An Island Mentality

The towering statues are all that remain of this lost civilization

As I flew from Delhi to Goa last week, I couldn’t help thinking about the relevance of an island mentality to the way that we live today. The irony of my predicament did not evade me as I swooped across India’s States like a gigantic bird of prey. I had just finished a small plastic juice bottle, which I was wondering what to do with, and as I stowed it carefully in my bag to dispose of later, I caught myself thinking, ‘I’d better not take this onto the island, there’s nowhere to throw it away’.

And it’s true. On Divar – the small island in Goa where my family home is – we dispose of all of our waste on compound, having to burn plastics when they accumulate. There’s no rubbish man or truck, and there never has been. In times gone by, everything was recycled, soft drinks and milk came in bottles, groceries were wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper, and we even had a pig, Pikush, who ate all of our vegetable and toilet waste – a remnant of Portuguese colonialism. Nowadays, with cheap and mainstream plastics, ‘disposable’ yet non-biodegradable packaging, higher levels of product consumption and far shorter product lifetimes, not to mention a burgeoning population, unsustainability is the word of the day.

One reflective evening a few days after I had arrived, I sat by the sea, watching the giant sun take its last few paces to the horizon whilst the ocean glinted in the dusky red. This was the first time I’d come to the beach in almost two years. I was quietly horrified to see the amount of rubbish there, and even more worrying, the reddish-brown colour of the once dazzling white sand and the distinct lack of tourists. Giant grey iron ore ships peppered the horizon. In the meantime the few tourists that were on this sultry beach filled their time paragliding across the murky sea and even fishing. What exactly still lives in these once paradisic waters, I’m not sure. I remembered the cartoon Wall.e that I had recently seen in Delhi, and the uncanny similarities that were beginning to play out before my eyes.

Is everything in life now a case of shifting baseline? Do we so easily forget how things used to be, I wondered, as I asked my aunt whether the sand had always been this colour…

As I looked up at the sky’s deepening blue, the sickle-shaped moon shone bright as did its ever close companion Venus. I thought about the Earth as a small island in space, the blue planet, and how remote we are from anywhere to go to once we have pilfered and plundered these resources to the point of no return.

We are reaching that point, as we are increasingly well aware. Waste now seeps into our back gardens, our water taps and the air that we inhale; it is almost impossible to get a clean glass of water in Delhi that is not bottled or filtered, and the Yamuna is like an open sewer; landfill sites exude methane and toxic chemicals across the world and plastic bags and bottles are beached on every shore with the incoming tide. Most concerning of all, greenhouse gas emissions are distorting our small island’s atmospheric gas composition and, as if wrapped in a giant duvet, the planet is heating up.

I often ask myself how this has happened. Was it not foreseen? Gandhi’s oft-quoted words remind us that ‘our world has enough for each person’s need, but not for his greed’. A famous Native American prophecy states; ‘Only after the last tree has been cut down. Only after the last river has been poisoned. Only after the last fish has been caught. Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten’. John Muir, the American Naturalist, said; ‘When we tug at a single thing in nature, we find it attached to the rest of the world’. Such insights are decidedly familiar.

But this leads me to the question, is foresight enough alone? In a rapidly globalising and capitalist world, with varying social values and fragmented corporate and political directives; with enough natural resource buffering to hide away and delay many of our behavioural impacts; and with more apparently pressing concerns at a day to day level, it seems in some ways highly predictable and unsurprising that the current mess we are in has happened.

More so, the changes that have occurred since the Industrial revolution and before are by no means all negative either. Quality of life has improved immensely (for some – not all), society enjoys greater freedom of speech, thought and action than perhaps ever before, livelihoods and choices have diversified, we are more connected than ever, and access to information has exploded.

The urgent challenge now though is to curb or change those behaviours whose impacts are detrimental, and streamline our currently wasteful use of resources moving onto a sustainable trajectory of development and consumption. And we can.

If we truly saw the Earth as an island, how differently would we all live? There would be nowhere to put the things we no longer wanted in our own back yard, the plastic bottles and bags, old cars, piles of refuse, e-waste, chemical waste, broken toasters and fridges, the list is endless…On a small island, you always think more of the full life cycle of anything you use, as there’s nowhere for it to go, there’s limited place for it to come from.

It’s true, in some cases you can burn waste, but as the great climatologist Tim Flannery says, the atmosphere is as thinly spread around the Earth as an onion skin around and onion. What we release into the atmosphere is still around us, even though we may not see it straight away, and these impacts are catching up with us in the form of air pollution, acid rain, holes in the ozone layer and climate change.

It’s not as if the impacts of unsustainability have not been seen played out to us before. Easter Island, one of the most remote inhabited places on Earth, saw the rise and fall of a great civilisation back in 500AD. The only evidence that now remains is more than 600 great stone statues, echoing the past aspirations and failures in their steady gaze. As this island community grew in complexity and numbers, their unsustainable removal of trees lead to their ultimate downfall, with soil erosion, livelihood destruction, and ultimate isolation, they were left with not a grain to feed on and not a boat to leave on.

We forget that sustainability doesn’t happen by accident, at least not in today’s complex society. It requires focused thought and research, widespread education, collaboration, political will, implementation, hindsight and foresight!

My aim here is not to be a pessimistic greeny, but rather to reflect on what we value in life and how it impacts our surroundings as many are encouragingly beginning to do today. Necessity, after all, is the mother of invention, and we need to start asking these questions with a renewed seriousness, applying them to everything that we do. There are no universal answers laid out on a plate, at least not that I can see. Society is too complex.

Many argue that ecosystem goods and services must be internalised into the market for us to really change our behaviours. The functions of the diverse global ecosystems that filter our water, purify our air, replenish our soil and crops and conserve our water reservoirs are as yet not part of our economic value chain. Back in 1997, a study[1] estimated the value of these services at $33 trillion per year, more than twice global GDP. Stern found that the impacts of climate change on our economy will be 5% per year if we do nothing, and 1% (recently revised to 2%) if we act now to drastically reduce the carbon emissions that are heating our planet to stable levels. But a comprehensive market is not enough. It would only catalyse changes at a large-scale, not necessarily the village, home or individual, or not at least for a long time. We need bottom up and top down solution sharing, and fast, and, lifecycle thinking tied to action, pilots, education, questioning, and innovation on a new and exciting scale.

Niranjan Khatri, Environmental manager at ITC, describes all waste as wealth waiting to be captured. No resource is not of value and no resource cannot be re-used. I wholeheartedly agree. Within our globalised society, we need to find space for an island mentality, for local within global, decentralised within centralised, like cells in a human body almost all of which possess their own nucleus, yet rely on those around them to function. Let’s start to take these next steps and look for the local within the global, question how to find that island mentality, and help one another creatively find the right solutions. Change is afoot, dare we grasp the opportunity?

‘If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age’ – Jaques Barzun