Below are Prof. Butola's responses as sent to us via email:
Out of the two approaches I mentioned in my presentation i.e.
the political economy and the political ecology approaches I think the
political ecology approach is not only relevant but also desirable mainly
on account of the following reasons:
The
societies in the developing world, particularly China and India, are mainly
political partners in the processes of modernisation without being historical partners, meaning thereby modernisation in these countries was
introduced through their incorporation in the world market, whereby the
then existing social contract were abruptly broken and replaced
by economic contractual and market relations. This led to new forms of spatial and
social relations. Some of the main manifestations of these were, as I mentioned, dematerialisation and metabolic rift.
These simply stand for the
disruptions that took place between the environment and society, for
example the hydraulic societies, and the self sufficient village societies in
the Orient were replaced by the proletarian reserves for the trading
companies. Similarly the environment which stood for self sufficiency and
self reliance was replaced by spatial dependencies. Urban centres became
the users and exporters of whatever was produced in the rural sectors and, in the process, became consumers of the products produced elsewhere.
Today the urban centre has become the focal points of standarisation of
cultures and tastes etc leading to the elimination of cultures that have made India
and China were so rich and vivid.
