Religion and Environmental Pollution
(Some reflections, tongue partly in cheek)

Mehul Kamdar 

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!

 


Mehul Kamdar from Chicago is currently moderating Mukto-Mona forum. He was the editor of The Modern Rationalist under late M D Gopalakrishnan  and associated with various rationalist movements. He can be reached at [email protected]