ExpertDabbler

Tagging is a tricky game, often a lousy game. I’ve 144ed it sometime back. But Dinesh’s tag was exceptional. The tag is to write about three ways to save our earth for our children.

I read about that and thought ‘wonderful topic, let me take some time’ only to come back in the evening and find Ramya and Priya had already written all that I wanted to write and more

Anyway here are my pointers

Spend less:
Particularly on fuel charges, water charges and electricity. By spending less on these, we are doing ourselves, our country and the world a great favor. Why do I talk about spending? Because there is a relationship between that and the environment. Most of the irresponsible acts are done by the highly educated and wealthy in the name of ‘growth’ and ‘development’. They spend more because they can afford and they think it’s their freedom.

Fuel:
Consider this, a middle class person who earns about 6,000 per month in Chennai takes the electric train to work and return everyday.

The guy who earns say 20,000 per month takes his own two-wheeler and spends 20 litres of petrol per month.

The affluent, IIM alumni types, and vice presidents take their gas guzzling cars to their offices 40 km away. To and fro makes it 80 km. That is they spend like 10 litres of petrol per day! Their thinking is - The employer is paying the fuel bill and the chauffeur. It’s all part of the CTC, so why bother?

Now, who hits the environment hardest?

And let me not get started on the wisdom of having IT campuses for 100s of acres at some obscure place 50 km from the city and running a virtual transport corporation. More on this later.

Water:
Many might think that chennaites being water starved would be very stingy with water. Nopes, not all. Why is that? Because it’s not that water is not available, its available provided you are willing to pay for it. There is a crucial difference between the two.

I know several instances where gallons of water are wasted because people did not have the time to change the flush mechanism in the western toilets!. And you dare not ask them, they will throw cash for the water they ‘used’ this way. There is a notion that since they pay for it, they are entitled to use it the way they want.

These are the drawbacks of attaching price tags to natural resources. Those who have money exploit it to the core.

Even if we cut down our consumption by 10%, that would be a boon to our family, country and the world.

Think simple:
Many of my readers might admonish me for saying this. But it pays to think small in certain aspects of life. While building a house, see if you can do with fewer rooms, doors and windows. It might mean silly to you, but it matters in terms of raw materials used, trees cut for wood etc. Cut down on things we do not need. Better still employ environment friendly building methods like Laurie Baker. It’s sad that we celebrate gorgeous Kerala girls but never this architect who settled down in Kerala and who has done wonders in low cost housing. We may not employ all of his techniques, but even some basic awareness might help.

Read more:
Most of the daily environment degradations happen because of a lack of sensitivity and some plain bad habits. I happened to read a portion of E F Schumacher’s ‘Small is Beautiful’ and my concept of development has never been the same (thanks to vatsan).
Reading more on such topics would broaden one’s horizon.

For example, read this (via prabhu).

With this, I’ve partially removed my 144 on tags. But please don’t compel me and I’m plain disinterested in doing tags like ‘Seven satyaraj movies you’ve seen’ etc.

I am not tagging anyone, those who share the concern and have a few things to say are more than welcome to do it:)

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 26th, 2006 at 10:37 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.