Ashish Kothari is an Indian environmentalist, author, and founding member of Kalpavriksh, a non-profit working on environmental and social justice issues at local, national, and global scales. He has taught at the Indian Institute of Public Administration and the National Law School of India University in Bengaluru, coordinated India’s National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan process, and serves as a judge on the International Tribunal on the Rights of Nature. He also helps coordinate the Vikalp Sangam alternatives confluence, the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, and the Radical Ecological Democracy initiative. Over more than four decades, he has authored, co-authored, or edited more than 30 books, along with hundreds of articles.
In this wide-ranging InterDialogue, Kothari traces his path from a childhood watching Delhi’s urban forests disappear into a lifetime of environmental and social justice work, and how that activism grew into Kalpavriksh and wider networks like the Vikalp Sangam, the ICCA Consortium, and the Global Tapestry of Alternatives. We discuss the biocultural and ideological diversity of the Indian subcontinent, his concept of “outscaling” as an alternative to conventional growth models, and how Adivasi and indigenous rights in India compare with frameworks in Latin America, shaped by very different histories of colonization and violence. Kothari also reflects on decades of writing—from a self-published newsletter in 1980 to the hundred-essay volume Pluriverse—and how it has supported grassroots movements and reached younger generations.
We go on to explore the rights of nature movement in India—including the personhood granted to the Ganga and Yamuna rivers and the transboundary politics of South Asia’s rivers—before Kothari lays out earthy governance, his framework for moving beyond the legal limits of rights of nature toward a form of decision-making in which the rest of the natural world is already part of the process, illustrated through examples from a threatened forest community in Mumbai to a girl’s account of a river’s “right to sing.” We discuss what this kind of ecological consciousness might mean for cities and displaced communities, the role of language and art in keeping it alive, and Kothari’s framework of Radical Ecological Democracy and the “flower of transformation” approach of the Vikalp Sangam process, before closing on the potential, and the obstacles, for bridging natural sciences and indigenous knowledge systems.
Timestamps
0:00 – Introduction
2:30 – From Delhi’s forests to environmental activism
5:04 – Founding Kalpavriksh and global alternatives networks
8:11 – Building international collaborations and community conservation
12:41 – Biocultural diversity and cross-cultural dialogue in South Asia
18:23 – Academic collaboration and ideological divides in Vikalp Sangam
21:58 – Adivasi populations and indigenous identity in India
23:55 – Indigenous rights in India versus Latin America
27:33 – The Forest Rights Act and territorial self-rule
29:36 – Colonization, disease, and violence across regions
31:45 – Writing for the public over academia
36:04 – Pluriverse, young readers, and Gen Z movements
41:10 – The rights of nature movement in India
47:07 – Transboundary rivers and political borders
50:31 – Earthy governance beyond rights of nature
57:13 – Bringing ecological consciousness to cities
58:57 – Displacement and the loss of nature’s voice
1:02:54 – Language, metaphor, and the voice of the river
1:03:50 – Reviving tradition through art and music
1:05:05 – Radical ecological democracy and the flower of transformation
1:10:04 – Bridging natural sciences and indigenous knowledge
1:16:11 – Breaking down academic silos
1:20:27 – Closing thoughts and final reflections
