Monday, June 13, 2011

China has more dam plans; more damage to the ecology


Here is this news about China planning to divert the Brahmaputra river to tackle its chronic water shortages, and the Facebook post by the Himalayan International Institute of India about maintaining nature's balance that I came across.
What this news shows is each nation trying to address its on self-created problems in isolation: without realizing that the world is a connected whole.
Whether it is India trying to dam up the rivers flowing to Pakistan or China trying to build dams on the Brahmaputra and other rivers, governments tend to forget that any so-called damage to downstream countries is not going to be restricted to those countries and populations.
Similarly, India's so-called experts have time and again come up with projects to link rivers in the north of the country to those in the south.
What these experts and short-sighted politicians don't understand is that our unsustainable development paradigms cannot be rectified and propped up with more damage to the ecology. They try to whitewash any ecological concerns with references to projected short-term gains.
The planet is being ravaged by human greed. It is time to look for holistic solutions to these problems rather than apply 19th and 20th century models of development and norms of human development.
The Himalayan International Institute's post shows puts it correctly: serving nature is serving the whole of creation; all development that hurts nature is not development. The faster we learn this lesson, the better.

No comments: