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Save the Earth - Consume Smart

Its out in the open that the global ecological balance is deteriorating every day. We all know that if we continue to consume as compulsively as we do, the doomsday will come sometime. The question is whether it will come in our generation or whether we will beat it by a hundred years or more. The answer to this we don’t know – the secret is that we don’t want to know. Lest the answer should spoil our mood, and more importantly force us to look at the world, life & living, differently from what we have looked at for a almost 60-70 years now as a race.

The massive strides in scientific knowledge have actually pandered to the senses. To shop to consume, to be occupied – is to give ourselves a perception of fulfilled living, while we hurtle towards destruction. It is all wired too deeply in our psyche.

Where does the solution lie? One solution, it for all of us to go back to a 1000 years behind time. No electricity, no airplanes, no gasoline guzzling vehicle, no anti-biotics, lower life expectancy, lower crop yields. That’s one route. But quite surely the most unlikely route. The homo sapiens wiring has gone so much in a different direction that by the time awareness of consumption damage is internalized - and re-conditioning efforts gather momentum and arrest the deterioration of ecological balance – the doomsday would have been so much nearer and the ecological imbalance that much catastrophic.

The other way, is to live smartly. Consume as much, but not plunder the environment. That’s what governments and societies can work towards. Enhance awareness of citizens, backed by policy based governance to start the process of sanitized spending of ecological resources. This will give the world the 100 years or so required to make a serious efforts towards reconditioning of our instincts and reduction of the consumption – and maybe the human race can see the next millennium.

A few weeks back, I had the opportunity to listen to a friend talking about Singapore. I heard that is a place with about 7-8 million people living in a long stretch of 40-50 KM. There is an awesome of greenery around and the traffic snarls are less stressful. The kwh [power consumption] per person is much lower than many countries with comparable levels of affluence. Old trees are relocated to a park [lock, stock barrel!!] while creating highways and brought back to the old earth after the construction is completed.

Essentially, people can live more with less is the message. That’s a model for the world. I know experts would like to do some more top level research to revalidate this case study, and may want to dig deeper to understand whether such a story is possible with significant natural endowment or whether human sensitivity, intent and discipline can do the needful.

Irrespective of whichever way the research goes, the outcomes go – the point I am trying to make is that institutionalized – community, city, state, national level initiatives to protect the natural balance, and wire us use only as much as we need Create an automatic restorative mechanism and not have the ecology as an external waste bin. That is what is the smart consumption, I was talking of.

Not just depend upon the small-small drops of water, individual silo-ed initiatives [they could well be a beginning of community sensitization]; but co-ordinated, scientifically examined, planned with rigour and executed with diligence at a community and country level. Those are the needs of the hour. The next level of social frontier extension will be done through these initiative of smart consumption.

December 25, 2010
Mumbai

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