Our own brand and model

By Renton de Alwis

(Written and published in late 2010. A reflection ....) 

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, pandemics etc. 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 per cent 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 per cent. We have, for several decades now sown seeds of environmental awareness among our young.  Our school children 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 the 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” for my Birthday by my father. 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.

 

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