In 1989, well before there was as much awareness about the environmental destruction and injustice as it is today, Chilean writer and journalist Luis Sepulveda published his novel Un viejo que leía novelas de amor. Translated in English in 1992 as The old man who read love stories, it is the story of Antonio José Bolivar Proaño, a sixty-something old widower living in a river town in a remote part of Ecuador in the Amazon rainforest. The old man lives a simple life, troubles no one, cooks simple foods, and minds his own business. He has some education and can read, and he loves to read love stories – the really tragic ones with a happy ending – brought to him by a dentist on an old boat who visits the remote town twice a year. Antonio, though originally not from this part of the country, has also developed an incredible relationship with the local indigenous community (the Shuar) who live in the jungle, and through them has learned to respect the jungle and its ways, its fauna and flora. This remote part of the world, however, is not immune to the greed of the gold prospectors and their enablers, many of whom work for the government in the far-off capital. They do not care about the jungle or its people, and have no qualms about their greed or the impact they have on the nature. As this short novel progresses, we see that increased destruction of nature, in the name of development, causes inevitable strife and chaos; leads to calamities and tragedies; and tension peaks between man and nature, the ways of the old and the progress of the modern. The old widower, with a love for books, is caught in the middle, trying to preserve the harmony of the world around him.
It is a short, extraordinary novel, steeped in symbolism and increasingly relevant today as we navigate the world where waters are claiming back their old pathways. Literature, I am often reminded, is not simply about imagining the world that does not exist but about the world we end up creating.
Much is being discussed these days about corruption of officials who allow for development in flood plains. There are senior journalists who used thinly veiled language to suggest that many in the powerful circles of the government have been involved in destroying the ecosystem of the mountains for personal gains. All of that is disturbing and needs to be investigated with honesty, transparency and a deep sense of urgency. But there is more to the tragedy in our midst. It is not simply the corruption or greed of the officials that needs to be checked. It is also our own desire to live in ‘exclusive’ gated communities in picturesque locales, in having carpeted roads that take us to forest clearings that have all the luxuries of the modern world, in having our own enclaves built on the ashes of old forests or in a cul-de-sac with a river view. As I drove from Lahore to Islamabad a couple of weeks ago, I saw numerous advertisements of housing societies and developments promising heavenly locations with picture-perfect houses. We must ask, what used to be here before this new development? Who were the people who were forced to leave? What trees were uprooted? And what topography was flattened?
Yet, as Sepulveda and countless other thinkers, writers and artists, and members of indigenous communities remind us, policy alone would not be sufficient. We have to love nature and care deeply about it. We have to be troubled by the unchecked notion of progress, not just because of self-preservation, but because we care about the land, and everything on it. No campaign to plant a million or a billion trees is going to bring us happiness until we feel wounded when nature is injured in the name of economic development or progress.
It is said that care begets courage. The courage to change, and forcing change, will not come until we care about the natural world that envelopes all of us.
