Back in 2007 I was on an
agricultural training program and giving a talk to farmers in the Aluvihare
area of Matale about the various crises in transport, food, energy, climate,
finance and garbage. While they listened attentively enough, as the talk
progressed, I got the distinct feeling that I was not really engaging them.
Finally, when I was done, a middle aged man who had been standing slightly
aside from the group beckoned me to his side.
He was Arunasiri he informed me, a man who had farmed his one acre of
uplands and one acre of paddy lands for forty years.
Summarized, this is what
he told me “Sir, I agree that there seems to be a problem with quality of
food and cost of food. But I don’t have that problem because I grow all the
food I need organically. I have never had to sit at my table with less than six
separate dishes to choose from. I know that fuel prices are very high but most
of my fuel needs are served by firewood picked from my own lands or from the
vicinity and my family goes to sleep by eight o’clock so we use very little
electricity. I also agree that some people have issues with transport. But I
don’t have that problem because I go to town only once every three months and
only to buy salt, dried fish, blades, soap and toothpaste. Once a year I buy a
couple of new sarongs and shirts. I earn about 2000 rupees a month by selling a
few fruits on the roadside and that is quite enough for everything I need to
buy. I know that may people use bins to put garbage in but I do not think of
anything as garbage so I don’t need a bin. Most of the people you spoke to are
like me. What you speak of may be true of the rest of the world but for us,
these things have never been problems so we are wondering what to do with what
you say”.
Although rueful that my effort of
the morning was completed wasted I nevertheless smiled with genuine happiness
for in Arunasiri I saw a completely sustainable man, living in a sustainable
community in a sustainable village. Where he is now I do not know. Neither do I know if his village has
succumbed to the insanity and impropriety of the world in the decade that
followed. However, the reason underlying
his killer missive of “your problems have never been my problem” is ragingly
relevant to us today as we deal with infinitely exacerbated versions of those
very crises I spoke about that day.
The reason is not that hard to
understand. Connecting people with goods that were produced on the other side
of the planet is a horribly unsustainable exercise that was the great, world
destroying mathra of the industrial age. With every increase in the miles
between the minds and markets of the producer and the consumer, everything
becomes more difficult, more expensive, more wasteful and more toxic.
A key difference between the
industrial age and the sustainable age is the fact that in the sustainable age,
minimizing this distance between producer and consumer is mandatory. Taking the
argument to its highest point, the sustainable age must strive to reduce that
distance to zero at every possible point. The only way to achieve that is to
make the producer the consumer or vice-versa as farmer Arunasiri and his
community had done so many years ago. This is easiest achieved in food, energy
and transport. In this piece, I will not treat finance and garbage for those
wastes deserve fuller attention.
To reduce “food kilometers”,
consumers need only to grow a percentage of their food and to eradicate those
kilometers, grow all of the food that they consume. Even urban Sri Lanka is
comparatively green and we have a tradition of growing steeped in our
agricultural heritage that is easily leveraged for the purpose. Happily, with
the present government committed to localizing food production and consumption,
they have the ability and the capability of lending a helping hand to any and
all who wish to engage in food production for their own consumption. Not simply
in rural settings but (especially) in urban habitats.
To reduce “energy kilometers”,
consumers need only to generate a
percentage of their energy and to eradicate those kilometers, generate all of
their energy. Once again, the government has created the enabling environment
for consumers to create their own energy through the “battle for solar energy”
initiative that provides substantial technical and financial assistance to
those (especially) in urban settings to generate their own power.
To reduce “transport kilometers”
consumers need only to work and study a percentage of time from their places of
residence and to eradicate those kilometers, work and study exclusively from
home. Here too, modern technology is already eminently capable of providing the
spidering required for person-to-person interconnects that do not require them
to be in the same physical space.
Doing these things will reduce
the carbon footprint of every citizen for all of these areas are high in energy
consumption when indulged in using industrial age sensibilities. Most
importantly though, it reduces waste geometrically.
But will we? Many of us, who dismiss stress,
illness, fatigue, loss of quality time as “occupational hazards” of attempting
to compete in the world will think of all of these alternative exercise which
will reduce all those industrial age problems as either “a lot of work” or “not
worth the time”. Such is the nature of addiction to bad things. If we qualify in any way to the title
“intelligent” this should have ended decades ago but beings creatures of habit,
addicts actually, we have let the runaway train of casual producer-consumer convenience
gather so much momentum that it threatens, not only to throw the entire human
race off track, but to destroy the track as well. Yet, true to our addiction,
we would rather shrug, bury our heads in the sand, watch our idiot boxes, send our tweets and snaps and posts, buy everything that loans, debts, supermarkets
and malls can sell us and go to our happy, habit-addled doom than lift a single
finger to turn this around.
I have a small hope though, that
people will sit up, remove their pink-tinted glasses and see the world for what
it truly is. See that we, collectively, have run out of time. See that we have to bootstrap
ourselves into the future and that future will belong to sustainability if we
are to have any future at all. See that enabling that future mandates that
these bad habits are broken. That these horror addictions are kicked. See
that like all such things, these must stop and that they must stop now.
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