We’re currently facing a major ecological crisis. Vast swaths
of the Amazon (the world’s biggest rainforest) have been burnt and the daily
fires have wreaked havoc. Given that we are living in an age of melting ice caps
and rising sea levels due to climate change, the last we need is the proverbial
lungs of the world being vandalized.
Unfortunately, the man in the best position to stop the
devastation, Brazil’s President, Jair Bolsonaro, has decided to use this occasion
to brandish his credentials as “Trump of the Tropics.” While he has made some
gestures about doing more to stop the fires, he’s decided to pick fights with
the outside world, accusing the West of treating the Amazon fires as a Western
attempt to stop Brazil from getting rich and developing.
I live in Southeast Asia and unfortunately, Mr. Bolonaro’s
arguments are nothing new to me. The general argument that we in the developing
world have used is the fact that we have millions of poor and hungry people and
we need to feed those people first. Things like concern for the environment or
worrying about trees and animals comes second to looking after the people. I’ve
often argued that Singapore is what a city should be – clean, green and rich.
However, this underlines a point about the neighbourhood we’re in – Singapore is
clean and green because it is rich. We can afford to worry about trees and
animals because our people are well fed. The story is quite different across the
Riau Islands, where there are lots of hungry people who need be fed.
While economic growth in Southeast Asia has been pretty
spectacular, the environmental costs have been brutal. Little Singapore is clean
and green but like the rest of the region, we get engulfed in the annual “haze”
when the farmers in Indonesia need to clear land and pour kerosene on tracks of
rainforest and burn it. The rest of ASEAN’s governments complain at the usual
talk shops but that’s about it. As one journalist said, “The problem will
remain as long as it remains cheaper for a farmer to burn forest with kerosene
than it is for them to rent a bulldozer to clear land.” The palm oil industry
is also a very big employer in this part of the world and governments and environmental
groups loath of take on a major employer. So, the situation persists – the
people of the region tolerate the year inability to breath as long as economic
growth continues on the right trajectory.
I sympathise. We, in the developing world, have had so
little for so long and when Western governments and NGO’s or the people with
full pockets and bellies start telling us this and that, it gets very annoying.
Yet, having said that, I don’t believe that economic growth
and concern for the environment should be exclusive. Why is it such that we’ve practiced
a system where the two are separate? Perhaps it was the way to go in the late
70s but in an age where we’re talking about communications at the speed of
light and artificial intelligence, there is no reason for economic growth and
environmental preservation being exclusive from each other.
One country that is trying its best to have economic growth
and environmentalism is Bhutan, a land locked tiny little Himalayan Kingdom, sandwiched
between Asia’s giants, China and India. Bhutan is famous for promoting the
development concept of “Gross National Happiness” (GNH) as opposed to the standard
measure of “Gross Domestic Products” (GDP). The Kingdom argues that the key in development
is “happiness” as a holistic measure rather mere industrial output.
The cynics would argue that while the concept of GNH sounds
wonderful in theory, “happiness” is something that you cannot measure and Bhutan
can only do what it does because its fairly isolated. Nobody cares about Bhutan
in the same way that everyone cares about India and China. Bhutan, is after all
a country that looks to India for development assistance.
While Bhutan is fairly isolated on the international scale,
the world should not dismiss the concept of GNH and should in fact study it and
make it applicable to their local surroundings. This is particularly true in
the area of the environment.
One of the key features of the Bhutanese constitution is the
fact that 60 percent of Bhutan’s area has to be forest. At the moment, 70
percent of the country is forest. This makes sense when you consider the fact
that Bhutan is primarily mountainous and, in a neighborhood, where things like
landslides are common. While Bhutan does have landslides, the number of
landslides is relatively low when compared to neighbouring India and Nepal.
The reason for this is simple – Bhutan has trees or enough trees
to keep the grounds held together during the rainy season. Large parts of northern
India and Nepal have not preserved their trees and allowed vast forest lands
become desert. Being tree friendly is national survival in Bhutan and the
economic costs of keeping trees is far less than human and economic costs of cleaning
up an environmental disaster.
The second point about Bhutan is the fact that it has
delivered the basic services like electricity to the majority of people. While
Bhutan is by no means a rich country, there are no homeless and starving.
Education and healthcare are free and even if you have no money in your pocket,
you will have a plot of land to grow your own food.
How has the government done this? It has done so by using
modern technology. In the Phobjikha Valley of Bhutan, the government had a dilemma.
It needed to deliver electricity but it was also in an area where there were cranes.
What did it do? Electricity cables were built underground and the people got
electricity. The cranes kept their national habitat. The cost of laying cables
underground is significantly higher than doing it overland but the investment has
paid off in the form of tourist who come to view the cranes. Where the
government is unable to build electrical cables, households are provided with
solar panels. Bhutan is famously carbon negative.
In a funny way, Bhutan’s concern for the environment is its
greatest economic asset. Tiny Bhutan, with less than a million people cannot
compete with India and China with their respective billions of people. Anything
that Bhutan can make or service will inevitably be done cheaper and better in
India and China. Yet, Bhutan has one advantage that the Asian giants do not
have – a pristine environment with lots of good mountain water and fresh air.
Bhutan’s GDP is primarily powered by hydroelectricity, which it sells to India.
It’s second industry is tourism, which is dominated by Indians and Chinese. While
Bhutan’s capital, Thimpu may not have the “nightlife” of Delhi or Beijing, it has
something that these cities do not have – fresh, breathable air. Nature is a
tourist attraction.
Many aspects of the Bhutanese model are unique to Bhutan. However,
the Bhutanese have shown that economic growth and environmental protection are
not exclusive and in many cases, it
makes good economic sense to care for the environment. It is a model worth
studying and implementing for much of the world.
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