Path to a green future

This year, World Environment Day celebrates the diversity of life. But the question it poses is sinister: Will the diversity survive if we continue to damage the environment in a reckless and wanton manner? The answer is a no-brainer. Every class V student weaned on slick World Environment Day slogans will tell you that the ducks are headed for extinction.

For the moment, tigers and Salim Ali’s fruit bat are going. What we don’t see are the bacteria and fungus that are becoming extinct too.

All living beings — be it animals, bacteria, plants or fungi — work hard at keeping our planet ticking. In fact, they must be responsible for quite a bit of the world’s GDP of $60 trillion (give or take a few trillion). I can’t imagine human beings growing all the fish in the ocean. It’s a complicated chain of life that does it. We just harvest the fish and turn it into a GDP figure. In fact, if we eliminate these species, won’t we be left to do all the hard work nature does? Like fish breeding, driving rodents out of fields and pollinating flowers.

Simply put, we don’t have the ability to do that kind of work. Example: If the trees vanish, will we be able to convert all the carbon dioxide back to oxygen? I doubt it.

Central to the issue of environmental degradation are the choices we make as consumers. Our consumption patterns need to change. Sustainable consumption (consume fish the ocean can produce and no more), avoiding wastage and pollution management should be the priority for our individual decisions.

How do we make those decisions? For example, is it better to wear organically grown cotton T-shirts? It takes a stupendous 2,700 litres of water to grow cotton for one shirt.

Cotton, points out author Daniel Goleman in his book, Ecological Intelligence, was the chief reason that the Aral Sea, the fourth largest inland water-body, vanished! Worse, he says, cotton resists absorbing dyes. And the dyes used for cotton include chemicals like chromium, chlorine and formaldehyde — a large amount of which gets into the factory wastewater and into rivers and lakes.

You are wondering if this is a case for knocking off your T-shirts under the excuse of saving the world. If anything, it’s an argument for rational consumption. Don’t buy two shirts when one will do. Don’t buy a pack of six pens when one will do (five get lost anyway). Buy a refill instead of throwing away the pen. Today, we are not positioned to make informed choices about the products we consume because of a lack of maturity levels in product labelling. But the volume of consumption is a decision we can make.

As Indians, it’s in our DNA to repair and reuse. Next time, take your shoes to a cobbler when the sole appears to be coming off instead of buying a new shoe — a stitch in time, to rephrase an old saw, is the real answer for our times.

The writer is a content and communication consultant