K.A.Shaji

Everywhere except Kerala, the Church has emerged as one of the strongest voices against deforestation, biodiversity loss, reckless exploitation of natural resources and destructive development.

From Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’ to the interventions of Pope Leo XIV, the message has been remarkably clear: forests, rivers, mountains, wildlife and natural resources are not commodities that human beings can exploit without limits.

The Church speaks about climate change, ecological destruction and the moral responsibility to protect the natural world for future generations.

But come to Kerala’s Western Ghats, and the Kerala unit of Catholic Church appears to be speaking an entirely different language.

This contradiction is particularly visible in the positions taken by the Church leadership in Idukki, Thamarassery, Thalassery and Pala.

Their interventions on environmental regulations and wildlife increasingly sound less like the language of ecological responsibility and more like the language of unrestricted human expansion into a fragile mountain ecosystem.

The suffering of small scale farmers in the hilly regions is genuine and nobody should trivialise it. People have died in encounters with elephants and other wild animals, crops have been destroyed and families in the high ranges live with genuine fear.

But the Church cannot use that legitimate suffering to create a political narrative in which the farmer is always on one side, while the forest, wildlife and environmentalists are placed on the other. That is not the reality of the Western Ghats, and it is certainly not the way to protect the farmer in the long term.

A small farmer cultivating a few acres is not the same as a powerful landowner, a commercial estate operator, a resort developer or an encroacher seeking to profit from fragile land.

A farmer’s modest house is not the same as a massive commercial construction project, and agricultural activity cannot automatically be used to justify every occupation or every form of development in an ecologically sensitive landscape.

Yet this distinction is repeatedly blurred whenever environmental restrictions are challenged in the name of farmers. The uncomfortable question is therefore unavoidable: whose interests are actually being protected when every environmental safeguard is portrayed as an attack on the farmer?

If the Church genuinely wants to defend small farmers, it should have the courage to distinguish their legitimate needs from the interests of those who want unrestricted access to the Western Ghats.

One of the most disturbing manifestations of this politics is what has come to be described as Kurishu Krishi, the planting of crosses on hilltops, forest margins and disputed or environmentally fragile land.

There is nothing wrong with a cross, Christian worship or people praying on a hill. But a cross cannot become a land title, an environmental clearance or a building permit.

When a cross is followed by a pathway, a shrine, a shed, a road and eventually permanent construction, questions about the legality of the occupation cannot simply be dismissed as an attack on Christianity.

If forest land or government land has been occupied illegally, the law must apply irrespective of whether the occupation carries a cross, a political flag or the name of a corporation. Faith deserves respect, but faith cannot be weaponised to legitimise encroachment.

The problem becomes even more serious when we look at the gigantic religious structures spreading across fragile parts of the Western Ghats. Large churches, convention centres, retreat facilities, pilgrimage structures, parking areas, access roads and associated construction are transforming landscapes where ecological restraint should be the first consideration.

Hills are cut, slopes are modified, natural drainage is altered and grasslands and forest edges are increasingly treated as available land for construction. The question is very simple: do building and environmental laws apply to religious institutions or not?

If an ordinary citizen cannot construct on an unstable slope without complying with regulations, a religious institution cannot claim a special exemption. If a private developer cannot destroy a sensitive grassland, a church cannot demand a different standard. A cross on a building does not cancel a building rule, and religious sentiment cannot override environmental law.

This is not merely a question of aesthetics or regulation. Mountain ecosystems are extremely sensitive to disturbance, particularly in a state that has repeatedly experienced devastating floods and landslides.

Cutting slopes, removing vegetation, altering natural drainage and placing large structures on fragile terrain can change the movement of water and increase erosion and instability.

The consequences do not remain within the boundary of the institution that carries out the construction. They travel downhill into farms, settlements, roads and rivers, and eventually it is ordinary people who pay the price.

After everything Kerala has experienced, treating the Western Ghats as an unlimited construction zone is not development. It is ecological irresponsibility dressed up as development.

The Church’s increasingly aggressive position on wildlife is even more troubling. Elephants, tigers and other wild animals are increasingly portrayed as the principal threat to people in the high ranges, while the destruction and fragmentation of their habitats receives far less attention.

Elephant corridors existed long before many of today’s roads, plantations, resorts, fences and buildings came up. When those corridors are blocked, elephants are pushed into fragmented habitats and human settlements, after which the animals are labelled as problem animals.

An elephant cannot be called an encroacher in a corridor that humans have encroached upon. If an elephant corridor is blocked, the rational response is to restore it; if illegal fencing obstructs movement, remove it; if illegal structures occupy wildlife routes, investigate them; and if commercial activities have taken over critical corridors, those activities must be examined instead of simply demanding the removal or killing of the animals.

This is why the latest action by the Idukki administration against unauthorised structures and electric fencing along elephant movement routes is important.

The public debate cannot stop with the question of why elephants are entering human settlements. We must also ask who blocked their traditional routes, who occupied those routes and who benefits from keeping them occupied.

Restoring wildlife corridors is not anti-farmer. In many circumstances, it is one of the most practical ways of reducing human-wildlife conflict and protecting farmers themselves. The Church should be demanding such long-term solutions instead of reducing the entire debate to the removal of wild animals.

The same political hostility has been directed at Madhav Gadgil and the ecological recommendations associated with the Western Ghats. Gadgil warned that the region is ecologically fragile and cannot indefinitely absorb indiscriminate quarrying, mining, deforestation, construction and other destructive activities.

His recommendations can certainly be debated, and the concerns of farmers must be heard, but turning the scientist into an enemy of farmers was never an honest way of conducting that debate.

The ecological problems he warned about did not disappear because his recommendations became politically unpopular. Kerala has continued to experience landslides, extreme rainfall, water insecurity, forest fragmentation and growing human-wildlife conflict, while climate change is making ecological vulnerability even more serious.

This brings us to the question the Church must answer honestly: is it protecting the small farmer or is it also providing political cover for powerful interests that benefit from weaker environmental regulation?

Landowners, commercial estates, resorts, construction interests and encroachers do not automatically become farmers simply because the word is invoked in a political campaign.

The genuine farmer must not become a human shield for everyone who wants unrestricted access to fragile land. If the Church is serious about defending farmers, it should be at the forefront of the fight against the destruction of the forests, springs, watersheds and stable slopes on which agriculture itself depends.

The tragedy is that the politics of unrestricted development ultimately works against the farmer. The farmer needs water, healthy soil, functioning watersheds, stable slopes and a climate-resilient landscape.

Destroy the forests and springs disappear; destroy the grasslands and water retention suffers; cut the mountains and landslide risks increase; disrupt drainage and floods become more destructive.

The real conflict, therefore, is not between the farmer and the forest. It is between the farmer and the forest on one side, and reckless development, encroachment, land speculation and ecological destruction on the other. Any institution that genuinely cares about the farmer should understand this distinction.

This is where the Kerala Church needs to look seriously at itself. The Catholic Church already has a powerful environmental philosophy in Laudato Si’ and a global tradition of speaking about climate change, biodiversity and responsible use of natural resources.

It has the influence to tell its followers that forests are worth protecting, that mountains cannot be endlessly excavated, that grasslands are not wastelands and that wildlife has a legitimate place in the landscape.

It can defend the genuine farmer without defending every encroachment, demand restoration of elephant corridors instead of demanding the elimination of elephants, oppose destructive construction including religious construction, and insist that churches themselves comply with environmental and building laws.

I have no quarrel with Christianity or with ordinary Christian believers who have every right to protect their livelihoods and practise their faith. My objection is to an increasingly insensitive politics in which religion, farmer identity and human-wildlife conflict are being used to weaken environmental protection in one of India’s most fragile ecological regions.

A cross cannot legitimise an encroachment, a church cannot override environmental law, and a farmer cannot be used as a shield for powerful land interests. Equally, an elephant cannot be condemned to death simply because humans have blocked its traditional corridor.

The Western Ghats cannot be treated as an unlimited real-estate reserve, whether the demand comes from corporations, politicians, wealthy landowners or religious institutions.

It is a living ecological system that sustains water, agriculture, communities and wildlife far beyond the hills themselves. If the Kerala Church genuinely wants to protect the farmers it claims to represent, it must stop treating environmental protection as the enemy.

The real protection of the farmer begins with protecting the land, water, forests and ecological systems that keep the farmer alive.

That is the contradiction the Kerala Church can no longer evade: the Catholic Church cannot preach ecological responsibility to the world and practise ecological irresponsibility in Kerala’s Western Ghats.

Shared post

Savyo Joy

 ·

You seem to be targeting the church more than the corporates and missing teeth against the big corporates like tatas and ambanis who might own and control far more land in the western ghats than the Church and could be engaged in tax evasion.. I personally know what’s going on in this aspect.

Can you point me to any sharp or similar elaborate criticism by yourself targeting corporates?

What about the international green carbon fund paid to politicians and government? Is it illegal? Is it lucrative? Is it genuine?

Who is giving endless permits for excavations and building private resorts in high range? The church or government?

Any audit on the forest department regarding the claim by politician Anwar from Nilambur who claimed that the forest department is releasing wild animals into human settlements?

Any audit on timber auctioned off and previous metals mined by the government?

What about muttil maram muri case in which the main culprit is a msm news channel tycoon?

Any audit on illegal constructions by the CPM in forest land or revenue land. There was a news where one cpm office in Kerala High range somewhere that didn’t have any permit.

You seem you be well intentioned. Its laudable that you’ve kept the comments section open to the public. But you are selective in your response. You have the freedom to be so and do so.

If you claim to be mother earth first and climate do gooder, try to first understand what’s happening to humans and patients in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industry where humans are being poisoned from birth itself. For example examine the ingredients of vaccines. Examine why a lot of people died after taking the recent jungle juice of covax, astrazeneca etc..

Examine what is genetically modified organisms and stratospheric aersol injections and how that affects the protection that you claim is needed for water bodies, land, agriculture, wildlife and ecological systems..

Any write up on mullaperiyar dam a ticking time bomb, an explosion of which would lead to death of lakhs of humans ?

If there was a genuine intentioned government, there would have been food and quality testing labs in every nook and corner of kerala and India given the mushrooming of blood diagnostic centres everywhere.