We're in this together
IF there is one person whose insights and ideas we in Bangladesh could benefit from learning about, it is those of Van Jones, activist, author of The Green Collar Economy, and now a special advisor to the Obama administration for green jobs.
Van's insights seem simple and unremarkable, but until he started banging the drum on the issue with his best-selling book, the link between environmental pollution and poverty had been pretty much neglected.
In an interview with an environmental magazine last year, Jones succinctly made the case: "The only reason that we have the unsustainable accounting that we have right now is because incinerators, dumping grounds and sacrifice zones were put where poor people live. It would never have been allowed if you had to put all the incinerators and nasty stuff in rich people's neighborhoods; we'd have had a sustainable economy a long time ago."
It's a simple point, but no less insightful for, what, in retrospect, seems like a blindingly obvious observation. All great insights seem blindingly obvious in retrospect after someone else has articulated them.
But it is Van's second insight that is perhaps even more radical in terms of its implications for the future.
To this day, the conventional wisdom is that environmental preservation can come only at significant economic cost and that going green will require a trade-off in terms of economic growth and development.
Rubbish, says Van, not to put too fine a point on it.
In fact, the opposite is true: we can solve the problems of poverty and the environment at the same time. In fact, he argues, it is only possible to solve them both at the same time
It is only by retro-fitting the world economy to go green that we will create the sustainable jobs needed in a post-industrial world that will pull people put of poverty.
Just as the industrial revolution powered the 19th and 20th centuries, it is green jobs that will power the economic engine of the 21st century.
Now, I am sure that I was not the only reader who has spent the last week pie-eyed at the revelations in The Daily Star about the appalling levels of pollution in the waterways in and around the environs of Dhaka city.
As is always the case in matters such as this, the poor are the ones who bear the brunt of the problem. It is no coincidence that the worst hit are the river gypsies and those who must squat in squalid tenements on the banks of filthy water because they have nowhere else to go.
If you or I or anyone from the ruling class lived by the banks of the Turag and were forced to wash every day in dank, malodorous fluid that barely merits the dignity of being called water, you can bet that we would have heard a lot more about it a lot sooner.
But the truth is that in this country which measures just a few hundred miles from top to bottom, into which some 150 million of us are squashed together, and whose capital is slated to be one of the world's four most populous metropolises by 2020 with a population of 22 million, we can't isolate ourselves from the filth.
In one sense, this has always been Bangladesh's bane. No matter how rich you are, you cannot fully isolate yourself from the poverty all around you, the pot-holed roads, the slums, the crumbling infrastructure.
Now we even see it with water and power. It used to be that the poor didn't have regular access to electricity and clean water. These days it is pretty much everyone.
Sure, the ritziest parts of the city have been the last and the least affected, but hit they finally have been, and even residents of Gulshan and Baridhara recognise that the day of reckoning is just around the corner.
In a sense, though, the fact that we are all finally feeling the pinch is no bad thing: it means that we are all in this together.
It is too bad that it has taken the electricity and water crisis to come to our door-step for us to notice that there is something amiss, but the silver lining of the ill-effects of environmental degradation being democratised is that just maybe we can now muster the political will to do something about it.
The good news is that we have the political will, we can fix things. It is not too late. Of course, it will take radical re-imagining of our options and priorities and creative and inventive policy prescriptions.
But, and this is Van's insight that we need to take to heart, fixing the environmental mess is the only way to create the job opportunities that the economy is in such dire need of.
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