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Exploitation and earthslip posers

While our front page pictures yesterday bespoke the monumental human misery generated by the devastating flood waters in the Sabaragamuwa and Southern Provinces, earthslips registered a relentless increase, some of them wiping entire villages off the map. In one such tragedy, 25 persons were killed in Kalawana.

This spate of earthslips constitutes a disconcerting aspect of the current deluge. It would prove useful to have the expert opinion of geologists and environmentalists on this dimension of the catastrophe. If a body of scientific opinion on this troubling phenomenon has not been established so far, it must be done without further delay. We hope these natural dislocations would lead to a robust national debate among those who matter in this context, on the causes that lead to earthslips and on any remedial measures which could check the disastrous trend.

Nevertheless, it would be relevant to probe whether any formal and systematic scientific studies on earthslips and kindred disasters here, their causes and consequences have not been attempted thus far. If not, this should be considered a serious lapse on the part of the persons and organisations tasked with these undertakings. We note that the relevant institutional set up for these projects, has already been established. Not long ago 'Disaster Management' proved a bitter bone of contention among some State functionaries.

The time's ripe for these authorities to prove their mettle by coming out with the necessary scientific inputs and studies which would help curb the suicidal tendency among some sections to over exploit and savage nature.

Even a nodding acquaintance with the Earth Sciences would reveal that earthslips are usually caused by soil erosion and extensive denudation of forest cover on hills and slopes. As is well known, it is excessive and inadvisable cultivation activities on high ground which trigger soil erosion, which in turn renders the relevant locations vulnerable to earthslips and kindred disasters.

If the foregoing is accepted, the question which comes to mind is whether those who engaged in inadvisable cultivation practices were not warned against their excesses. Raising such warnings is the responsibility of environmental scientists and those State organisations which concern themselves with issues of this kind.

Another line of inquiry which is worth pursuing is whether such warnings, if they were issued, were rejected out of hand by the cultivators concerned and power-wielders who would prefer to be in the good books of the cultivators by pandering to their whims and fancies. In other words, do some of those wielding political influence callously disregard scientific advice out of consideration for a few more votes?

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