Editorial:Introduce the Young to Environment First

Today is World Environment Day. Like every year, there will be plantation drives, workshops and seminars held all over the world. Like every year, once the people are done with the process of observing WED, they will return to their concrete homes driving fuel guzzling and noxious fume emitting vehicles, their headlights powered by batteries that turn the earth sour. This is so because although urban-dwellers realise at some level the need to protect the environment, they do not understand what environment really is. They want the city air to be cleaner, but cannot connect with the need to keep green belts alive for this to happen. They want potable water in their taps and also uninterrupted power supply, which either burns fossil fuels or taps into water resources to generate. The city-bred ideas of environmental protection are riddled with clichés, are impractical and for all their high-sounding ideals, are shallow in their concern.
This is the trap that Sikkim has to work itself out of. Even though a majority of the people here live in the bustees, and are thus closer to nature, the generation which will take decisions in future is being groomed in the urban areas where Environment may have become a subject in school but speaks of things they cannot associate with. The disconnect cannot serve the environment too well, because even if a generation grows up feeling that the environment needs to be conserved, it will, by and large, not know what environment means. The superficiality of environmental concern will thus continue to mar even well-intentioned efforts. Take the theme for this year’s World Environment Day – “Green Economy: Does it include you?” for example. Economies, by nature, exploit natural resources to progress. The only green that an economy recognises are ‘greenbacks’, and these have nothing to do with the greening of the environment. Activities which constitute a “green economy” continue to be microenterprises which are allowed neither the space nor the motivation to grow beyond token gestures. Statistics which are so important to economists, excite little appeal among the real folk who live in rural spreads and watch urban excesses exploit resources they have nurtured for centuries. It is important for the young [the elders already beyond help] to realise that every time they leave the lights on longer than required or allow faulty water tanks to overflow or insist on being ferried around in an exclusive car instead of a bus or other mode of public transport, they are creating a demand for the exploitation of limited natural resources. Similarly, they should feel pride when they try and minimise their carbon footprint because then they would be supporting sustainable harnessing of finite resources which too many generations before them have exploited. As this section has repeated too often in the past, for such responsibility to ingrain itself, an introduction will have to be made first. That is not happening anymore. There are many children who have never seen a cow being milked. It is only slightly better in the villages because there, although the children run chores around the home, they have never seen the indigenous cow graze in the fields because the only bovines around are imported hybrids which spend their entire lives in the cowshed. For no fault of theirs, most of the young might know the various functions of the various keys of a mobile phone, but ask them to recognise one tree by name and they are stumped. They know the months and days of the week, but do not need to know the seasons anymore. This is not the curse of modernity, it is a reflection of the previous generation’s uncaring attitude not only towards their young, but also towards the society and its collective future. A generation so uninitiated in the ways of nature cannot, even if it wants to, take care of the environment.
On World Environment Day, we should perhaps introduce the young to environment first. Once they get to know each other, they will also take care of each other as well.