Since moving to Chennai, we have had an abundance of bird-sighting. The area that we are living in is on the fringes of the city; there are still open lands here and coconut and banana groves. There is a lake fairly close by, plus marshlands, which support over a 100 species of birds. Standing on the terrace of our house or on our little street, I have in the last 15 days already sighted chestnut-headed bee-eaters, white-breasted kingfishers, a rufous treepie, purple sunbirds, ashy prinias, the Indian pond heron and a few other species that I haven’t identified yet - besides mynas, doves, bulbuls and of course, crows!
A large plot of land next to our house is lying vacant and this is is a haven for many of the smaller species. It has already been identified for building by a flat developer. I can’t help feeling sad about this, and indeed, many of us love to wax eloquent about the forests being destroyed for development, ecosystems being wiped out and so on - but what we do not realise is that the ecosystem does not exist in a remote forest comfortably away from us. Our backyards and cities are also part of an ecosystem and we are all complicit in driving away every other species from it except - homo sapiens.
We are the ones who buy the flats - for which the land is cleared.
We are the ones who use mobile phones - and their towers that drive birds away.
We are the ones that want a ‘lakeside’ property - where access is denied to fishermen who have used the lake for generations because we don’t want ‘outsiders’, especially poorly dressed ones, in ‘our’ neighbourhood.
And we are the ones breeding in numbers our country cannot sustain. Yes, you and me, netizens may protest that we don’t have more than 2 kids each, but even then, ours will be the kids that eat more processed food, use and throw electronic items every year, want larger houses with more privacy for everyone and 24 hour ACs to shut out the heat - in short, consume energy and resources like an American does today.
Those metals and minerals have to come from somewhere, don’t they? And while we protest the jungles being cleared for the bauxite mining and the coal plant, we can’t live without the things they make! We protest the process, but clamour for its results. Most politicians know this, which is why no one (ok, make that few, out of some respect for Jairam Ramesh) takes environmental objections seriously.
I don’t know really what the solution is. Live more simply, yes - but easier said than done? Honestly, it is difficult to weigh the consequences of each and every small decision. Should I gift this friend’s child yet another cheap plastic china-made toy made probably with toxic materials? Or an ‘authentic’ wooden toy that still needed some part of a tree? Or is there something more sustainable? Do I need one more outfit? If I were to be absolutely honest, I ‘need’ very little of what I have. Yet, it is all very exhausting and rarely do I continue this chain of thought to any logical end.
I did buy recently Ramachandra Guha’s ‘How much should a person consume‘, and I’m hoping that it will set me thinking a little more deeply on the subject and perhaps act on it, even if in my own small way.
What do you think? How much should a person really consume?
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Strangely enough, there was no specific launch date, although the first bunch of articles went up early April 2010. Work has been so busy that I never even realised that a year was up until the end of April! It’s been a challenging year - a year of finding out how little I know about running an online publication - but it’s been extremely exciting too, and I wouldn’t have given up the experience for anything!
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