What Being South Asian Taught Me About Sustainability
“Uh, absolutely not,” I declared disdainfully as I surveyed the banana leaf on the cramped floor of the Chennai apartment. “I’m not eating on that.”
“Uh, yes you are,” my cousin Sai replied, his voice lilting in mockery of my pompous tone. “If you opened your mind, you’d know that banana leaves are way more sustainable than the plastic nonsense your friends probably use back home.”
A traditional banana leaf meal. Photo courtesy of Pintrest.
I was taken aback, but intrigued. Sai and I spent the next two hours poring over websites to research the dichotomy between our eating setups, conjuring up notes and diagrams. Guiltily, I realized that I had no evidence to substantiate my claim of the banana leaf’s supposed inferiority. In fact, although plastic plates seemed cleanlier, banana leaves contained bacteria-killing polyphenols and were compostable (a double whammy to my argument).
My Indian heritage has continuously crept into my interactions with sustainability, but never in a way that I had ever overtly acknowledged prior to the banana leaf epiphany of 2018. My parents immigrated to the United States with little to their names, so sustainability was always subtly interwoven into the fabric of values I was taught growing up.
Hole in your jeans? A needle and blue thread should do the trick.
Food on your plate? Finish it, or store the leftovers in the fridge for tomorrow.
Done with your watermelon? Save the rind for curry.
“It is our collective responsibility to amplify the importance of pre-existing habits rooted in culture, while simultaneously teaching communities to hold corporations accountable for unethical procurement practices.”
Despite this, I have grown up on the “going green” tutorials made by predominantly white women, all the while failing to consider the unspoken rules in my own household. I lauded the movement to “recycle and reuse,” while attributing all the same things I did at home to mere products of my parent’s thriftiness. While the tutorials meant well, they thrusted the blame of the climate crisis in its entirety onto regions — like South Asia — that were central to production in the global supply chain.
On paper, this connection made sense to me. Whenever I visited India, I saw smog, factories and wasteland. But I also saw lush fields bursting with fresh produce, the clamor of vendors lining the streets to sell their locally produced knick knacks, sarees being passed down across generations. It just didn’t add up.
A landfill in India. Photo courtesy of Pintrest.
It was only when I developed a keen passion for ethical sourcing and sustainable supply chain management that my perspective on South Asian sustainability became nuanced. I began to understand the distinction between consumer behaviors and business action. Perhaps the individual habits practiced by the South Asians I saw were not integrated into the global conversation about climate because of a lack of awareness.
It is our collective responsibility to amplify the importance of pre-existing habits rooted in culture, while simultaneously teaching communities to hold corporations accountable for unethical procurement practices. Prioritizing intersectional climate justice, I now realize that socioeconomically disadvantaged and indigenous communities in South Asia — and across the globe — face a disproportionate negative climate health burden, despite contributing minimally to it. The tutorials I grew up on cannot apply to them without modulation.
Going green is not a linear process that operates inside a vacuum. Instead, it must take into account the cultural competencies and economic considerations that shape people’s daily interactions with sustainability.
To me, sustainability is cookie-tins-turned-storage containers. It is old shirts repurposed into cleaning rags. It is the namaskarams I do to Bhoomi, the ever providing Mother Nature, every time I perform a Bharatanatam piece. The purpose of namaskaram is to give thanks to the earth for all that she has done, and for bearing the weight of my stamping feet. As I lay prostrate with my forehead pressed to the barren ground, I am reminded to channel this gratitude into intentional and inclusive advocacy.
Yukta Ramanan doing namaskarams at her Bharatanatyam performance. Photo courtesy of Yukta Ramanan.
And yes, I will never again scoff at the opportunity to eat a meal on a banana leaf.