Feeding the birds and watching the young ones take flight from my balcony, I feel I am paying off some of the bad karma I sowed by hunting birds for the pot when growing up in a very different India. In just my lifetime, I have seen the number of birds in the sky and fields dwindle, and great forests rolled back to small islands of green.

And I am part of this. I bought a tiny piece of land some years ago, in scrub forests in the foothills of the Himalayas, partly because when I visited the site, I heard a leopard calling nearby. Yet, if I ever build a house there, I will be eating into the habitat of that leopard.

I try not to be an eco-fascist or to wallow in guilt. But I believe we should try as individuals, even as governments and vested interests fail, to stop collectively sawing at the branch we are sitting on.

So I propagate my own island on my balconies. I switch off all lights when I leave. I buy ‘green’ products. I use things until they fall apart. I take public transport.

Yet, for all that, my footprint on this planet is still large.

Next year (2011), we should strive to walk more lightly, writes Nirmal Ghosh in The Straits Times.  Read More

OPINION: Will we have a greener 2011?

Nirmal Ghosh in the Straits Times ( 29 December 2010):

BANGKOK — The two balconies in my eighth floor apartment in downtown Bangkok are stuffed with green plants.

In one, where I keep only palms and bamboos, I put out a bowl of birdseed every morning along with an earthen platter filled with water.

More than 30 sparrows frequent the bamboos. A pair of spotted doves built a nest among them a year ago and has since reared half a dozen chicks.

I work from home, and see the palms and the bamboos as a successful scrap of nature — even if it is less than a tiny fraction of the big city, and smaller than dust in the wind on this planet spinning around the sun. But it makes my apartment more liveable.

To keep our planet green and habitable amid mounting pressure from a human population of about seven billion, we have seen, in recent months, two major worldwide efforts — the Biodiversity Convention meeting in Japan last month and the Climate Change meeting in Mexico earlier this month.

The talks at Cancun were approached with more realism both by those involved and by the media, after the crushing deflation of expectations at climate change talks in Copenhagen last year.

Cancun ended in a consensus agreement, the headlines assured us. The magazine New Scientist, for instance, said: ‘Dawn breaks on a low-carbon world.’

But the content of the article visibly struggled to live up to that vision. A false dawn, perhaps.

As Bolivia resentfully pointed out: ‘Compromise was always at the expense of the victims, rather than the culprits of climate change.’

The fact remains that whatever will be done as a result of Cancun will most likely be too little, too late.

True, there is more environmental awareness than ever. Ecological products are the rage — by choice for the rich in their mansions and condos, and by default for the poor in their mud and reed shacks.

There is some evidence of slowing deforestation. Several countries have ambitious national targets for curbing man-made greenhouse gas emissions. Cricket stars and children have marched in India to save the tiger.

Bookstores are full of doom-boom books with titles like The Flooded Earth, The Rising Sea and The Coming Famine. Several are not far off the mark.

Recent and under-reported data from the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration shows that from 1995 to 2005, global annual plant consumption rose from 20 per cent to 25 per cent of all plant production.

Which brings us to biodiversity.

If Cancun was lukewarm, the Biodiversity Summit in Nagoya the previous month was a disgrace. Only five heads of state showed up.

‘One-third of the countries represented there couldn’t even be bothered to send a minister. This is how much they value the world’s living systems,’ wrote columnist George Monbiot.

Indeed, even as Japan hosted that summit, it continues to fish for the disappearing bluefin tuna.

The plunder of marine life makes plunder on land seem gentle. A merchant ship captain recently told me that the sight of fishing boats as his container vessel approached the coast of China, was like a ‘snowstorm on my radar’. Europe’s fishing fleets have long since emptied many seas off Africa’s coast.

Will we have a greener 2011? Possibly. But it is likely to be superficial.

We remain locked in a model that emphasises consumption and materialism, with little respect for the thin skin of land, sea and sky that makes it possible for us to live.

Environmentalists have long sought to put a value to things like clean air and wetlands, in the hope of proving that preserving offers better returns than polluting or plundering. But once something is given a value, it can also be traded.

Production and trade is at the heart of our economic system and civilisation. In a logical consequence, as our population grows to over seven billion, we are trading the very biosphere which gives us life for little more than a handful of change.

Next December offers another opportunity to secure a meaningful agreement on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, at the next talks on climate change in Durban, South Africa.

It may be the last chance, but nobody is holding his breath.

My guess is that it will take disasters, on a scale unheard of in human history, to force change.

Feeding the birds and watching the young ones take flight from my balcony, I feel I am paying off some of the bad karma I sowed by hunting birds for the pot when growing up in a very different India. In just my lifetime, I have seen the number of birds in the sky and fields dwindle, and great forests rolled back to small islands of green.

And I am part of this. I bought a tiny piece of land some years ago, in scrub forests in the foothills of the Himalayas, partly because when I visited the site, I heard a leopard calling nearby. Yet, if I ever build a house there, I will be eating into the habitat of that leopard.

I try not to be an eco-fascist or to wallow in guilt. But I believe we should try as individuals, even as governments and vested interests fail, to stop collectively sawing at the branch we are sitting on.

So I propagate my own island on my balconies. I switch off all lights when I leave. I buy ‘green’ products. I use things until they fall apart. I take public transport.

Yet, for all that, my footprint on this planet is still large.

Next year, we should strive to walk more lightly.

Source: www.dailyme.com