Sustainability and the Common Man March 20, 2017 on peregrinator's blog / misc

Policy with respect to sustainability in India has never been top priority, until very recently. It has often been fraught with people’s predispositions that should never have come about in the first place. I will be talking about the ways of a singe man I know, let’s call him Devdas (original name withheld for various reasons) and how almost all of his actions were made knowing about the state of wildlife in India.

In my 21 years, one word that I’ve heard consistently in discussions of any sort is sustainability. Due to its overuse, particularly very frivolously, I must say over the years the word has lost its meaning but the concepts have somehow become clearer (as a result of my own digging and research). Being from a school with a rich biodiversity in its very own campus, this isn’t a very heartening thing to hear. What I don’t understand, however, is the fact that actually very few people that I’ve interacted with in my latter 18 years get involved in either the conservation of wildlife or the policy making it closely associates with. This becomes clearer when one understands the latent intrinsic characters of the people that run the school, albeit that is a topic for an essay by itself. As I will write in most of my upcoming papers, the fauna and flora of the Eastern Ghats has not received much attention and the cause and outcome of this is seen in the people that inhabit the region.

Beginnings

The person whom I will be talking about is from a rural region of the Eastern Ghats, probably on the coast. His upbringing was in the medium of the language spoken in that place and definitely excluded the hot topics of biodiversity, conservation, and sustainability. Most of his childhood was spent trying to find means of indulging in fun and frolic without being discovered by (possibly) strict parents. The parents would also have been quite unaware of such issues as they would have been labouring to make ends meet. This person, like all others in his village, wanted to come up in life and so he took up the course of education that was necessary for the challenging exams one was required to clear for a career in Chartered Accountancy. Usually a well paid discipline, he had to settle for a not-so-high salary post in a remote school. That was where I met him. It might have been some nine or ten years ago that Devdas first came to work in this school. Since I was studying in that school, and during vacations everyone staying back met frequently (not to mention knowing each other fairly well) we saw each other very often. Devdas was a young chap, maybe in his twenties then, fairly naïve (as was I: naïve, not in my twenties!) and with a keen inferiority complex. His English was not the best as a result of which he would interact only with a select group of individuals, mainly those he though were “in his league”. He was jovial in the sense that he wanted to lighten the generally hostile environment that he lived in to make his time alone pass along faster. Initially I talked to him a lot, and every time I went to his spartan apartment, there would be eggs lying around in the kitchen and a pile of old accountancy textbooks in a corner gathering dust. I never knew how he passed his time because soon after I got a new friends circle and he was not in it. I did still say the occasional hello and what’s up, but that was all.

Now I don’t know what his life was like in truth in the few years that I didn’t meet him or talk to him. All I heard after this period, which lasted nearly 8 or nine years, was rumours and more rumours, all of which is completely irrelevant here. A change that I had seen was that he had bought his own new motorbike and used it to travel even to the place he worked that was barely 200 meters away from where he now stayed. He had made several new friends and some that lived elsewhere even stayed with him when they visited. However, certain other aspects of his character, I could never understand, whether they were new because I had not gotten to know him earlier. It is those that I will be talking about here.

An ode to plastics, the wonderful!

If asked to lecture on the science behind plastics, both Devdas and Donald Trump would very likely say the very same things. On a trip to the nearby village, as usual on his motorbike, we purchased a large bag of pakodas diligently wrapped in old newspaper, tied with synthetic string and finally placed inside a black plastic bag. To wash hands we got some plastic packets of water, a cheaper alternative to buying the unnecessary plastic bottle (we didn’t want to spend that much money). Of course, I enjoyed eating this fast food, excessively oily, salty and essentially the bane to human existence, as did he. Now in his thirties, he continues to eat this junk and has the nerve to talk about maintaining health! (That, I will write about another time just for the sheer hilariousness.) Well, we found an isolated sheet rock that was easy to access, as the numerous broken bottles of alcoholics indicated, we ate and finally when the time came to dispose of (what I knew to be non-biodegradable) plastics and paper, he did the most predictable thing. He got up and walked to his motor bike. Of course, after tossing aside, with almost a certain flair, the oily newspaper, the plastics and bits of leftovers. I looked at him inquisitively and, finally realising subtlety was not his forte, asked him why he had left the plastic there. He merely waved me off and we left. I was not satisfied. This happened again soon after, and again, and again and again. Put simply this was what would happen every time he went out. So eventually I confronted him one day. His explanation was probably the most well thought out and, as you shall see why, transformed the way I think entirely. I mean, the way I think about him. Of course not the way I think about plastics!

Biggibee [thats what he calls me, a corruption of Big-B], why you worry? This plastic and all will go in 2 or three years! Go to that place where they dump plastics. It will not be there in some years.

I say that it’s because people collect it and dump it elsewhere and that plastic is not biodegradable.

No yaar! Not like that! I have seen! Plastic will go!

I remind him that cows and other animals including wildlife eat that and die. After two minutes silence:

No yaar. Nothing like that.

Well, I kept quiet since I realised how futile it might be to have an argument about something he was so convinced about.

Half a year down the line, we still go out to eat, sit in the same places and do the same things. I ask him about it once in a while but don’t press for a definite answer.

If you’re not a drinker, you still can have fun with bottles

Even if we aren’t eating anything he sometimes likes to just go to these rocks which in the evenings and mornings are undisturbed. Usually he parks his motorbike near these rocks and get on with his work. Although the purpose of his going there is to sunbathe or do some exercise on the road shoulder (I still don’t understand why he shows a preference for such a spot do do this), he first scans the rocks for empty liquor bottles left behind by careless drinkers. He goes over and picks them up giving an impression that he might actually do the place a service. The very first thing heard is the sound of glass shattering. Sometimes pieces of the shattered bottle hit you, if you’re close enough. Then one can hear the laughter of satisfaction. I once told him (sarcastically, but convincingly) that glass is the same as sand in its chemical composition, expecting him to be overjoyed but he was completely unconcerned. Just mildly amused. He went about doing his social service, sometimes with a little creativity: he would rest the bottle on the rock and fling a stone the size of a clenched fist or even larger at it and watch in satisfaction as the bottle fragmented. Another time he flung a small hard bottle against a larger fragile bottle and merrily witnessed the results. Even large pieces of glass upset him. He crushes those underfoot. I did try explaining to him that there are a lot of animals that live near these rocks and that his breaking those bottles does them anything but good. He shrugged this off as he did with the case of plastics.

The scam that is waste disposal

The school that we live in has, over the years, transformed waste disposal into a systematic process wherein the separation of different types of refuse is integral. It is very evident that without this, piles of accumulating waste attract domestic pests, pollute the place rather than anything else and on the whole make it extremely unpleasant and hazardous to not only human but also other life. Organic refuse can be composted, plastics and glass can be reused and metal can be recycled. However:

What yaar Biggibee! All these * * and * ** [names withheld for various reasons] simply bought four-four new dustbins yaar.

His stock of old soft drink bottles (all plastic), soft drink tetra-packs, plastic shopping bags, kitchen wastes (often including packaging, plastic of course), and almost anything else is bundled into a large polyethylene bag and dumped randomly into any one of the four dustbins provided. Franky, at this stage, I’m not shocked or anything.

His obsession for soft drinks is now a die hard habit. Purportedly, soft drinks are far better than the drinking water provided here for the reason that the water (as opposed to soft drinks such as Coke, Thums up, Appy Fizz, etc) makes him fat. Okay, I’ll admit the water here is hard, but that signifies nothing! Aerated drinks, such as those he’s shown a preference for, are but concentrated sugar and carbon dioxide! (I am very seriously considering writing a character analysis about him as we used to in school about characters in plays!) Getting back to the topic at hand, he buys these not in large bottles but in small plastic tetra-packs and tin cans. When asked what he does with these, he once said that he keeps them after use and uses them to drink from rather than using large bottles. That is something that not just I but several others would disapprove of, and on various levels. In any case, he does not do what he says he does as you would have expected. He disposes of them as I described above.

I only let what I want inside my house

Knowing that a long line of interns and volunteers have been conducting a project on a lizard species here, he often used to ask me if any of them would like to catch lizards in his house, since their job was to catch lizards anyway. Attempts at explaining that the species of lizard that they study is so vastly different are futile as that doesn’t mean anything to him. Although this is said lightly, this tendency of his is of interest and I may write of it elsewhere. His descriptions of the menace cause by the lizards is often very humorous.

These lizards, no, they put their dung everywhere.

What dung? I ask, seriously wondering what on earth he’s talking about.

Arre yaar! Their shit!

I don’t bother any further. I don’t understand what those lizards have done to him that he hasn’t himself! It turned out that, as I found out much later, he had bought a toy gun that actually shot at fairly high speeds small plastic balls and a laser pointer with which he used to accurately shoot these house lizards to death. When someone is stubborn and hell-bent on doing something so ridiculously elaborate, I’ve found out that, more often than not, its best to let them do as they wish.

Amphibians are the other unwelcome guests to his house. Toads that usually migrate towards anywhere that they get more food, such as under a light source, migrate to the top of the stairs to his door where he keeps his shoes. Somehow, these toads climb into his shoes and stay there until he accidentally touches them while putting on his shoes. Once this has happened, he empties the shoe over the stairs, dropping the toad a whole story down. Once he has worn the shoes, he then picks up a bamboo stick (which I’ve seen him use only in the way mentioned) and on finding the toad nails it to a concrete or stone surface with the stick and crushes it. You can almost guess his answer when asked what he’s doing that for:

Arre this frog is simply coming into my shoe. I will teach it not to do it again.

How can you teach a toad (not a frog) by crushing it?

Arre if I hit it, it will not come back.

Yeah, well, I can’t argue with that logic can I?

Consequences of this mindset

A whole country thinking this way only makes things harder for implementing sustainable policy. Even the best of governmental policy if not understood by the people, comes to no good. What the best school in the country has failed to do is to educate such people about such issues and that definitely doesn’t sound good. I do not intend to pin the blame on any one, least of all the school, but it is these antisocial elements that spread negative influence and why this mindset still prevails, as did happen with the Jallikattu protests. What I have described here is a limited perspective of the bigger issue at hand, the same that probably took the Jallikattu protests forward to the large scale that it achieved. That I will be talking about in another article. Indiscriminate killing of wildlife, damaging wildlife irreversibly alters the interactions between species which are a fundamental requirement of ecosystem maintenance. Hence sustainability goes out of the window as soon as one meddles with other life forms. That is not saying much because human existence today already causes so much interference with pre-existing life forms. It can hardy get worse, and this I say not in a positive way. If anything, human should strive to reduce unnecessary contact with wildlife that can potentially damage it. That was about the effects of direct interference. Improper waste management, unsustainable practices and other such contribute to indirect effects. The indirect effects have already caused significant damage. If it isn’t realised immediately, as should the issue of global warming (which the world’s biggest superpower ignores so conveniently) it is inevitable that the apocalypse will occur. The only cure to this is a scientific or methodical approach to thought which I have written about in the first part of the essay on evolution. I may have missed our several aspect so these issues and probably even some important ones. I hope to cover those in the other articles that should be up later.