Witoubou Newmai
“…when women without fur coats grow kind to their husbands…you know for sure that winter is near at hand”. This is a line from O Henry’s story, The Cop and the Anthem, which tells us about a homeless man named Soapy, who struggles to escape the severity of New York winter. The story tells us about how torturing a winter can be for the have-nots.
Cut to the present trend here in our region, the torturing part for the people without the ‘fur coats’ during the winter is more than the issue of ‘fur coats’.
The issue of drinking water or for any other purpose during winter is perennial in this part of the world. Our own making is also greatly contributing to the issue. This issue will continue to haunt us as long as we refuse to go beyond the culture of knee-jerk response to embrace the culture of persistent advocacy.
What is our normal response when a water source dries up? We will not spend much to reason on the cause of it - our happy indifference and the rush to find alternatives without turning back have been adding to our miseries.
With this, we are raking up here one bit of the light environmental issue.
This is the least discussed and most neglected issue in our society, although extremely important.
Our society has a level of education that is enough to reason the required effects on the issue. However, the preponderance of the culture of knee-jerk response inhibits the progress. A person who knows of only rushing to chemist shops whenever he has health issues but never bothers to introspect for the cause can be a closer metaphor on how our people tackle issues, especially that of the drinking water.
Many brooks and streams, which fed generations after generations, have long gone now, and those days’ rivers are fast becoming streams and brooks today. We could have done something, but we didn’t. But at the least we must realize our mistakes and follies to act.
Most of the ‘phenomena’ are global today driven by the market, which are assaulting the ‘local’ with increasing forces by the moment, and as such, everyone tries their best to go in ‘sync’ with the global ‘phenomena’ so that they are not left behind. In contrast, to have concerns on the environmental issue would mean compromising many national and local interests. Perhaps, it is one unfortunate issue which may not find concrete mechanisms on a global scale as long as a sort of global governance does not prevail. As such, the bottom up approaches, a moral sense and attitude are the only fighting tools at the moment.
The local and national politics intensify in proportion to the global market force even as the environmental problems, which recognize no territories and their boundaries, also aggravate. As no one likes to be left behind, competing local and national politics and their policies often contravene environmental health.
According to political scientist David Jonathan Andrew Held, there are three types of problems at issue. The first, according to him, is “shared problems involving the global commons, i.e., fundamental elements of the ecosystem—among the most significant challenges here are global warming and ozone depletion”.
Another category of global environmental problems “involves the interlinked challenges of demographic expansion and resource consumption---pressing examples under this heading include desertification, questions of biodiversity, and threats to the existence of certain species. The third category of problems, according to David Held, is transboundary pollution such as acid rain, or river pollutants…”
These environmental problems require global governance or global policies. However, since we do not have a kind of global governance at the moment that will bring the top-down policies with regard to the environmental problems, and since local or national politics compete in global market so that they are not left behind, one needs to look at the local environment problems through the 'moral' lens and act in one own possible ways.
