Archives

Coping with environmental damage

While Sri Lanka continues to pick up the pieces painfully in the aftermath of the flood havoc of a few weeks ago, graphic accounts are continuing to pour in of the politically engineered illegal encroachments in the Muthurajawela Marsh - a prized patch of the country's bio-diversity. That such depradations are continuing is a sad commentary on the ways of our power-wielders and their sense of values.

The wanton disregard and dangerous nonchalance with which such exploits are continuing compel one to treat with a measure of scepticism, warnings by the authorities that firm action would be taken against those perpetrating environmental damage. Still, given the magnitude of the environmental harm suffered by Sri Lanka over the years, we hope that the big stick would indeed be wielded against ravenous exploiters of our natural resources. Accordingly, we warmly welcome a statement by Power and Energy Minister Karu Jayasuriya that "encroachers of sensitive watersheds" and other offenders of this kind would be taken firmly to task. We urge, however, that strong punitive action be taken against all such offenders - "big or small".

The recent ravages unleashed by the flood waters of the South, although terrifying in their immensity, brought home to us the staggering costs of unplanned development and vampirical exploitation of natural resources. The task before Sri Lanka would be to learn from these bitter lessons rather than succumb to a sense of despair.

Clearly, violating Mother Nature is out of the question, if we are to make amends for past indiscretions and if we are to get on to a path of planned, sustainable development. Accordingly, we fully agree with Minister Karu Jayasuriya that natural disaster planning needs to be integrated into the development exercise.

It is some time since the more enlightened sections of world opinion came to the realisation that countries cannot remain mired in the old paths of development. Today, very many countries of the West in particular, adhere to ecological planning and insightfully designed, sustainable development. Thus a paradigm change in development has occurred but this development model seems to be making a very slow entry to this part of the world.

The dire result is environmental disasters of the kind we experienced recently. Today,our development experience has been mishandled to such an extent that extreme weather phenomena meet in Sri Lanka - prolonged droughts, for instance, followed by apocalyptic deluges. Could we afford to ignore warnings on our adventurous, ill-designed approaches to "development"?

We badly need to wean ourselves away from the "development at any cost" fixation. In fact, this approach doesn't yield any development worth speaking of. Sprawling urbanisation and unplanned industrialization do not lead to any tangible, beneficial gains which could be labelled as development. On the other hand, the "greening of Sri Lanka" needs to go hand in hand with the measured, wise utilization of our natural resources if the goal of sustainable development is to be reached.

www.crescat.com

News | Business | Features | Editorial | Security
Politics | World | Letters | Sports | Obituaries

Produced by Lake House
Copyright © 2003 The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd.
Comments and suggestions to :Web Manager