above, one of the most common tangential assumptions of American students about life and ecology in South Asia is that environmental degradation is simply the result of "overpopulation." Layers of latent assumptions about the causes of "overpopulation" exist just beneath the surface, and these assumptions are connected to the logic of the global ecological paradigm in ways that are not really very surprising. Students tend to assume that Indians or Bangladeshis are not educated enough to regulate procreation; or that they are making "irrational" family planning choices that only exacerbate their poverty. The commonly identified causal cycle leads from an uneducated South Asian couple to unwanted pregnancies and surplus children, to the degradation of soil and water, to the poverty of the family, which continues the cycle by preventing access to education. Beginning students in classes in which I have covered human-environment relations in South Asia have repeatedly remarked that they do not understand why women in India or Bangladesh have "too many children" when these offspring continue to "make the family even poorer."

This model of "overpopulation and poverty" blames the people of South Asia for their own poverty as if they lived in isolation from the complexities of world politics, history and economy. This is a decontextualized perspective is a particularly a-geographic and a-historic view of place. Its hidden assumption is that rational western science, medicine, and education are needed to save the suffering masses of Asia from themselves. This is of course, the same hidden assumption of the global ecological model, and like the latter, it ignores both local context and the processes that link localities to regional and global mega-structures of power, politics, ideology and wealth.

In coping with this Pandora s box of assumptions, there are several steps that can be taken in the classroom. First, we can demonstrate, or at least argue for, the "shared capabilities of human beings," or psychological unity. Other than simply explaining, and having students read, arguments that refute differences in intelligence or capability between groups of human beings on the basis of race or geographic origin, there are other ways we can help students understand that people in South Asia, despite different cultural customs, are very similar to them. My preferred method, when covering topics related to "other" people, particularly oppressed peoples, is to allow the subjects to speak for themselves. Thus, as a white American academic, I find it quite useful to introduce the students to writings by South Asians living in South Asia. This reinforces the concept that we cannot disconnect our analysis of the world from our cultural and social position, i.e., no one can interpret the role of the ibex in village life high in the mountains of northern Pakistan better than the village people themselves.

One of my favorite academic texts is Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South, by Ramachandra Guha and Juan Martinez-Alier. The biting sarcasm and out-front anger of sections of this book can be useful in the classroom for shaking students out of an epistemological arrogance and faith in their own views. Guha in particular is unwilling to entertain U.S. environmentalism s attempts to dictate changes in the human-environment relationship in his native South Asia. He is adamant that South Asians be recognized for developing their own conceptions of the environment, and that they should be accorded the opportunity to define the most urgent, and devise locally appropriate solutions which may often entail attempting to change the local-national-global power nexus in significant ways. He notes, "That wealth provides the means to correct environmental damage, that wealthy people are environmentally more conscious because they can afford to care for quality of life issues, and that poverty is one main cause of environmental degradation, are the politically correct beliefs. However, for many ecologists, this constellation of beliefs represents no more than an attempt to blame the victims, and it provokes outrage.  indignation is repressed, and the argument that the poor destroy the environment is considered calmly ." (Guha and Martinze-Alier, 1997:47). Believing as I do that students may need a intersubjective, dialogical perspective to open their minds and allow them to hear and see South Asia from something other than a Eurocentric position, Guha and Martinez-Alier s book serves a useful purpose.

Some of the readings I have chosen to use in my classes and sections on South Asia include monographs produced by community groups in India. For example, I routinely assign sections from Rakku s Story: Structures of Ill health and the Source of Change, written by Sheila Zurbrigg, and published by the Center for Social Action in Bangalore. Although Zurbrigg is a Canadian doctor, she worked and lived in Tamil Nadu for a number of years, and the opening chapter of this book is the transcription of the story of one South Asian woman s life and struggle. It is a powerful and moving testimony to the limited opportunities faced by rural people in India. In addition to many monographs published by the Center for Social Action, I also utilize publications of a variety of other collectives around the country. There are also numerous online resources that provide a useful bridge to the actions and ideas of actors in South Asia, including www.narmada.org; www.neravt.com/left/India.htm; FOIL (Forum of Indian Leftists); SAMAR (South Asia Magazine for Action and Reflection), and the Asia Labor Monitor Resource Center.

Whenever possible, I invite guest speakers from the communities or regions which I am covering. I also use personal testimony, autobiography, and stories about material life in South Asia in addition to more academic writings. Allowing the "subaltern" to speak is usually the most effective pedagogical medium; their voices cannot be ignored. Finally, I use films made by South Asians that allow them to define their own ecological and social problems, and propose solutions that are consistent with their own perceptions of their human and physical landscapes. The point here is not to say that non-Asians can never comment on conditions and issues in the region; certainly much can be gained by a dialogue between academics and activists across the divide. However, the tendency is for American students to be very influenced by Eurocentric or "Orientalist" thinking in regards to South Asia and Asia more generally. Democratic dialogue between differing ideas and conceptions of the human-environment relationship cannot be established until this tendency is overcome.

In reference specifically to the role of population pressure, I have found it useful to use studies that demonstrate the rejection of family planning schemes by poor rural people, based on the need they have for extra labor, old-age support, etc. Exposure to the gains made in the state of Kerala through improvements in health, women s education, overall literacy, etc., helps encourage students and prevents them from viewing the Indian social landscape as one of problems without solutions. Here as well I attempt to utilize work written by South Asian women themselves; Gita Sen s Development, Crises and Alternate Visions (1987, with Caren Grown) and Ashoka Bandarage s work in Dangerous Intersections (1999) come to mind.

One of my favorite films in this regard is The Legacy of Malthus distributed by Bullfrog Films. This film confronts precisely the common misconception that poverty in South Asia (and Scotland, by way of contrast) is created by the birth of "excess" children, and, consequently, the ability of the land to provide for growing families. Much of the film consists of powerful interviews with women in a village in northern India. The interviewer is interested in the reasons for the poverty of the women and their families. Perhaps what my students have found to be most remarkable about this film is their own dismay when they realize that they fully expected the women of rural India to be something other than articulate, intelligent, powerful spokespersons on their own behalf. "I am ashamed that I was so surprised that these women clearly understood their own circumstances, and had such a sophisticated view of their lives," commented one of my graduate students after viewing the film. Indeed, the interviews with the women show that people in South Asia have a deep understanding of their own lives, including the processes that have reduced their land holdings, changed the circumstances under which they strive to feed their families, and undermined their ability to maintain the health and well-being of the village. In addition, the film makes it clear that the choice to give birth to more than two children is indeed an outcome of the worsening ecological and economic conditions of village life, not the cause of it. Here the women themselves express the classic reasons for larger families in rural South Asia: lack of medical care, lack of education, lack of retirement security, lack of water and fuel resources, lack of social services, lack of job opportunities. In the absence of such social amenities, children must provide the labor and services necessary for family survival.

Another clear benefit to the viewing of this film is that students  cannot escape the conclusion that women in South Asia, while victimized by powerful local, national and global forces, are also agents in their own lives. Thus, the common stereotype of the Asian woman as subservient and pliant is done away with when the viewer sees the women of the village organize and arm themselves in defense of their land. Reading and discussion of some of the work of Vandana Shiva and other leading South Asian women activists can also reinforce this point. Raka Ray s book, Fields of Protest (1999), is a useful resource in this regard as well, because it is an ethnographic study of women s organizations in two states in India. It demonstrates both women s attempts to change the circumstances of their own lives at the same time that it illustrates the diversity of the country, socially and politically. Finally, Indian Women Forge Ahead: Case Studies of Women Activists, edited by Jessie B. Tellis-Nayak and Merlyn Lobo Brito and published by the Indian Social Institute in Bangalore (1992), is also helpful.

The goal here is to make it clear to students that human beings, wherever they reside, make choices in their lives in much the same manner as they do; South Asians are equally rational, thoughtful, and compassionate when making decisions about family size, for example. Once this understanding is achieved, students will be motivated to ask why rational, thoughtful, caring people in Bangladesh or India might choose to have larger families than contemporary Americans. This question cannot be answered without a very grounded examination of the material life of families in rural South Asia, and an examination of the national, regional and global forces that shape and constrain their access to land, seed, draft animals, loans, pesticides, fertilizers, medical care, education, etc.

There is much fodder in the teaching the geography of South Asia for helping students understand cross-scale complexities. Indeed, a truer understanding of the problems of ecological degradation and the human condition in the region demands a clearer view of how the local is in a dialectical relation to the global. I view the teaching of human-environment relations in South Asia as a kind of Socratic journey. We begin by asking what are the social and environmental conditions under which people in the sub-continent live. This leads us to further questions about human nature itself, during which we attempt to dispel the common Eurocentric and racist assumptions about Third World peoples as irrational, ill-informed about their own ecological landscapes, or incapable of problem-solving. From there we are compelled to ask what larger structures and processes have forced people in particular locations to choose larger families, or to undertake unsustainable environmental practices. This in turn leads us on a path from the local (where we might examine gender and caste relationships), to the regional (where we might discuss Green Revolution policies, communal conflict, physical and political diversity), to the national (where we encounter federal vs. state tensions, and federal development policies, economic liberalization, etc.) and finally, to the global (where we must confront both the colonial history of the Sub-continent and the neo-colonial processes still at work in the global economy). Finally, including a section on South Asia in any introductory geography class affords the opportunity to further challenge outdated but firmly-held ideas of "Orientalism," which may only be reinforced by popular narratives about the global environment.

References

Bandarage, Ashoka, 1999. "Population and Development: Toward a Social Justice Agenda," in Dangerous Intersections: Feminist Perspectives on Population, environment, and Development, edited by Jael Silliman and Ynestra King Cambridge, South End Press.

Blaut, J. M., 1993. The Colonizer s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History. Guilford, New York.

Desai, Uday, 1998. Ecological Policy and Politics in Developing Countries. SUNY, New York.

Guha, Ramachandra, and Martinez-Alier, Juan, 1998. Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South. Earthscan, London.

MacDonald, Kenneth, "Global Hunting Grounds: Power, Scale and Ecology in the Negotiation of Conservation," Ecumene: A Journal of Cultural Geographies.

Luke, Timothy, 1999. "Environmentality as Green Governmentality," in E. Darier, Discourses of the environment. Oxford, Blackwell publishers.

Luke, Timothy, 1997. "The World Wildlife Fund: Ecocolonialism as Funding the Worldwide "Wise Use" of Nature," Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Journal of Socialist Ecology, Vol. 8, 30, June, pgs. 31-61.

Ray, Raka, 1999. Fields of protest: women s movements in India. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

Sardar, Ziauddin, 1999. Orientalism. Open University: Buckingham.

Sen, Gita, and Grown, Karen, 1987. Development, Crises, and Alternative Visions: Third World Women s Perspectives. New York, Monthly Review Press.

Zurbrigg, Sheila, 1991. Rakku s Story: Structures of Ill-health and the Source of Change. Center for Social Action, Bangalore.

Rebecca A. Johns holds a Ph.D. from Rutgers University (1994) and is an assistant professor of Geography at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg Campus.  She is also a member of the board of editors of Project South Asia, a digital library of teaching resources for colleges and universities.

Copyright  2001 Teaching South Asia (ISSN 1529-8558) and Rebecca A. Johns.  All rights reserved.  No part of this article may be reprinted in any form without written permission from Teaching South Asia or Rebecca A. Johns.