perspectives: post-travel

Yes I know, this post has been a long time coming. I have been on blogging sabbatical and now I'm back. Over the past month I made a massive trip through Malaysia and IndoChina mostly on work. In Malaysia I attended the AFCSR and met a lot of eminent CSR personalities. It was all very exciting.

Vietnam and Cambodia were both a revelation. Cambodia was only 3-day break during the whole trip of networking and meeting people. So I stayed in a quaint little place in Siem Reap and visited the famous Angkor temples. The people in Cambodia are incredibly friendly and live in abject poverty. Yet for some reason, are more hopeful and optimistic than most Indians I know. I also noticed that even if they were poor, they weren't starving mostly because they grew their own vegetables and fished in the three large lakes in the town. Siem Reap is a gorgeously green little town and is under conservation in Cambodia. The country is not without problems; apart from the mentioned poverty, it also has one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world.

The point of food self-sufficiency kept striking me as something obvious that every government should be striving for. The government of every developing country is moving in the opposite direction of introducing a centralized food production system that is taking away from something basic in the lives of most people.

My next stop was Vietnam. I was in Ho Chi Minh City which is very much like Mumbai. It is so much better planned, cleaner and developing at an unprecedented rate. However, unlike in India I saw a plan in their growth and development which was forward-thinking and heartening. Vietnam, like India is an SME-based economy and also many MNCs have entered the market, awareness of sustainability issues are not that high. However, I did have the chance to speak to a few people and through them I learnt that many companies are becoming more and more aware, which is encouraging.

Overall, the trip was fruitful and insightful especially in gaining new perspective about development in other countries. More to follow on here and also on Justmeans.

Photo: Akhila Vijayaraghavan © View of Saigon with the Saigon tower.

my take on Yosemite...

Photo: Akhila Vijayaraghavan © View of the Yosemite Valley

Photography has been a great passion and I am an ardent hobby photographer. I pretty much make photographs of everything although there are moments that are truly sublime. These moments usually happen when I catch the light at the right time or am suddenly able to 'see' differently. This shift of perception is tangible and it usually happens when I'm photographing landscapes or doing macros.

Art is an accurate barometer of the socio-political and economic atmosphere . It not only reflects these events but also in some way has the ability to influence or change. All great artists know this, which is why they intuitively realize that they have a responsibility towards something bigger than themselves.

In the forum of art and environmental protection, there are countless artists who have made their contributions known. In the era of Woodstock, several musicians sprang forth with anthems that are still popular today. There are others who has made their mark by extrapolating their love of Nature in their work and for me, one of the greats in this category is Ansel Adams. His photographs of America's National Parks pushes past the black and white images and seeks to lodge itself deep inside the retina. Of all the places he photographed, he loved Yosemite the best and it's not hard to see why to anyone who has been there.

Yosemite is one of those places on Earth that seems to have rolled right off of God's hands. Its magnificence is of a scale unto its own - ethereal, sublime, majestic and yet playful. I was in Heaven with mouth-open awe the whole time I was there and couldn't stop snapping away. The beauty of such places cannot be adequately described in words, photographs or even through merely seeing but only by feeling.

Adams' is one of the people who understood this and his work not only manages to convey the silent grandeur of such places but also equally firmly suggests at conservation. The National Parks in America saw an influx of visitors through Adams' work and this still continues to hold true. This was his most important contribution to the environmental movement - to make people go and appreciate their natural surroundings. All conservation starts from the inward retreat upon confrontation of beauty and this is something that he understood very well.

There are so few places on Earth untouched by human activity and National Parks are meant to be protected habitat. Stresses felt on the rest of the world will be felt even in these places. Respect for the natural environment will go a long way to ensure that these little oases of Paradise remain protected.

Sometimes I get to places when God is ready to have somebody click the shutter - Ansel Adams

tragedy of the commons

Photo Courtesy: www.fao.org

The tragedy of the commons is a phenomenon that was first written about by Garrett Hardin in 1968. In his article published in Science he describes a dilemma in which multiple individuals acting independently and solely and rationally consulting their own self-interest will ultimately destroy a shared limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's long term interest for this to happen.

Central to Hardin's article is an example, a hypothetical and simplified situation from medieval land tenure in Europe, of herders sharing a common parcel of land (the commons), on which they are each entitled to let their cows graze. In Hardin's example, it is in each herder's interest to put the next (and succeeding) cows he acquires onto the land, even if the carrying capacity of the commons is exceeded and it is damaged for all as a result. The herder receives all of the benefits from an additional cow, while the damage to the commons is shared by the entire group. If all herders make this individually rational economic decision, the commons will be destroyed to the detriment of all.

This concept that the 'commons' is available to everyone to use and abuse without regulation is the primary stumbling block towards a sustainable future. The abuse of the commons is being seen in many environmental scenarios like destruction of land resources, deforestation, air pollution, overfishing etc. Due to the lack of ownership, there is also a lack of conscience. Increase in population only increases the pressure on the commons.

I have previously argued that the definition of sustainability itself lends itself to an anti-growth model because it assumes that we are compromising the future generations' ability to enjoy the level of comfort that we do and because our current consumption patterns means that resources will run out. It does not address the issue of employing a new business model in order to overcome the tragedy of commons.

Businesses traditionally considered pollution and other abuse to the commons as an externality - a phenomenon that occurs during the normal course of doing business. Now however, there is a stark realisation that the environment can no longer be considered an externality. In fact any business model that still operates on this precept is ultimately an anti-growth model.

Business as usual needs a total reorganization in the way it operates. The age of big businesses and the off shoots of globalization like off-shore manufacturing is part of the redundant business model which still does not negate the tragedy of commons. It only makes the problem their problem but what it fails to recognize is that ultimately it is our problem.

A model of new-age business with sustainability at its core depends on social development and a bottom-up approach to knowledge transfer and horizontal management. This is done through the involvement of the community in community projects and allocation of the commons so that it is no under common jurisdiction but individual responsibility.

The backbone of every big business should be based on social development if it is to thrive. Social development is not just a localised 'small-time' tool. It can be as big or as small as one envisions. One of the biggest dairy companies in India, Amul uses this as a philosophy. Corporate social responsibility becomes an empty sentiment if it is not fully integrated into the daily workings of the business in question.

sustainability and the 'bottom line'

The Brundtland report defines sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. 20th century economics has seen an emphasis on economic growth i.e., increases in GDP and consumption levels, which has brought us to the present situation. The concept of sustainability ushers the 21st century in a more development-orientated model i.e., keeping consumption constant over an infinite amount of time through improving the quality and efficiency of the production process across the world.

All industry ultimately depends on natural resources for their operational needs. The growth model may have improved living standards for few but at rates exceeding those of natural resource regeneration. Climate change is an effect of this model and could cost the world 1-2% of its economic output per annum; it may not seem to be a significant portion of GDP except that, most industrial economies grow at a rate of 2.5% per annum. Hence, given that this estimate is even approximately correct, climate change comes close to stopping economic activity.

The ‘bottom line’ for any company is to maintain market share, responsibility to its stakeholders and to make a profit. In terms of climate change, companies have a responsibility to be aware of public opinions in order to maintain or improve upon their market share. To ignore environmental issues or not pick up on public sympathies, companies can lose customer trust and this affects the bottom line. They may have to run a costly advertising campaign to restore consumer confidence and avoid losing market share which may have knock-on effects on share prices. A good example of this would be the Brent-Spar oil rig fiasco which cost Shell between Β£60M and Β£100M, when loss of sales were considered.

Environmental issues can work for the company to regain market-share, re-launch itself in a new sector like carbon-reducing goods and opportunities for expansion into sustainable development. An example of this would be Scottish Power which was a traditional company generating energy from coal and hydro-power. However in 2006 they were granted permission to build Europe's largest on-shore wind farm. The 322 MW/140 turbine site will cost an estimated B£300m. This is already showing an increase in their share prices and the company is slowing regaining its flagging market-share.

As with any newly developing economic sector, careful investment, studying market trends, etc., is needed. Energy is one of the biggest commodities in the world today and sustainable forms of energy have huge economic pay-offs. Suzlon is the world's largest, fully-integrated wind power company. In terms of market share, the company is the largest wind turbine manufacturer in Asia. As a relatively new company, it has proved that careful prediction of future trends and investments can reap rich rewards within the sustainable energy sector.

The main challenges associated with sustainable development are the fundamental reforms needed to make this a wide-spread method of production. From factory equipment upgrades to a radical change of global production standards, the 21st century faces heavy costs and adaptation time lags to forge sustainable economies. Globalization, indeed, in itself proposes the birth of eco-trade. It is perhaps one of the earlier manifestations of this change.

Another challenge is the persistent uncertainty surrounding global ecosystems. These are complex and interactive to a degree that we are only just starting to understand. Environmental economics, at its present embryonic stage, has only glimpsed at the causal chains that brings environmental effect about. Investing in research and development for betterment of the technologies available should be of prime importance for big companies and developed governments world wide. Careful investment in existing technologies and promotion of existing sustainable technologies should be encouraged as well.

Finally, conceptual changes in biological and economic evaluation standards for environmental effects have to be incurred. Unless we find new methods of measuring pollution, we cannot impose equivalent controlling measures. Since aspects of pollution show huge variability in its types and forms, in varying densities between different places even within the same country, an overall expansion of current data-gathering models is needed. This can be achieved by honing environmental sciences to produce a larger and more holistic view of the global ecosystem, while integrating the economic science in the appraisal of such complex dynamics.