In Part 1 of a two-part series, this article examines the special challenges to environmental sustainability in South Asia. Sustainability requires much more than mere good intentions. One needs to go beneath the surface, acknowledge and resolve to the best of one’s abilities the myriad interconnections that exist between various biotic and abiotic components of the world, and subject their optimization to a number of constraints. Flashy ideas that seem ingenious, or even traditional methods, often fall flat once implemented because their relevance and ramifications were poorly thought out. Scale, timeliness, sourcing, and availability and viability of alternatives are the key factors that need to be taken into account before opting for a novel solution. For example, in 2004, India’s railway minister at the time, Laloo Prasad Yadav, proposed a set of innovations that included the introduction of small traditional clay cups called kulhads as a potential replacement for plastic and waxed-paper cups. The former could persist intact in the ecosystem for decades, taking centuries to degrade fully, while the latter would require the chopping down of thousands of trees. A number of experts, however, soon
pointed out that large-scale provision of kulhads would lead to considerable loss of fertile topsoil, in addition to the fact that the traditional artisanal furnaces that make them exert a significant environmental footprint, relying primarily on sawdust or coal dust to fuel them.

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ASIA TIMES