Buddhist Economics – Part I: The Way

Sabbe Saththa Bhavanthi Sukhi Thaththa (May all beings be happy)

The sparking of interest:

If you are a follower of the Buddha’s Dharma and not merely a mainstream, ritual-addicted, gatha-singing, fear-driven Buddhist, the first thought that might have popped into your head  on reading the title might have been “What the ….?”.

I don’t blame you.

The Buddha instructs the laity

When  the phrase first hit my ears in January 2016, my reaction was not dissimilar. That was when Prof. Clair Brown of the University of California, Berkley, was visiting with us in Sri Lanka. She it was who had started the first course in Buddhist Economics in the west after realizing that her students were tired out by the flat, stale, commonplace and useless ideas of mainstream economics and starved for  something fresh, something new, something different.

I was tasked with interviewing her and Prof. Mohan Munasinghe on Buddhist Economics and Sustainomics respectively.  As we sat in the reception area at Rupavahini to discuss my planned structure for the interview, I waded in with, “Well, Clair, I am not too sure if we can tie a subject like economics which is worldly and horribly bound to iffy science to something as pristine and steeped in the truth as the Buddha’s Dharma?”. For me, the oxymoronic nature of that phrase needed no macroeconomic dissection to figure out. I was rather taken aback when she didn’t attempt to dispute the point but casually and disarmingly sidestepped the issue.  Diplomacy kicked in on my side as well and we went on to discuss a few other points and then live to the studio.  While the interview was more focused on sustainability than economics, there were some notes, flavors and scents in her responses that seem to arise from an idea of economics that was people centric and holistic in approach with happiness as an implied goal and the effort to meet, mesh and marry off  the approach to the goal as the process.

Identifying the rationale:

Although still skeptical,  I was urged by that exchange to explore this more worldly aspect of the Buddha’s teaching. An aspect that hitherto, I had no reason to examine since my practice of the Dharma was purely for the purpose of enlightenment.  So, a few months later found me sitting in front of my teacher in the blackness of a typical Kataragama night under a bower created by bo-trees. Detailing at some length the whole idea of Buddhist economics as I understood it up to that point and expressing my doubt as to both its validity against the dharma as well as its effectiveness against future civil and civic disaster.

” Do not think so” he said. “Start by understanding aarthikaya (economics) as a component of artha-kriyawa (meaningful action)”.  “WOW!” I thought to myself. It was a gentle reminder, a surge of ever expanding linkages and understanding of how the dharma can inform us on the conduct of worldly economic effort and help those of more material bent to live out their lives in an environment less fraught with worry. 

The term itself is not new, first coined by the German statistician and economist E.F. Schumacher in a 1966 essay that later became the fourth chapter of his classic “Small is Beautiful” which is an antithesis of the “Greed is Good” way of economic excess that has brought us to this calamitous juncture in world history. Ten years later, in his book, “A confused Society”, economist, former governor of the Central Bank and former chairman of the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka Dr.Neville Karunatilake describes Buddhist Economics as a system founded on developing co-operative and harmonious effort in group living where selfish and acquisitive pursuits are eliminated by developing man himself.  

Very nice. That should put a cap to it and we can very well stop here but indulge me a bit folks. I want to unpack all of this a bit more and see what it reveals to us.

The basis for Buddhist Economics:

The key takeoff point for me is the Buddha’s reading of wealth is stated in the much quoted, mostly ignored  line from the Dhammapada “Santhutti paraman dhanan” (Happiness is the greatest wealth).  This firmly ties wealth to achieving a satisfactory state of mind and not to the acquisition of an overload of people, position, power and pieces.  According to the Buddha, in this case as in most, the mind overrules both matter (in this case fiscal, natural and human resources) and matters ( in this case, production, distribution and consumption).  Here, dhanaya or wealth is not merely personal acquisitions but rather the entire set of economic things and actions. And, regardless of how much of these an individual can control or own, if that individual Is not satisfied and satiated, then there is no sansindima or contentment and no happiness so the individual is impoverished. 

Now, this is interesting.  Since santhutti  or happiness as the primary idea of wealth is something that is internal, once achieved, it  is maintainable over the long term with little further effort. All other ways of determining what constitutes wealth are external and once acquired, high in risk of loss. We all know that the acquisition of external wealth forces  us to up the ante, increasing the overall effort of protecting, consolidating and growing our various acquisitions and assets.  We are all fully aware what a suicidal, lifespan decreasing, earth destroying  exercise this is. We have all experienced the fact that such an effort comes with a veritable symphony of mental trauma and physical sickness,  played upon the various instruments of competing, controlling, manipulating, conniving, coercing, threatening, weeping , worrying, stressing, diseasing and dying.

The rational slicing here then is in how we give ourselves a definition of wealth and how we understand its import. In the Buddha’s reading, happiness is wealth and essentially marginalizes every other way of defining it. In every other reading, wealth is supposed to lead to happiness where such “happiness” is acquired through the channels of gain, fame, praise and pleasure. Well, human history has shown us that this effort has the opposite effect to the one intended. Those who seek happiness through gain, suffer loss. Those who hanker after it through fame suffer shame. Those who think they can find it through praise suffer blame. Those who attempt to catch up with it in their pursuit of pleasure suffer pain.  So, if happiness is the outcome of an effort to remove suffering, then mainstream ideas of wealth can only compound suffering and never eradicate it. This is an awful conclusion for it implies that most supposedly civilized effort is mad and most human beings are deranged. Small wonder then, that in our insanity, we have only managed to “develop” ourselves to the point where we are just a hairbreadth away from annihilating ourselves and our planet. 

Thus, the whole Buddhist framework essentially sideswipes into the dustbin classic socioeconomic  questions that have vexed us for millennia. Questions such as how to optimize earning potential, how to minimize effort and optimize profit, how to infinitely acquire and horde fiscal and natural resources, how to infinitely consume as much as one can, how to rise within the serried ranks and tiered  hierarchies of foaming, snorting, angry, jealous, frightened, confused, confounded society are of no real importance.  It also implies that lasting (sustainable, durable) solutions to the problems of economics must come from sociology, anthropology and metaphysics rather than from crunching down and treating the impacts of the lodestones of classic economics  such as man-hours, machine hours, money markets, material management etc.

So, overall them, the only question that remains is how we can achieve and maintain happiness. That, after all is said and said and said, is the only thing that really needs doing.  To do it, we must figure out how to find real meaning in our economic actions or, in other words, the arthaya in the aarthika-kriya. 

(Click here for Buddhist Economics: Part II - The Means) 

Sustainable engagement: The art of making one’s self progressively unnecessary

(This may also be found here on the Daily Mirror)

Today, I will tell a story that is of great use and therefore, I shall limit my reading of it because my views on it are not that useful. The dialogues are not a perfect lift because memories such as these are long and rambling as they flit across one’s mind but… the essence is there. Indulge me folks.

Mrs. Seelan (not her real name for reasons that will become apparent),  is a small scale farmer in the Vanni. Back in 2012, I was on a project to uplift the lives of farmers and looking for people who were already on their way without my intercession. I was chock-full of NGO-ese gunk like “empowerment”, “micro-entrepreneurship”, “value-chain enhancement” and a whole load of additional blah. Looking for champions for case studies, I heard of this lady from people in one area as I was rooting around with my Tamil speaking buddy Damien. They were doing fine with a bee-keeping collective but flat out refused to speak about it. Instead, they named another. “Go see Mrs. Seelan” was the stock statement within the community and try as I might, they pointed to none other. Yet, their directive was anything but casual, as noted by the lowering of the voice, the glazing of the eyes, the tiny smile at the edge of the lips.  This then, was one of significant standing among them. A lady held in honor by all to the point that everyone else felt they were not quite as good, quite as enabled. A formidable person, I decided, as we parked our big bad vehicle in front of her gate. A gate  which was one by name only for it was not designed to keep anyone out. We proceeded through into her small haven.

As I stepped out of the super-heated sunlit blaze into her cool, green-twilight, elven-fantasy land it didn’t take me more than a second to realize that our very presence there was an aberration. A break in some complex internal harmony within the place. A distraction at best. An irritation at worst.

We wandered in. We wondered in. There was no hurry to the process of walking across the acre from gate to house and much wonder swirled around us as we did so. Her two acre land was dense and dark with shockingly luscious and green foliage. Birds tweeted in the trees. Lizards and monitors sat, straddled and waddled across the ground. Insects zinged, hummed and chirped in that strange, constant concord of intermingled harmony and cacophony. The very air seem aware, excited and enthused by the idea of life.  Seated in front of her house and bound up with it all was Mrs. Seelan, a tiny tiny lady with many smiles and few words.

Despite our fractious intrusion, she did by us because the great hospitality of our people was not be denied. Indicating a rough seat in her garden, she stepped into her house and returned with two sizable slabs of honeycomb fat and dripping with golden goodness. I sat there, holding it in my hand, and spoke to her with Damien translating.

“The people call you the bee-lady, although looking around, it seems to me that you are an everything lady”. 

She didn’t reply for a while then “… they call me that because I was the first to teach them the art and they are quite successful now”.

“Oh??” The penny dropped.  “So it was you who introduced it to them?”

“No Sir, many came with the science. They failed. I gave them the art. They succeeded”.

I nodded. “They have formed a very profitable business group but you are not a part of that. Why?”.

She said nothing.

“They respect you a lot you know?”

She said nothing.

“Perhaps they would love it if you lead them?”.

She said nothing.

I dropped it. Not entirely insensitive to these things and I saw that I was very quickly going from being a mere irritation to being a downright nuisance so I decided to shut my notebook and concentrate on the honeycomb instead. That honey had a unique sharpness, caused no doubt by the mix of flowers in the area. Tricky thing, eating honey from the source. Much care is needed to extract it and its certainly not an “on-the-fly” type of food that is preferred these days.

In that place, the taste seem somehow enhanced by an infusion of the essence of its multifaceted aliveness. So concentrated was I in the task and the ethos of the place, that it was a while before I realized that she was speaking in a slow, casual monotone, murmuring to no one in particular, almost as if she were revealing something to herself.

“Once they understood, my task was done. Some will teach their children. Others will teach their relatives in other villages. All will enjoy benefits. The art can only be taught if the student owns the process. Otherwise, the knowledge is with the teacher. This is the big mistake of teaching the science. The teacher always tries to be bigger. Always wants credit for the skills. Then the student becomes lesser. Less interested. A good teacher must become progressively unnecessary. I never had to teach them the full art. The last third, they figured out for themselves. I was not needed and that was good. I did not need to be known. I did not need to own. I did not need to belong. I was only the source of the energy. They used it to light their own lamps. It is well. My task is done. The benefit of the action is theirs. The recognition for the action is theirs. The respect for the action is theirs”. 

Damien was silent for a long while before he translated and I understood why. If roles were reversed, I would have wanted to hold to her soliloquy for as long as possible myself.

When he finished, I said nothing. All was well. All was very very well. We finished our treat, he exchanged a few words with her, we all exchanged many smiles and then we took our leave, walking slowing out of a piece of mini-magic.

As we retraced our steps, Damien said “do you want to know why she spoke?”.

“No”.

“It’s just… well, in all the time I have known her, she has never spoken that much”.

I shook my head. “Drop it bro, it doesn’t matter”. I was not in the least interested in making her into a case study or a report on “best practices”. But he couldn’t let it lie.

“He made a mistake, that one…” she had said.

“…but then he realized and he stopped. Many have come here. He is not the first. But he is different this one. He is wiser. He put his book down. I spoke because I saw that he was eating honey as it should be eaten”. 

I smiled, nodded, opened the door of our SUV and tossed the notebook inside.

Damien glanced quickly at me, pointing at the discarded book. “You will write it up later?”. 

I shook my head as I got in.

“Such things are to be passed from person to person. Not report to report. Someday, if I am in the mood, I might tell someone the story. For now, I am satiated”.

“what?”.

“Satiated…” the driver started the engine. “…full, complete, aware. Aware that the world is not really all that bad”.

Mrs. Seelan, by example, exposed the root of sustainability, continuity, durability. She showed the point of takeoff for a more equitable and contented future for us all, less fraught with danger, less driven by fear. To get there, we must understand three things. First, that our base dynamic energy should kindle the potential energy of many. Next, that our capability must trigger innate capability in many. Finally, that when many people benefit a little, entire communities and nations benefit a lot.

Moreover, we must honestly recognize and unequivocally reject our past lives of shame and sham.

Lives where the extent to which we were able to hoard and guard our very minor stores of wealth, knowledge and power defined capability. Where the extent to which we were able to viciously suppress any who dared threaten them, using policy, acts, rights, politics on one hand and lying, cheating, manipulation and thuggery on the other defined ability. We must understand that if we are the reason for the contentment and happiness of many, we are automatically giving ourselves a reward a hundred times greater without any requirement to be counted as those who started it all. As Mrs. Seelan is well and her world is well, so, we, too, can make our worlds well. When we do that, we will heal the planet.

As Mrs. Seelan proved without ever setting out to do so, honor, recognition, power and above all –respect - does not come to people through demand or command or because of what they are but rather, because of what they make others see in themselves. 

The low of higher education

It was in my teens that I first read Robert Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” and came face-to-face with his “law” which states that “The number of hypotheses that can fit a given set of facts is infinite”. The statement was anathema for a budding young math and science person. If it was correct, it meant that both those fields of inquiry were going nowhere fast. Fast-forward to school at the University of Murdoch where my Vietnamese mathematical genius friend Duong Pham and I were taking a course in “Structure, Thought and Reality”. That was where we both first got to know about Thomas Kuhn, Immanuel Kant, Naom Chomsky and other such philosophers of science (We had both already gotten waist deep in the incompleteness theorems of the philosopher of mathematics Kurt Gödel before we got there). Discussing, collating, correlating and analyzing was (and is) the great and honorable exercise of all academics and career achievers of worth and we were no different back them.

So, Doung and I were in the habit of hitting the school pub to discuss outcomes after each class as well as the voracious back reading we did to understand how the world worked both in general as well as when viewed through the lenses of mathematics and science. One cloudless, blameless day, as we sat there discussing Khun over a beer, he happened to casually say to me (paraphrased), “you know Jun, around 200,000 math discoveries are made each year by masters and doctoral students. Each is seen by about 6 members of the student’s friends and family list who don’t understand a word of it and read by about six people on the student’s thesis defense team who actually understand it and hopefully, give the student the sort-after degree. No surprise that the rediscovery rate is greater than 70%”. That was a shocking revelation that brought home to me the sheer uselessness of our 400 year old education system and its utter waste of human effort, money and resources.

How many of us actually use any of the learning we absorb after years of what is tantamount to forced labor in our various portals of education? In my years of life, I’ve seen very few whose life work can be directly linked to the education leading to their degrees.  If what we slave over is useless, then the immediate next question we must ask ourselves is “why do this?”.

Well, since at the highest level, higher education is largely useless, I must reluctantly recognize that its importance is merely cosmetic. You see, it is fashionable to have a degree or three. It doesn’t really matter if its owner is actual a master or doctor of the skill area that he or she claims lordship over. There is a general perception that they are people of some account. However, if we take a step back and look at the conduct of millions of these people proudly armed with their diplomas, we must understand an inconvenient truth – quite a lot of these folks have no clue about anything at all.

The best proof of this is that if they were of any worth, our world would not be in the place it is. A place where our doctors, engineers, scientists, lawyers, financiers, businesspeople, policy makers and leaders have actually managed to retrograde development and bring us to our knees. Pandemics, epidemics, development disasters, natural disasters, money market crises, food crises, climate crises – all point to that uncomfortable conclusion. Looking back over the sum total of human effort in the last century or so, I have to affirm that most of the things that actually eased the burden of life on people were things created by people who never saw the insides of a university. Diplomas were never the reason why they did what they did and their effort was based on accomplishing something good for the world – not achieving something that was only of good to the industry that overarches all other industries – the social-fashion industry and its attended manufacturing of a vote for things that are mostly made of air. 

It is not their fault. They acquire these three letter dirty words because they feel that those will give them stability, position, recognition, money, power and acceptance in the world. Hitherto, to a large extent, that, indeed, has been the case. However, the world is now well past the time when it can be satisfied with gaseous diplomas or window-dressing degrees. Those bought us a world of fear and alarm. Now, knowledge has necessarily taken precedence over learning and Insight has taken precedence over education. Hanging above it all, wisdom has become the great need of the day and folks, wisdom comes from getting one’s hands muddied in this kickass reality we call the world. 

On that matter, I can share some great, positive news with you. Wisdom doesn’t require us to pass the O’Level or the A’Level or get degrees or masters or PhDs or post-docs. It can be acquired by all regardless of the social, economic or academic sub-stratum to which they belong. It is the outcome of a kind of self-service where the effort is worthy because it a) is part of a greater collective effort, b) is simple, responsible, replicable and useful and c) requires no validation or adoption by anyone.

A wise person is generally not a scientific person or career person. Nor is he or she a discussing, arguing, researching, collating, correlating, analyzing person. Those are things that are the vacuous mainstream indulgences of people who, hell bent on getting an education for a living, have completely lost contact with life. Wise people will take time off to grow a chillie plant in a pot instead of complaining that the price of chillies is Rs.1,600 a kilo. They will have a small composting bin on their balcony and not be the cause of the Meethotamulla disaster. They will have a solar panel on their rooftops instead of screaming at CEB tariffs. They will switch off their lights instead of railing at power cuts. They will use public transport at non-peak hours and weekends instead of howling about congestion. In short, they are problem solving people not problem-complaining people or problem-contributing people and as they proceed down this road, they acquire greater and greater insight into the working of the world. Insight that is impossible for the PhD holding specialists and qualified career people who naively believe that they are worth something when they are not.

Twenty nine years ago, as I studied Duong over that pitcher of beer, I said (paraphrased) “The intellectuals are able, only. The intellectually intelligent are enabled, only. The intellectually intelligently creative are knowledgeable, only. The intellectually intelligently creatively emotionally stable are wise and Doung wisdom cannot be if we are thrilled by our intellect, intelligence, creativity, mental stability and what it can personally give us in this world ”.

He grinned, turned to me and said “Yup! so, whatcha gonna do doc?”. I looked him straight in the eye and said “You reminded me why I should get the hell out of education because it can give me absolutely nothing of worth”. And so it happened. Both Duong and “Jun” as he was wont to call me, walked out of the convenient, fashionable, useless, conventional route of becoming someone through the stifling, mind stilting, insight killing, resource guzzling, world destroying path of higher education – happily, positively and very productively, never to return.

Trashing unsustainble debt that leads to garbage lives

(This post is an expansion of thoughts expressed at the 19^th anniversary celebrations of SIRASA and may also be found on the Daily Mirror) 

Thirty three years ago, I was a soil and concrete technician and laborer on the Maduru-Oya dam project, working for the Canadian consortium of FAFJ when I first came into contact with the true peoples of our beautiful land – the vedda community. I was no tourist and they were not interested in tourists. Instead, they lived with the earth, off the earth and over a period of months when I was permitted into their wadis and their world, they taught me much. Of the many things they taught me and colored and flavored my worldview for all time, two stand out. The first was the sanctity and non-negotiability of the continuance of all sentient life and the second was the importance of maintaining the balance and harmony of the human-environment interface with all its attendant complexities, nuances and surprises so that live guilt-free and debt-free with respect to the future. In an era where few people even knew the meaning of the word, I was given an advanced course in sustainability by the kings and queens of is practice and to them I owe a debt that cannot be repaid.

Speaking of non-payable debt, we have about 80 trillion dollars of cash in the world of which about 65 trillion is useable. Global public debt is 59 trillion dollars and growing at 7 million dollars a minute while total debt is 199 trillion dollars – three times the amount of cash there is to cover it. The total global debt is currently at an eye-popping, heart-stopping 325% of the global gross domestic product. 1.2 quadrillion dollars of what is tantamount to funny-money invested in derivatives alone. Much like drugs addicts in thought, word and deed, we are living on a puff of smoke and a clutch of dreams where there is absolutely no possibility of wealth creation – only debt escalation. This essentially means two things.

One, everyone is over their eyeballs in debt to everyone else and when we build our houses, buy our cars, acquire are little electronic gadgets and appliances, put our kids through college and continuously seek acquisition of things that make us feel that we are living civilized and developed lives, we are not displaying our wealth. Instead we are living our lives sloshing around in a toxic vat of unsustainable debt.

Two, most of us are living a shallow, blatant lie where we believe we live in comparative affluence when in fact, we live in abject poverty.  It is not that hard to understand that poverty is not a measure of what one doesn’t have but rather, a measure of what one wants. Whenever we want more money, a bigger estate, higher qualifications, more recognition and power and position - we are becoming poorer. Living in an age of snowballing needs and wants, we necessarily live in a world of snowballing paucity, unhappiness, unrequited needs and unfulfilled desires. So lustful are we for “stuff” that every time we pay off a small debt, we are immediately thinking of acquiring twice the debt as soon as possible to feed our next wave of needs. Greed then is the primary driver of individual poverty and, regardless of the socioeconomic stratum into which each of us is slotted, let us be under no illusion that we are all living beyond our means.

I am not going to pull my punches here friends, because if I do, then I cannot be considered anyone’s friend. This is a pitiable, shameful, wasteful, garbage of an existence far dirtier than the physical garbage that we generate that is the outcome of the gunk in our own minds.  Regardless of where we are, what we are, we must understand that we are a bunch of stinkers, disanitizing the world in a whirlwind of mental and physical filth. Unlike the lives of the adivasivarigaya who spend more than half their lives preserving and regenerating the resources they have for future generations, we have  cannibalized  a few hundred years’ worth of  earth’s resources earmarked for the future - just to live a few hundred months ourselves. Continue this way and we will not have life on earth in a few hundred days.

The world is indeed in grave, grave trouble and very few of us realize it or even want to. To realize it is to understand that everything we have valued is valueless, everyone we honor is without honor themselves, every method, system, process and science we trust is as untrustworthy as a pit of vipers. Yet, all is not lost for us in Sri Lanka because we haven’t completely bought into the great lie of the industrial age. Our culture, traditions and spiritual systems have protected us. We can become safer. We can become more durable. We can become more resilient. But, to do so, we absolutely must make the effort to remove the vision impairing pastel shaded glasses we have been trained to wear and resolve to see things as they are. In that respect, the most important vision we must have is that we are not, repeat NOT, a developing country trying to become a developed country. We are a country that the horror of the industrial age labeled as a “developing country” but which is, in fact, simply a country that is trying to become a sustainable country. We are not going to damn ourselves by trying to imitate developed countries, nor are we going to visit upon our people the stressful, competitive, miserable twilight existences that are the tragic legacy left for our brothers and sisters in those countries. NO!

To become sustainable, to pull ourselves out of the global bind of debt, we must think smart, think collective, thing corporative, think together. We are not trying to create processes or technologies that require massive borrowings and merely result in top-heavy monopolies or massive machines that remove human beings from the life-loop and log every dime in profit to the bank accounts of a few individuals. What we have to do is create appropriate methods and technologies that help individuals to ease their lives and their livelihoods.

We are going to create a super-efficient plough not the next generation combine harvester. We are looking to create small aps that will collectivize and synergize the physical effort of many people not killer programs that literally kill that effort. We are looking to use drones, small-scale dispensers and tiny-payload delivery systems that will help improve the precision of our agricultural methodology not create next generation airplanes that over deliver on inputs and force under-delivery of produce. We are looking to create many thousands of inventors and entrepreneurs helping, learning and sharing with each other and not one or two monopolists. 

We are looking to launch the happiness, fairness and contentment motives to the top of everyone’s minds – not just a few. To do that, we cannot approach such exercises with the profit motive on top of our minds. Indeed, while profit is a happy outcome, it is not a primary goal. It is not every a tertiary goal. Instead, if it happens, then it should happen as a collateral outcome of more critical activities.

This is a tough, tough ask folks and I do not say it is not. Habit dies hard if it dies at all. However, the choice here is whether the habit dies or you die and there is no workaround that stark reality. Killing the root of this evil will require a few habits to be replaced. The habit of hoarding wealth and resources must be replaced by the habit of sharing both. The habit of competition must be replaced by the habit of cooperation. The habit of defaulting to individualism must be replaced by the habit of defaulting to collectivism. The habit of complaining, manipulating, gossiping to suppress others and project one’s self as greater must be replaced by the habit of lauding, championing, discussing and highlighting the good in others regardless of what it costs one.

In short, the habit of greed must be replaced by the habit of contentment.

Let me wish ourselves good luck as we dig our heels in and embark on this painful yet rewarding journey towards personal salvation, future-proofing our nation and ensuring global emancipation. We will need it. 

Sustainable Production and Consumption: The zero distance argument

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.

What do we have today? We have Asia growing the largest amount of food but also having the largest number of starving people in the world. We are bleeding money to power our lives with geometrically increasing fuel prices while largely ignoring our own renewable sources. We carelessly bring home and discard 2500 metric tons of material a day and are literally and figuratively being mowed under by an avalanche of garbage.  The price of money has skyrocketed. Having made all of these things come to pass, we call ourselves civilized, sensitive and intelligent when in fact, the opposite is true. 

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.