ABSTRACT
India, a vast region of more than one billion people extends one thousand miles from the Himalayas in the north to Kanyakumari at the southern tip of the peninsula and another thousand miles, from the Pakistani border to the hills of Assam. Home to one of the world’s oldest civilizations, environmental problems have reached immense proportions in India. The air and the rivers are profoundly polluted. By some estimates, the Delhi region has the worst air quality in the world. Long stretches of the Yamuna and Ganges Rivers are no more than industrial effluent. Despite the work of many action plans, urgent triage must be enacted throughout the Indian subcontinent for the sake of human, animal, and plant well-being. This chapter will explore messages from Hinduism and Jainism, Gandhi’s legacy, and Sikhism that can help provide alternative inspirations for redressing the problems of ecological degradation.
