In an earlier blog of the same title (Sustainable Development) , I have talked of how ancient civilization lived with nature and how we are now living against nature. In a very enlightening article, in The Hindu dated 25th Sep 2009, Siddharth Varadarajan says this:
"If the rise of civilization is linked to the harmonious relationship that developed between human beings and their environment in the Indus, Nile and Mesopotamian valleys, the unrestrained emission of greenhouse gases in Pittsburgh (and places like the Ruhr valley in Europe) for more than a century is what future archaeologists of climate change are likely to identify as the beginning of our decline".
There is another passage in the same article which runs like this:
"It was only in 1941 that the first pollution control ordinances in the ‘Smoky City’ were passed but their implementation had to wait for legislation that came only at the end of World War II. Old timers speak of going out in the morning and coming back with soot on their faces. Frank Lloyd Wright was asked once what could be done about Pittsburgh. “Abandon it”, the famous architect famously replied. Since then, of course, a lot has changed. After cleaning up its skies and rivers, the city became a pioneer in ‘green building’, converting disused industrial sites, or ‘brownfields’, into eco-friendly buildings with a very low carbon footprint. The changing nature of the local economy helped, as heavy manufacturing relocated to other parts of the world. The Lawrence Convention Centre is itself a former brownfield and President Barack Obama is likely to point to it as an example of what can be done to combat global warming".
US which is now telling everybody in the world to check emissions has shifted the problem to elsewhere as the undelined sentences indicate. Right, agreed that pollution should be curtailed everywhere. No meaning in India's defecnce that its per capita emission is still lowest. Becasue of the 1.1 billion population, the per capita emission is low but what is the total emission which is naturally huge and damages the environment. So, there is no escaping the rule that we have to reduce emission. But US has no moral right to say that. If needed, it should atone its past mistakes - grave ones at that - by helping other economies with technology and money to reduce emissions.