Our own brand and model
 A
report in last Sunday’s Newspapers talked about plans of Highways and
the Road Development Authority to construct a 81 km highway with
dedicated two-way bicycle lanes between Padeniya and Anuradhapura at a
cost of Rs. 6,000 million supported by the Korean Government. In my
mind, this is symbolic and represents groundbreaking thinking by our
highway authorities to encourage use of clean and sustainable modes of
transport by our citizens.
It is also a step in the right direction in our nation’s desire in
working towards being a carbon clean land and its significance need be
recognized and highlighted.
While on the one hand, our road, rail and water transport networks
and public transport systems will need to be much more energy efficient,
comfortable and user-friendly to make a significant shift in the
passenger and goods transport domain, this move demonstrates that
rational and meaningful thinking is being set in place.
Sustainable lifestyles
We can not ignore that in today’s world, it is no longer a state of
‘business as usual’. Beyond the short-term needs of getting over the
financial crisis, curbing the loss of jobs, ending the threat of
terrorism and stabilizing the movements in investment capital; global
warming and the resultant issues of sea level rise, increased incidence
of floods, droughts, forest fires, food shortages, poverty and pandemics
continue to threaten humankind’s future existence.
All evidence shows that very soon, strong and definitive calls will
need to be made out to all citizens of all nations, rich, poor,
developed or developing to adopt more prudent and sustainable
lifestyles. Perhaps that beginning will come as an outcome of the
resolve leading to a Copenhagen Protocol on Climate Change, commencing
this December.
Counting on the young
Here in Sri Lanka we have a huge opportunity to be a leader and a
pioneer nation in guiding the world with a new brand and a model of
sustainable living. We are still with a near 50 percent of our land
covered in a green canopy. Even with continuing unmanaged logging and
deforestation that must stop, we have reportedly retained a forest cover
of nearly 29 percent.
We have, for several decades now sown seeds of environmental
awareness among our young. Our schoolchildren have setup environmental
brigades in their schools, and are being activists for conservation at
their homes and in their villages.
Out of the Box
Not only should we as Sri Lankans be looking at reducing our
dependence on carbon emission loaded fossil fuels. We will need to seek
ways of developing and using alternative energy sources through a
process of rural-centric and community-based initiatives. In industry,
we may need to think of many more on-scale green factories and chains of
home-based manufacturing facilities feeding them.
To accommodate our tourists and visitors we may need to think outside
box from the now dominant model of hotel and resort framework of large
facilities, to creating new models of visitor accommodation, combining
rooms-in-homes or bed and breakfast facilities.
These can form area-wise ‘resorts’, with cooperative type management
for quality assurance, marketing and sales with direct benefits accruing
to the community operators, much similar to the B&B movement in the
non-urban U.K. These can be without the central air-conditioning plants,
sewerage treatment facilities and the draw on the national electricity
grid. Instead, well managed smaller units can provide facilities
utilizing solar, wind and bio-fuel sources meeting the energy needs.
Our agriculture must continue to take on more and more sustainable
practices with a view to our weaning away from the use of unnatural
substances. Our natural and manmade lakes, reservoirs, and waterways
offer us huge opportunities for transport and for recreation and
tourism. So are the opportunities we have for taking on a whole new
industry of ‘Care Services’, where we can also provide a home-based
alternative, to the export of our little or untrained mothers and
sisters to far away lands to work as domestic help.
Defying conventional wisdom
The options and opportunities are many. Yet, for them to be turned
into rational and workable solutions, leadership and long-term focus
will need be in place.
This would mean taking on a sea-change in our thinking. It may even
be taking on initiatives that may seem ridiculous and imprudent now, as
the tools we use to evaluate them are those from the current model of
conventional wisdom.
Once as a teenager, I was gifted a book titled “Square Pegs in Round
Holes”. I now forget its author, but vividly remember people the book
featured. It was about Pythagoras, Socrates, Hippocrates, Plato,
Aristotle, Archimedes, Ptolemy, Copernicus and Galileo Galilee.
All of them as scientists, mathematicians, philosophers and thinkers
presented new ideas that challenged the conventional wisdom of their
time and even defied them placing their own lives in danger.
Galileo the Italian scientist and thinker who defied the dominant
beliefs at the time on the shape and the motion dynamics of the Earth,
was placed on house arrest by the Roman Inquisition until his death.
Hard road ahead
Today, more than ever, we need those who can defy conventional
thinking and challenge them to show its follies. We need them among our
leadership, our thinkers and our social activists.
The easy way out is to ‘tag along’ with the dominant system of
beliefs and values, without questioning its validity to these times and
the new challenges we face. The hard road is for those who want to take
them head-on by being innovative and cause the changes, we as a nation
and as citizens of Mother Earth deserve.
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Renton de Alwis |
Useful web addresses
Road Development Authority - www.rda.gov.lk
A River for Jaffna - www.dailynews.lk/2009/05/05/fea03.asp
Gama Naguma - www.gemidiriya.org
Sustainable Tourism - www.sustainabletourism.net
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