Tuesday, September 03, 2019

Let’s Fiddle While the World Burns.


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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Maira Gall