Just how much is too much?

GREEN WARS: DISPATCHES FROM A VANISHING WORLD
Bahar Dutt
Harper Collins
164 pages; Rs 299

For most of us, Bahar Dutt is a familiar figure. She comes from a family of journalists: sister of one of India's leading broadcast journalists (you-know-who) and daughter of the late Prabha Dutt, India's first female journalist to report from a war zone (the 1971 Indo-Pak War). But more than that, Ms Dutt has, over the years, carved her own niche. She started her career at the age of 22 as a member of the wildlife non-governmental organisation, Wildlife Trust of India, and went on to join CNN-IBN as its environment editor. Today, she is counted among India's leading conservationists and environment journalists.

For too long, environment has remained a neglected beat in mainstream media - both in print and television. The number of environmental journalists, especially in the broadcast media, are so few that they can be counted on the fingers of one hand. One remembers the famous Bedi brothers (Ms Dutt is the daughter-in-law of one of them) and Valmik Thapar, all of whom made documentaries. On prime-time television, there was Swathi Thiyagarajan, who used to have her own wildlife show on NDTV 24X7.

Ms Dutt, though, as the first-page introduction of Green Wars: Dispatches from a Vanishing World says, can be credited for "having pushed the boundaries of environment journalism from an obscure segment on the daily news to prime time television".

CNN-IBN was recently bought by India's richest man (again you-know-who) - the cruellest of ironies for Ms Dutt, who through her reportage at the news channel had crusaded against the politico-corporate nexus that causes the maximum damage to India's environment and wildlife. Ms Dutt is no longer with the channel (in the "Acknowledgements" section, she refers to her CNN-IBN colleagues as "former") - her exit might have been for this very reason.

Green Wars (released this year on World Environment Day, or June 5), then, is part ode, part memoir and even part catharsis to Ms Dutt's adventures during her two stints: first as a conservationist, and later as a full-time journalist.

Yes, cathartic! Ms Dutt's career as an environmental journalist was full of frustrations, with her editors subjecting her beat to double scrutiny. As she writes in her preface: "... the editor of a leading media house, everytime I pitched a green story, would invariably complain: 'Environmentalism is stalling growth; all I am interested in is double-digit growth for this country' ".

Despite such frustrations, Ms Dutt bravely took on the odds as she vividly describes in her 12 adventures, 10 of which took place across the length and breadth of India.

Ms Dutt did various things. She tried to find (and succeeded) alternative but familiar livelihoods for former snake charmers in a basti on Delhi's outskirts. She spearheaded a campaign to protect the habitat of the sarus crane in central Uttar Pradesh's wetlands, which were in danger of being destroyed because the then chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav wanted to build an airport for his village. She reported on the dead gharials found in the clear waters of the Chambal on the Uttar Pradesh-Madhya Pradesh-Rajasthan border. She profiled the struggle of the Idu Mishmi tribe in Arunachal against a dam being built on the mighty Dibang. She even had a hair-raising encounter with Goa's infamous mining mafia.

One would think that environmental problems are specific to India because it is a rapidly developing country. But Ms Dutt shows that this is not the case. Two of her adventures are abroad.

One is on Sumatra, the world's fifth largest island and one of the last refuges of Asia's great ape, the orang-utan. Ms Dutt spent time on the island, profiling an ecological disaster in the making, as growing palm-oil plantations there threaten to wipe out thick rainforest and in turn, the orang-utan.

The other foreign story is about Ms Dutt's visit to the North Pole, on the frozen reaches of the high Arctic, where each year tonnes of polar ice melt because of global greenhouse emissions.

Green Wars is very important reading material for budding environmentalists, environmental reporters and civil society activists. A slim volume, it is fast-paced and keeps you hooked on right till the very end.

However, it is not only the above classes of readers that the book is meant for, but also the lay reader. As Ms Dutt makes it clear in her preface: "This book is not meant to be a diatribe against capitalism or modern living. What this book seeks to explore is the tension between environment and development and to question the existing model of 'growth at any cost' that has led to an unprecedented onslaught on India's forests and rivers."

We have recently elected a prime minister whose campaign's central plank was development. Today's media stories are all about the development-versus-conservation debate. All this makes Ms Dutt's book a very timely read. Read it and find out what is the view on the other side, what "development" really means, and just how much is too much.