Our ancestors preached it. Our parents taught it to us. The West is adopting it. So why are we Asians abandoning it?
I’m talking about environmental consciousness. Conserving water. Switching off a TV that no one is watching. Calling the municipality to get a recycling bin in the building. Not flushing the toilet at night (that one always raises eyebrows).
Growing up in India in the 1980s, our lifestyle was very different from today’s. There was hardly any waste generated in a typical household. Everything was used and reused until it fell apart.
We traveled in trains. We were reprimanded for wasting food. When my parents visited the US for the first time, I didn’t hear the end of their shock at the excess they saw — from the wastage of paper napkins and plastic cutlery at fast-food restaurants to the average household’s usage of cars and electricity.
At the time, as a young Indian recently relocated to the West, I didn’t want to be associated with stodgy parents who patiently folded used wrapping paper and stored it under their mattress. However, now a renaissance of their mindset is taking place, as climate change becomes common knowledge. The wisdom of my parents’ generation speaks to me again.
Losing touch with that wisdom was, perhaps, understandable. As India’s economic boom has transformed it from a global laggard into one of the world’s key emerging powers, the new generation of Indians finally arrived — in business, science and politics. Indian diasporas in the US, the UK and Southeast Asia are among the richest communities in these countries.
We don’t want to reuse paper bags anymore. We don’t even want to be seen conserving. We now have the power to waste and we want to flaunt it.
The same change in mindset can be seen in other emerging Asian economies. Conservation is regarded as a sign of weakness in this era of rising economic wealth. The desire to claim one’s rightful place under the sun — to share the planet equally — is a driving force throughout the region, from Southeast Asia to South Korea and China. Why should we conserve? The West was responsible for all the pollution and waste in the first place. It is our turn now to ruin the planet and no one should try to stop us.
Unfortunately, while we are lining up for our BMWs, the rules of the game changed. The new lifestyle is no longer sustainable.
It’s the end of the road for gas-guzzling cars, glass apartments that need constant air conditioning, water-thirsty washing machines and wasteful packaging. By 2050, Earth’s population will be more than 9 billion and more than two-thirds will live in urban areas. We cannot survive the lifestyle that we desire.
There is an opportunity here for leadership. Infosys is redesigning every aspect of how it provides lighting, cooling, water and transportation to their more than 100,000 employees, and aiming to reduce costs 10-fold in the process. The Indian army is using solar steam cooking in Ladakh to cook for the 500 jawans (young army recruits) stationed there, and so is the Shirdi Sai Baba temple in Maharashtra.
Elsewhere, prisons in Rwanda are using their 30,000 inmates’ sewage to provide biogas for cooking and compost for growing vegetables. Sunlabob, a private company in Laos, is renting solar lanterns to poor villagers, who find them more affordable than candles. The United Arab Emirates is spending a chunk of its oil money to develop Masdar, the world’s first zero-carbon, zero-waste city. Singapore is using Newater, a treated form of wastewater that is potable. And British schools now include sustainability as a key part of the curriculum.
However, some are falling behind in this thinking, namely well-to-do Asian households — and some Asian governments. Just five years from now, developing countries are projected to emit more greenhouse gases than all developed countries.
We can either shrug our shoulders, or we can use the opportunity to revive our old values, rethink how we live and change that projection.
Whether it is through low-energy housing, planting trees, teaching children to respect the environment, boycotting incandescent lightbulbs or wrapping gifts in old newspapers, we have the opportunity to lead by example. Governments, too, should collaborate with their developing-country counterparts to provide much-needed leadership in the climate-change debate.
Asia must leapfrog the unsustainable stage of development. We already have a deep-rooted tradition of conservation. Reclaiming it would make Asians trendsetters and make the Asian way of life an example for others to follow.
Malavika Jain Bambawale is a research fellow at the Centre on Asia and Globalization at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore.
COPYRIGHT: PROJECT SYNDICATE
In a stark reminder of China’s persistent territorial overreach, Pema Wangjom Thongdok, a woman from Arunachal Pradesh holding an Indian passport, was detained for 18 hours at Shanghai Pudong Airport on Nov. 24 last year. Chinese immigration officials allegedly informed her that her passport was “invalid” because she was “Chinese,” refusing to recognize her Indian citizenship and claiming Arunachal Pradesh as part of South Tibet. Officials had insisted that Thongdok, an Indian-origin UK resident traveling for a conference, was not Indian despite her valid documents. India lodged a strong diplomatic protest, summoning the Chinese charge d’affaires in Delhi and demanding
In the past 72 hours, US Senators Roger Wicker, Dan Sullivan and Ruben Gallego took to social media to publicly rebuke the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) over the defense budget. I understand that Taiwan’s head is on the chopping block, and the urgency of its security situation cannot be overstated. However, the comments from Wicker, Sullivan and Gallego suggest they have fallen victim to a sophisticated disinformation campaign orchestrated by an administration in Taipei that treats national security as a partisan weapon. The narrative fed to our allies claims the opposition is slashing the defense budget to kowtow to the Chinese
In a Taipei Times editorial published almost three years ago (“Macron goes off-piste,” April 13, 2023, page 8), French President Emmanuel Macron was criticized for comments he made immediately after meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Beijing. Macron had spoken of the need for his country to find a path on Chinese foreign policy no longer aligned with that of the US, saying that continuing to follow the US agenda would sacrifice the EU’s strategic autonomy. At the time, Macron was criticized for gifting Xi a PR coup, and the editorial said that he had been “persuaded to run
The wrap-up press event on Feb. 1 for the new local period suspense film Murder of the Century (世紀血案), adapted from the true story of the Lin family murders (林家血案) in 1980, has sparked waves of condemnation in the past week, as well as a boycott. The film is based on the shocking, unsolved murders that occurred at then-imprisoned provincial councilor and democracy advocate Lin I-hsiung’s (林義雄) residence on Feb. 28, 1980, while Lin was detained for his participation in the Formosa Incident, in which police and protesters clashed during a pro-democracy rally in Kaohsiung organized by Formosa Magazine on Dec.
RSS