The ever losing battle

By sahan Hattotuwa

As a member of the Core Committee of the Green Lanka Youth Platform, I have thought about environmental sustainability, with regards to the many countries of the World and also thought what our country (Sri Lanka). This will be a part of many documents that I will be publishing.

Today the population of the World is almost around 7 billion, and we have seen that technology has developed greatly and that technology will go on developing in the future and will reach new heights. We can also see that the Consumer trend has changed dramatically over the past 20 years. With this in mind we can conclude that Consumer Demand will increase at an over-whelming pace because of the fast growing population of the world and the constant change of consumer trends. Due to the ever increasing demand of consumers, the environment of the world is deteriorating, as the need for the supply for this demand is increasing. Today people are free to spend their money on whatever they want, and people do change quickly and adjust to different trends in the world.

Today if a person has money or a huge wealth, he is considered a powerful man in the society and will be respected more than the others. This situation escalates to a huge scale when it comes to the World Political Arena, and as of now the new modern warfare is Economics. With this statement in mind , I can conclude that governments in the world, who are greedy for power and respect , will fulfill this wish of theirs’ by doing anything just to have a powerful economy, yet have no concern for the environment.

What do governments substitute in order for development? They Substitute basic human rights and destroy our lovely environment. Today the world is facing Climate Change, because of this problem. We have polluted rivers, air and the whole environment in general, because Governments of the world want to grow, develop and supposedly thrive.

Governments of the world have a duty to protect their environment as it has a direct link to the health of their country’s people. We see that businesses in the world conduct wrongfully to increase their profits; they do incur huge social costs and externalities to the society. One such example is when businesses release toxic chemicals from factories to water bodies which many people use for their basic needs, and when people consume this, they get sick and end up with cancers. Thus people do suffer from these ill practices, yet governments all over the world show little, or no concern about these kinds of issues, simply because they don’t want to upset the so called ‘Corporate Giants’, as they contribute largely to the national income of the Country. We can see that governments are selfish and only think in the short term, without thinking the long term effects that apply to the whole country.

Although we see that some countries have taken a keen interest in the environment by conducting and organizing many Environmental Sustainability Conferences, the final outcome is still very disappointing. These issues are brought out by the small and less powerful states, and what eventually happens is that the powerful states do not cooperate as they fear they might lose their share of the global market.

As I have stated earlier in this document, the main problem for, and the major barrier to achieving environmental sustainability is the very large population and their huge demand for goods and services.

We shall take a small case for consideration. For example as everyone knows there is a huge demand for jeans as it is very popular among the youth. Thus there many jeans manufacturers based in China. Due to extensive production of Jeans, many water bodies in China are polluted and it has caused many problems to the Ecology and Humanity. Why has this happened? Because the sole reason that businesses don’t care about the environment, is that they only care whether they make good profits and supply for the Demand. The Chinese authorities also should be blamed for their negligence. As of fact China do face a water shortage. Then shouldn’t the Chinese government look after it previous water.

So we can see that Governments or relevant authorities don’t care about the environment getting polluted because they think it is has a very a minute problem, but everyone will only wake up when the problem escalates out of control. Shouldn’t everyone take action now, rather than later?