A slight change in the way we live?

In our day-to-day lives, it is almost natural for us to be preoccupied with social time without realising that our social world is embedded within more abstract conceptions of time such as ecological time. Our own social world in particular and the wider social world in general change much faster than ecological time.

The present controversy over climate change, whether the global climate is changing for the worse i.e. increasing global warming, is very much related to the apparent lack of a clear correspondence between social time and ecological time. Most people carry on regardless of the slowly changing natural environment. On the other hand, we are very conscious of the changing social environment; we debate passionately about social, political, cultural and economic trends because we can observe changes in these fields very closely and they constantly affect our day-to-day lives.

Our ignorance about longer term trends, be it social or ecological, is at least partly related to our lived experience. Not many people live beyond a hundred years and most people much less. So, younger people usually think about the next few decades, while older people tend to count in single years. So, we celebrate the new year, birthdays, anniversaries etc because they are annual events.

In the super-fast social world today, people’s lives are caught up in even shorter-time frames. So, to get people involved in matters that extend beyond this social time is a real challenge. While long term social and economic planning has become a thing of the past, governments have become ‘fire-fighters’ trying to defuse short term crises that crop up all the time, often largely due to the lack of longer term planning. All major global and national media outlets have daily business reports and these focus attention on day-to-day events, with little or no attention being paid to longer term economic trends. The same is true for political and cultural reporting.


It is against the above background that we have to understand why most people do not worry about their growing ecological footprints and carry on with their unsustainable life styles they have got used to.
I devote this short essay to introduce and elaborate on what I call a New Year resolution that many people in this country and elsewhere could easily adopt. It involves a slight change in the way we live, by taking a few easy steps that can have a multiplier effect if adopted by a significant number of people. The few easy steps are:



a) Stop throwing away things that can still be used

b) Stop using disposable things like disposable plastic bottles, paper towels, disposable racers, etc

c) Grow at least a few things that you often consume

d) Avoid using chemicals in and around the house as much as possible

e) Avoid using motorable transport within one mile radius from your residence

f) Take a cloth bag when you go out so that you do not have to use polythene bags

g) Separate biodegradable waste from your household garbage that can be composted to be used in gardening


The above steps are good for your health and the environment, both local and global.
All of the things mentioned above might be a little inconvenient to begin with but most people will get used to it in no time. If adopted by several million people in Sri Lanka, it will slow down the economy a little but will have a significant positive impact on our own health and the wider environment: all these will also improve the quality of life of the people in the country.

Vance Packard called the Americans ‘the waste makers’ in the 1960s but, sadly Americans have not done much to get rid of that label, in spite of the efforts of many leading Americans to increase environmental consciousness and change consumption patterns. Continuous economic growth and the availability of easy money have led to increased consumption that has made a significant contribution to a massive obesity crisis at home and an unprecedented damage to the global environment. America, through a colossal network of retail shops and junk food chains has contributed to the spread of the habit of wasteful and unhealthy consumption across the globe. Many developed and fast developing countries have followed suit by adopting mass consumption as the ideal life style.

If the globalisation of production and consumption is the root cause of environmental damage and public health crises around the world, then reversing this trend without dislocating lives and livelihoods of the masses appears to be the only way forward. While a complete reversal of the trend towards increasing globalisation is unrealistic, there is an urgent need to strike a balance between globalisation and localisation of human activities such as production, consumption and mobility.
Right now, the trend is towards increasing globalisation of almost all human endeavours. Stemming this trend no doubt requires systematic changes but equally important is behavioural change at individual and community levels. The few simple steps mentioned at the outset of the article are expected to contribute toward much needed behaviour change. If we look at each of the steps more carefully it would become clear that these, if widely followed, have the potential to bring about even structural change at a societal level.



" The present controversy over climate change, whether the global climate is changing for the worse i.e. increasing global warming, is very much related to the apparent lack of a clear correspondence between social time and ecological time. Most people carry on regardless of the slowly changing natural environment. "



The use of disposable products has become quite common around the world. Introduction of plastics as an industrial material contributed to this trend immensely. The disposal of used disposable products in large quantities has become a major environmental hazard, in addition to the increasing use of non-renewable resources in the production, packaging and transportation of disposable products.

So, a significant reduction in the use of disposable products such as plastic cutlery, paper towels, polithene bags and plastic containers, can help preserve environmental quality.  The third step mentioned above is to grow at least a few of food items that we consume regularly like fruits and vegetables. The mix of things one can grow depends on several factors such as availability of space and environmental conditions.