Volume 22, Issue 2, Summer 2000
Vinay Lal
Pages 149-168
Gandhi and the Ecological Vision of Life
Although recognized as one of the principal sources of inspiration for the Indian environmental movement, Gandhi would have been profoundly uneasy with many of the most radical strands of ecology in the West, such as social ecology, ecofeminism, and even deep ecology. He was in every respect an ecological thinker, indeed an ecological being: the brevity of his enormous writings, his everyday bodily practices, his observance of silence, his abhorrence of waste, and his cultivation of the small as much as the big all equally point to an extraordinarily expansive notion of ecological awareness.