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Greed and river sand depletion

The huge environmental and economic toll exacted by continuous river sand mining in this country should set off alarm bells among concerned sections, particularly the State, the people and environmental groups.

Sustainable Development has long been identified as a priority need, but environmental damage of this scale and kind could undermine our plans - if at all we have made any - to further this end.

What compounds the issue is the fact that river sand is being illegally mined - steadily and relentlessly. Our lead story yesterday said that the annual environmental damage resulting from excessive sand mining exceeds Rs. 600 million. It went on to reveal that some eight million cubic meters of sand is mined annually from the Maha Oya, Deduru Oya and the Kelani river, to meet the requirements of the construction industry.

This, then, is the cost of "development". The so-called construction boom and all the glitter that goes with it is depriving us of a very valuable natural resource and incurring severe environmental damage, including the contamination of our reservoirs with salt water.

One of the primary tenets of Sustainable Development is that material progress should be in accordance with our renewable and non-renewable resource base. If "development" occurs at the cost of the latter, we could very well be courting irreversible environmental destruction. The damage caused by river sand mining could be one of the first indications that the country is heading in this unfortunate direction.

The onus is on the State and its agencies to prevent this avoidable catastrophe. We are not entirely certain whether "development" in this country is happening for the common good but whatever the nature of our development experience, it cannot be allowed to take hold at the cost of our natural environment and its systems which ultimately sustain the country and its inhabitants. What we could be certain of is that the gradual undermining of our ecological balance could do grave harm to one and all.

There is no alternative, then, to cracking down hard on all forms of illegal sand mining. This is a task for the relevant State agencies, including the law and order authorities. We call for the formulation of a legislative framework - if this has not been done already - to facilitate this urgent measure.

The opinion is also gaining ground that sea sand could be used as an alternative to river sand for construction purposes. Although sea sand could be used as a short-term measure, to meet, for instance, the housing needs of the poor and other very essential requirements, it is best that the mining of this variety of sand is also avoided on account of its harmful environmental consequences. Ideally, sea sand should not be considered a limitless resource. The public is already familiar with the grave damage, sea erosion is generating. This is facilitated by sand and coral mining on our coastal regions. How could we, then, look to our shores as an alternative source of sand ?

On this issue too, we seem to be badly in need of a "paradigm shift". Rather than stretch and exploit our natural resources with no thought for their limited and scarce nature, we need to trim our needs to match our restricted resource base. In other words, Sustainable Development needs to be made a reality without further delay. There is no getting away from this need.

A country which ignores these imperatives could be said to be living on borrowed time. For, vampirical greed would make very short work of our natural resources and reduce this country to a severely hazard-prone, ecologically - devastated patch of earth.

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