SUUHAS TENDDULKAR

Climate change, the greatest of all crises facing humanity, is happening and there is no denying that. The effect of climate change has been validated in studies after studies

Green Piece is meant to be an informative take on new technologies, solutions and strategies that can help individuals and communities in Goa to practice sustainability in daily life.
The concept of sustainability is not very different from the concept of common sense. If at all, the concept of sustainability, which is concerned with future society and life, can be called critical common sense.
There is this local story (many attribute it to our honourable CM, Mr Parrikar) about the watermelon eating competition that took place about 30-40 years ago in many villages in Goa. Every year, the watermelon growers held a watermelon eating contest for the youth of the village. For this contest, they used to put up some of their largest and choicest watermelons. The contestants could eat as much as they could but were asked to spit out the seeds in a separate bowl. These seeds from the best watermelons were then used for the next harvest by the farmers ensuring that the new crop got the best genetic stock. Just a generation later, their sons continued holding the competition but started using smaller watermelons for the contest, reserving their largest and the best ones for selling to the customers so that they could fetch higher profits. Over time, the size of the watermelons kept going down and nobody won.
Unfortunately for us, the same story is playing out before our eyes on a larger canvas. The compulsion and urgency of ‘now’ has overwhelmed our culture that even the most intelligent of our lot are taken in by the dazzle and have submitted themselves unquestioningly to serve goals that are nothing more than figures. Majority of us are so entrenched in this culture of ‘now’ that we have become blind to the decadence and destruction that this culture is bringing about.
Climate change, the greatest of all crises facing humanity, is happening and there is no denying that. The effect of climate change has been validated in studies after studies, and leading scientists across the world now believe that unless we act fast and in coordination, we would be leading the earth to its next mass extinction. The impacts could be as simple as inundation of coastal areas, to more complex and interlocked effects including drastic changes in rainfall, crop failures, food scarcity, and mass migration to gradual disintegration of urban states. In a real sense, the impacts could be unfathomable and nothing that we can think of can prepare us for the social, economic, environmental and psychological shocks of things that may unfold in the coming decades.
A simple common sense understanding dictates that we should match our consumption with available resources. While many of us do this at an individual level when we manage our finances and make spending choices, we fail miserably on a collective level. In our race to satiate the ‘now’, we are overusing limited resources without any thought or consideration about the long term effects of this relentless taking.
All the problems that we are facing now, are the problems of our culture. Is there a way to change this culture? Is there a way to go forward with new insights and ideas to take things forward?
Please read on as we talk about specific aspects of how this culture is affecting us in different areas and what we can do to make a change at an individual and a community level. The subsequent issues will focus on diverse domains including agriculture and food production, water management, material extraction, land use and construction, energy use and generation, waste management, transport, material use, education system, localism and many other topics that can make a difference to our life and our future.