Everyone knows the story of little Johnny and the flea.
Regardless of what sort of essay the teacher tells the class to write, this formidable brat always finds a way to very quickly tie the assigned topic through some marginal link to the flea and then proceeds to blast out his spiel on that redoubtable species and its critical importance to every single reason behind every single reason that underscores every single reason why Johnny, his peers, his educators and his examiners, his family, his community, his town, his country and his planet should or shouldn't live. The local equivalent of Little Johnny of course, as everyone knows, is Amden and the story is “makkage kathaava”. In fact, when someone constantly harps on a single idea regardless of the idea he/she is responding to or its direction or its worth or its relevance, we, in Sri Lanka say “mekata one uge mekkage ellena” (He just wants to spin his flea) or PMS ( “Predetermined Mekka Spinning” - yeah, it was not what you were thinking but it is similarly annoying).
I was recently reading an article on Colombo Telegraph by Vangisha Gunasekera on the global problem of climate instability (to which, by the way, Sri Lanka contributed almost nothing) and found, both to my astonishment and day-long amusement that one of the responses was on Weliweriya (you see, the pollution of water bodies in Weliweriya are just as important to planetary climate stability as Amden’s mekka is to a fish right?). Another was just classic “what we are doing to mother earth at Weliweriya and other places is slow murder and therefore Sri Lankan women are fleeing to the middle east”! What the….?!
Let me clarify that “what the…” What the whole of Sri Lanka has done to mother earth over the last 100 years is not even a blip on the climate horizon in comparison to what China and the USA do to it in a day. LOL. A piece I wrote on the same subject at a global level had someone responding with uppercase statements about Sinhalese kicking out Tamils and Muslims and watch out… the Christians next. Huh? I didn’t even get what this guy’s breed of mekka is or what sort of fish he might want hosting it. It certainly was not the nature of things or the things of nature but I suppose that’s his nature.
Was this specific to environment issues I asked myself. Answer: NO! PMS was evident in responses to practically every post, every article, every response to news, every new Sri Lankan film, every new song, every new piece of art, every civil initiative; regardless of whether the subject was violence against women, pharmaceuticals, beverages, milk products, buildings, or food crops. Whatever the creative, academic, research or governance outcome, I saw broadly, three basic species of mekkas based on their longevity: a) the flavor of the last month mekka (Weliweriya), b) the flavor of the last decade mekka (the regime) and c) the flavor of the last half century mekka (racial and religious differentiation). All of these pointed to a queen mekka: politics. It seems as if people are spinning off or spawning variations of these breeds at a rather dizzying pace – at least on the interactive components of communications instruments.
Was this really true? Was Sunil Perera’s classic “Uncle Johnson’s Jubilee” and its two lines about politics the actuality? Well, no. Not really. The political mekka is the outcome of a desperate search on the part of human beings to find a target for one of three questions: a) “Who is to blame?”, b) “Who can I say tricked me into doing this?”, c) Why can’t I indulge in the same nasty things that I hate to see others doing?”.
What people are doing is finger-pointing and politics is the best vehicle there is to engage in the age old trick of shouting “LOOK THERE, THAT MAN HAS A KNIFE” while he quietly slits the throat of the man standing next to him with his own knife. Regardless of the target, everyone seems hell bent on engaging in digit-stabs that are then countered by the target with similar digit-jabs. Be the perpetrators the people, the regime, foreign powers, weliweriya or Zoroastrianism.
At one level this is simply a mean way of externalizing issues but at another level who can really blame people for this? When people, in the main, indulge in the worst possible human failings as a matter of preference, one of the few ways of reducing internal frustration is to scream in the direction of the nearest external entity that can be hauled in by the scruff of its neck and scaped into the reason why they get our goat. Be that scaped goat a journalist, the USA, the regime or the pollution of water bodies in micro-geographies. Who cares that five decades of agrochemicals have baked our nation’s earth into toxic mudpack? More to the point, who, amongst us who use PMS as a way of life would even want to? One cannot really spin one’s mekka over dozens of regimes or 300 different bad policy modifications can one? One needs a temporally manageable window and an easily identified regimen of action for this and every “current regime” and the conflict between that regime and those that elected it is ideal for the purpose. For everyone. Not just the citizens or the politicians or other “concerned parties”. Not just in Sri Lanka. Across the world. Regardless of whether or not they have little or no role to play in the myriad different ideas that are aired in public forums from nature to notion to nation. Forget reason. It is of no moment to a circus where everyone indulges themselves in flea market entropy.
Take our current regime for example. The world and her husband are pointing accusatory fingers at it and it is reciprocating by pointing accusatory fingers at the world and his wife. People get on either one of these band wagons and fling their fingers all over the darned place and mostly, all they do is end up poking their own eyes out in the process. This is not a tragedy because one really doesn’t need “vision” to get one’s tickles via the biggest mekka of them all – the one that lives just a few miles away from the end of each extended index finger. The only negative upshot of PMS is that there will be a lot of bemused article writers wondering what sort of weird lens these people have fitted to the spectacle frames carefully straddling their non-existent visual organs.
Why do this? Well, we must go back to why Amden did it to find a reasonable answer. Amden knew nothing about most things that were going on in the class. Amden didn’t want to know. Amden didn’t think it is either sufficiently important or edifying to know. Amden didn’t believe for one moment that paying attention in class would help him in engaging in the “attara qualities” that gives him the most joy. What Amden knew very clearly was that he knew something about the mekka. Not a whole lot but just enough for him to make a case for “knowledge of the mekka”. That mekka empowered him. That mekka rationalized everything that ever needed rationalizing for him. Therefore, Amden would grab onto this micro-critter and belabor everyone with it with a tenacity that makes people fall all over the floor laughing their rear ends off. Well Amden doesn’t give a rat’s rear. All Amden is interested in is getting his flea to bite everyone else’s rear. Regardless of what sort of seat the owners of those rears have parked them on.
All human activity on earth attempts to find safer, more
stable and more comfortable environments to exist in and can be broadly lumped
under the heading “human development”. The trouble is that every group has its
own sweet idea of what comprises “a better way to live” and thus, clashes will
naturally occur and equally naturally, the more powerful minorities trundle
over everyone else, monopolizing what
flies and what dies, what becomes policy and what does not. Mostly, that which
flies and that which becomes policy, secures for them the lion’s share of human
and natural resources required to um… “live better”. This, despite the obvious fact that it goes
against the very grain of natural justice. This, despite the fact that due to brutal
exploitation of earth recourses over the last few centuries we are now on the
brink of destruction. In order to turn it around, we need to understand what
"environment" is, what "development" is and what the
current human bias is when it couples these two words together.
This post is rather drawn out, definitely rambling in content and
perhaps muddling in meaning but do bear with me. The “things of nature”
explained in the previous post requires a bit of meandering and quite a few
stops to smell the humus for it to make any sense at all :)
As we all know, the "environment" is a combination
of three intrinsically bound components, namely, social, cultural and natural environments
and "development" is a combination of three more such - environmental, community and economic development.
Now, the degree to which a majority of human beings place
emphasis on one or the other of these six components determine the
"stability" of a social system. Figures 1 gives a rough
idea of where the powerful minority of the world’s urban population currently
is and what the larger majority of rural and pastorals are constantly asked to
aspire to. It is not an accurate picture but simply used to give an idea of weightage and bias.
Interesting isn't it? What this essentially means is that
development practitioners and environment policy makers are primarily
attempting to convert the planet into America. In their minds, environmental and community development as well as the natural environment and the cultural environment should essentially disappear without a trace and we should convert ourselves purely into socioeconomic entities, living out our 600 months of life consuming as much of what is there to consume and give no heed at all to what those who come after us will feed their needs on. Never mind the great drumming, the superb dancing, the rituals of communal solidarity, the livelihood based recreational activity. Never mind the continuity of life on earth.
Such things don’t really give rural Africa any
money, right here right now.... right? The rumba doesn't allow a South American farmer to buy a cell
phone and feed Apple Inc.'s bottom line nor Awale enable and Asian rural to construct a high rise building and become a so-called top-feeder, does it? Nope. Even the so-called "developing group of human beings on this planet", in their majority, is being led to believe that nothing can possibly be better than strong legal systems, reality shows, IPL, apartment dwellings and credit cards.
The simple stupid
problem here is that if every single human being on this planet were to achieve
socioeconomic equality as that phenomenon is identified by the drivers of world policy
and focus exclusively on economic development and the social
environment, it is estimated we will
require the resources of 2 ½ earths to satisfy everyone. This situation is made
even more alarming because everyone knows but blithely ignores the fact that
this focus has only yielded the enabling conditions for greed, opportunism,
exploitation, moral degeneration, crime and destruction of the natural balance and
that climate instability, pandemics, poverty and conflict are the life threatening
results of such efforts for the planet.
Two questions pop up. a) Is there any possibility of reversing this
trend? and b) Is there any possibility to even out the balance between the component parts of development and environment as a viable alternative to the madness of attempting to eradicate four of the six components? The answer to the first question is yes,
but it will require a huge effort on the part of all human beings (most
significantly, those that have the finances and resources to control the
actions of others) to make the choice to change the way they view life and the
way in which they view "safe, stable and comfortable living". The
answer to the second question is no. At no point in history have all of
these things been in ideal balance although many communities and even nations
(such as Sri Lanka during the time of the kings) have managed to get very
close. Given the current world population and the extent to which that
collective has damaged this planet, a complete balance is an unrealistic
expectation. The best that one can hope for (and the best one can hope for is
not a bad place to be) is to achieve universal awareness of the interplay of
these factors and how they affect long term stability of individual and
collective lives and how to factor in the
marginalized components more and more into core existence frameworks.
Well, how? Certainly not by ridiculing
cultural and environmental sensibilities or by marginalizing natural and
cultural development as Binyavanga Wainaina seems to think. Certainly not by tired
thinking that wishes continual promotion of the straplines of development gurus. This requires a slightly deeper analysis. What follows is a lot of rhubarb, there is nothing
here that people don’t know but it is important that people don’t
conveniently forget so bear with me people.
The interrelationships among development components:
These are fairly well known but for the record, I’ll state them nevertheless. Obviously, the linking common ground between the development components and the environment components is environment itself. However, we will address the two entities separately in order to make the interrelationships clearer. The Venn in figure 2 has been known to development practitioners for quite some time now and there is a belief among quite a few of them that balancing environmental, community and economic development would result in sustainable development. mmm...Interesting.The thing is, this process is not quite that simple. If it were, we would have already achieved sustainability. We haven’t. Here’s the reason.
One cannot simply attack all of these areas simultaneously but rather, one must work on them a) through attempting to balance the relationship between any two pair of components and b) through qualifying the starting point of such an exercise. That is, we must address the common outcome of balancing environment and economic development in the relational activity of conservation (group cohesion excluded), the common outcome of balancing economic and community development in the relational activity of community economic development (nature excluded) and the common outcome of balancing community and environment development in the activity of deep ecological life-systems (money excluded). Now, excluding entire facets might seem on its face as an iffy way of looking at the problem but that is because one is using a Venn to define the interrelationships and there is no discernible “where to start” within in. However, the problem resolves itself when one looks at the issue in terms of an “onion diagram” (Figure 3).
Everything starts with the conservation and management of natural resources for without them nothing survives. Therefore this is the organic point of takeoff for achieving sustainability in development. While everyone needs to pull their weight by actively coupling any economic activity with environment sensitivity as a non-negotiable foundation, who amongst us can actually be the best custodians of such exercises? Well, the answer is obvious. The best are those who need no special “training” to understand balancing the human-environment interface. These are primarily communities of hunter-gathers such as the veddas of Sri Lanka and secondarily, rurals and pastorals living in dependence on the balance of natural resources. Now, here is where the problem lies. Urbanites are hell bent on “civilizing” these people with their urban crimes, their urban diseases and their cell phones. They, would like nothing better than to see the shepherds of our planet "socialized" and "economized". The urbanized believe, almost like a mantra, that living either in complete dependence on natural environments or slap dab in the middle of the jungle is a terrible miscarriage of justice and that these people deserve to discard their drums, their weapons, their ways of engaging in their livelihoods, their values and their idea of what constitute “civilized behavior” and espouse those of a group who promote, in their naiveté, lifestyles requiring 2 ½ earths.
Do those people want it? Well, as one old-timer in the Vedda community stated to me a few years ago, “සිදාදියෙන් අපට දුන්නේ හර්ධාබධ පොජ්ජ. දියවැඩියා පොජ්ජ” (all that we received from living in semi-urban communities was heart disease and diabetes).
So, no. Policy planners and development practitioners across the world need to understand the life-critical caregiver role that these people play, recognize their importance, provide them with every form of assistance possible and listen to them on how best to manage the world’s resources. The same policy planners should also start qualifying the recommendations of environmentalists, sustainable development experts and other urban ideologists against those of such communities. Then, and very possibly, only then, will we engineer community cohesion and resilient community development and recreate the foundations for sustainability.
This is not going to be easy. In fact, this would require an upping of the ante for humankind and an increase in the difficulty and complexity of engagement because one will no longer be able to use the popular “one-size-fits-all” methodology of high-rises, TV dinners, pill-popping and rights as valid measures of comfort and security and will need to completely understand the unique interplay of environments and communities before they can be “developed”. The outcome, or rather, the fallout of such an exercise would be, simply, sustainable development. It is something that one must aspire to through years of developing the world based on a significant shift in thinking and it is something that will result almost as a continuous collateral “interim result” , rather than the achievement of a specific “final goal”.
The interrelationships among environmental components:
The relationships amongst the environment components are not well known. The terminology used in figure 4 to describe the union of any two components is not the best. However, they are the closest one can get to. The phenomena are better explained using Sinhala.
The balance of the natural and cultural environments gives "යහ සිරිත්" or wholesome/rewarding customs. The balance of the natural and social environments gives "යහ ජීවිකා" or wholesome/rewarding livelihoods and the balance of the social and cultural environments gives "යහ වින්දනය" or wholesome/rewarding enjoyment.
The outcome of balancing out these dualities gives rise to "සමතුලිත සහජීවනය" or harmonious co-existence. As with the development components, the onion diagram in figure 5 better explains the starting point and process of moving towards its natural outcome.
Under ideal conditions (some of which did exist in the not too distant past), custom drove the way in which human beings did practically everything. The systematic marginalization of the natural and cultural environment saw the equally systematic rise in the establishment of laws. Whereas once, a whole nation managed co-existence through mutual agreement on how to live, now, there is a need to force them to live within relatively agreeable frameworks and this force is exercised through legislative instruments.
Obviously, anything that attempts to force a system of living on a person or a community will have to contend with resistive action. Therefore, laws are constantly broken leading to a lot of human effort going into destabilizing and re-stabilizing of societal frameworks. When custom was in vogue, there was nothing that could be "broken" since the entire process was one of "agreeing with one another" that had established itself in each social system over a long, slow period of time. Violation of these customs was a heinous crime punishable mostly by ostracization, sometimes by removal and occasionally, death. Development practitioners need to recognize this, and be ultra-sensitive to the customs that govern every micro-community and the place that this natural-cultural weave holds as the basis for any process leading to a harmonic balance.
With reference to the onion in figure 5, wholesome customs leads into a balanced understanding of the relationship between the natural and social environment. With a deep appreciation of the need for a balance in the natural environment, social activity itself becomes harmonized with nature and living and livelihoods are established that do not abuse the natural or cultural environment. Therefore, livelihood systems that endanger or puts undue pressure on these (such as exploitative commerce, "criminal" business etc.) are rejected. So, by default, communities engage in livelihoods that reward them, the community in which they live and the nation.
Now, while wholesome custom and livelihoods are important, recreation, entertainment and other forms of enjoyment are as crucial to a complete life. For harmonized communities, understanding the balance between the social and cultural environments gives rise to this. What must be understood here is that for them, enjoyment does not become an exclusive, stand-alone social phenomenon but rather a supportive and sustaining one enmeshed with their lives and livelihoods.
Again, granted, the paradigm shift required would be phenomenal and the effort that needs to be put in would be enormous. we have, as a planet, come so far down the road of "massives" that was Rome just before that particular civilization was wiped out that we can't even see we have simply recreated the competitive, excessive, gladiatorial mentality that brought about its downfall and that we are dangerously close to a similar fate. Take sport for example. Currently, sport has ceased to be a recreation and become a livelihood. It has become a socio-economic phenomenon rather than a socio-cultural one. Another example is that sexual activity has become an addictive physical engagement and not a life supportive or life enhancing one. Communities with a deep sensitivity to the outcome of wholesome enjoyment never indulge themselves in an excess of it but they are in the minority these days and the entire world needs to shift its collective rear and overcome its "comfortable inertia" to enable the world to survive.
Lastly, the wholesome individual existence that is the outcome of balancing out these environment components then leads into faith. Faith in the ability of a human being to live today well and trust in the fact that tomorrow will be stable, safe and comfortable regardless of the expansion of choices that tomorrow may brings. The individual knows and understands that this faith and trust did not become out of individual effort and appreciates that stability and safety came out of the stability and safety of the entire community. The individual appreciates that breaking from this collective will necessarily endanger him or herself primarily and the community secondarily. Thus, every individual naturally and organically arrives at a state where harmonious co-existence becomes critical to the continuity of excellence of individual existence.
Apologies for rambling on but the final question is “Do we want this?" No. We Don’t. We are on a runaway train of excess in everything we do and we will, sooner rather than later, hit a wall at twenty million miles an hour. In the interim, we will condition ourselves to bear our own misery by attempting to drag everyone else down with us into our whirlpool of doubt and worry. Those that do survive would be those that resisted being sucked in or those that recanted their belief in “civilized behavior”, sold their apartments, binned their cell phones, buried their M16s and hid in jungle caves. Those will have every opportunity to recreate the peopled earth in accordance with that which sustained it in the first place. Not us. We would have committed suicide a long time before. To those few who lived, simply as a result of making some high quality choices, simply because they never considered life a game of survival, I say “Salute! Good luck! God speed!”
Ok - I'm having a whale of time with this post so... here's an elegant recap of all the rhubarb above from Dire Straits. Thirty years ago, they were one of the few bands whose music actually reflected their lyrics and Mark Knofler is far better at this game of "communication" than I ever will be. You get both the lyrics and the live video from Alchemy *winks*
(This post was based on the engagement paradigm of the Green Movement of Sri Lanka which the author constructed with the leader of the movement Suranjan Kodituwakku. Thanks Sura, for the many ideological skirmishes, hours of “bana” and many nights spent worrying about the effectiveness of our work)
No one can justify saying that nature is unkind. In utmost kindness to this world of ours, it concentrated and hid from the regions of life on its crust, three things, namely, about 400 billion cubic meters of oil, about 300 billion tons of methane and most of its deposits of metals and silicon. In short, much of its potential and kinetic energy which, unleashed, could destroy the conditions required for life was sequestered where it can do the smallest damage.
In the habitable regions of the world, nature behaved in an opposite way. Instead of concentrating anything, it distributed everything, ensuring that the largest possible footprint on earth could sustain the continuity of life. Willy-nilly, life became and prospered, stabilizing, balancing and recharging the inhabited parts of the planet through incredibly complex systems of material and creature cycling.
Human beings who used this system in the not too distant past understood the fine thread on which this balance hung, clearly recognized the pivotal part that distribution and sharing of life resources played in it and engineered their own life-systems to highly sensitized engagement of the human-environment interface. Never letting human societies to get ahead of themselves, deeply in awe of and in instinctive recognition of the fact that they could not possibly fathom the interplays of nature, humankind managed the subtle task of harmonious-coexistence of ever growing populations with those of the natural world that they had to use in order to live.
Then, three things happened. We defined for ourselves some nebulous thing called “knowledge”, we discovered something positive in a hitherto highly frowned upon a human action-driver called “ego” and, using these two as a foundation, we set the human failing known as “greed” and its three henchmen “gain”, “fame” and “praise” at the apex of all things required to obtain that positive state of mind known as “pleasure” and its sidekick “comfort”.
To engineer this so-called comfortably pleasurable existence, we dug up and distributed all of the poisons that nature had hidden away and concentrated as much as possible, those resources that nature had distributed. In our folly, we decided that oil and gas were the only things that everyone must have in plenty and in pretty much the same quality and that the quality of food, clothing, shelter, water and land would have graded accessibility with the best of it and the most of it going to the smallest of groups which wielded the greatest of power. We believe that it is natural to aspire to be powerful, little realizing that such aspirations only rearrange the order of the powerful and not the percentage of gradations of power and all we actually do is end up being wasteful in the process.
Instead of allowing the great rivers of the world to water the multitudes, we dammed them in order to feed the power needs of a few urban elites. Instead of providing small plots of land to everyone so everyone can live, we took it away and gave massive parcels of it someone so that a few can live. Instead of allowing those who grow food to consume it, we gave it to people who haven’t planted even a weed in their entire lives. Instead of building dwellings that would last just a lifetime, we build mansions that last, uselessly, for many. Instead of allowing access to nature’s resources to those who use it, we gave access to those who abuse it. Instead of distributing money, we concentrate it uselessly in banks. Instead of using and releasing that which nature provide us with, we concentrate and horde it for no purpose except to massage our egos and credit our greed.
The nature of things as they have come to pass is such that we, as humans, have now come unstuck from the core edicts of nature that determine the continuity of life and we truly believe that it is good, natural and right that few users of the planet enjoy most of the things of nature.
So why do we do this? Why do we believe that we need three cars when we have just one backside to plant inside any one of them? Why do we need a forty room mansion when are bodies can only inhabit one? Why do we sequester millions in bank accounts when what we need to live on is so much lesser?
Fear. Primarily. Anyone who has played dice with nature would automatically become a very frightened human being. It (and I mean "it") would have revoked its right to be treated kindly by nature and it knows when push comes to shove, that it will be one of the first casualties. It believes, vainly, that its horded riches will somehow give it a bulwark, a moat, a rampart that will protect it against the results of its own stupidity. It desperately uses those ill-concentrated gains to try, through some sort of magic to use its techniques of gathering to gain even more in order to fortify itself resulting in an even stronger and quicker backlash from nature.
It, simply, has angered order and balance by creating chaos and imbalance and it’s just reward for greed is just that... just.
Since the whole world seems to be hell bent (and I mean hell bent here) on standing nature on its head, this whole planet is awash in a very large percentage of very frightened people. Blindly and urgently attempting to shore up their security against snowballing uncertainty they go ungently, raging against the coming of their self-inflicted night.
We cannot unmake the dams but we can stop making new ones. We cannot change land boundaries but we can allow many more to live on it. We cannot stop gathering, but we can stop hording and redistribute unconditionally. Instead of running after material wealth, we can run after social wealth. We can, if we really want to, take a small cue from the social media networks where the most used icons are "like" and "share".
But we don’t, right? We can’t, mmm? In our fear, we will die, smaller, meaner and angrier won’t we?
We will, like all who stare death in the face after a lifetime of self-servitude, try to buy our terrified selves a few more seconds of life at the cost of the lives of any number of others, eyes wide, nostrils flaring, mouth drooling, pores oozing…mimicking the hell beasts that we will soon become. Looking at ourselves, I am less angry and more sorry for what we have done to ourselves. Less hateful and more compassionate because, each day, as I step into the peopled earth, I see people driving themselves very hard towards death, convincing and re-convincing themselves that they are actually good people doing good things despite the truckloads of evidence to the contrary. I am not hard man but a hard look at our continued insult to life on earth shows me that we can expect just one, sure-fire outcome:
The loss of our right to it.
Here is Joan Baez, saying it all, much more elegantly that I ever could:
