Green Hotel Concept - Local Action for Global Change

Well at least a few hotels in Malaysia are trying to do their part to save the environment - bravo to these initiatives by Frangipani Langkawi....

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Green Hotel Concept - Local Action for Global Change

The Economics of Happiness

Destroying their future?

On 16 November 2011, I received a warm invitation to attend a Rotary dinner meeting at a suburb across Melbourne city. It was a nice gesture to welcome me to town but I had to turn it down. Why? I had a book reading to attend at Cinema Nova on Lygon Street and this was a wonderful opportunity for me to listen to one of Australia’s greatest thinkers of the present: Professor Tim Flannery. It was to be a reading on his latest book, Among the Islands: Adventures in the Pacific. I had not realised then how attending the book event was later going to have some significance over the classes I was soon to attend the following week on Sustainability Law, but it turned out to be a satisfactorily fruitful evening. When I listened to Flannery recount his adventures in the Pacific Islands, I knew it was something that I’ve been longing to hear for a very long time. It was not the ordinary book reading event that one could attend back home. It was the sharing of experiences and it was more like a peek into his work and his concerns for this world. I know now that perhaps I may never be able to set foot on the islands he spoke fondly about, nor will I be able to stumble into the communities he met which may no longer be existent in the next decade. Is it possible that our mere irresponsible daily habits will soon wipe these islands out together with their inhabitants? I have no answers but yes, it seemed to me that we were heading to that direction. In fact, I could see how, back home in Malaysia, we have all been guilty of wiping out a certain amount of a good future for our next generation. And by ‘next generation’, I meant the nearest one - the one which, Insyaallah, will be around within the next 20 years. That would include my niece and nephew (Aina and Annuar), my closest friends’ children ( Tasha, Suhail, Addin, Teja, Azzan, Eloise, Joel and Terence) and the children of the people around me, whether or not I knew them personally. Our way of life has surely changed and upgraded with the betterment of our economic standing today as compared to that of our parents but along with that, we inherited very bad habits. We want to drive our own cars, we want to be able to go watch a movie or go shopping or eat to our heart’s desire or travel or live in houses bigger than is necessary to run our daily lives. We want to have gadgets just for the satisfaction of a few minutes in a year or simply wear more clothes that we need to before the next laundry chore comes up. Malaysia has now around 28.4 million in population. The world has more than 7 billion. In years to come, there will be more and more, as mortality rates have gone down, thanks to the scientific and new medical findings and efforts to keep humans alive longer by giving them access to better hospitals, doctors, medical knowledge and new discoveries. But food is depleting as the population grows. Carbon emissions are increasing, destroying the very biodiversity that is important for the survival of not just man, but other beings and creatures. Resources are running out; some have reportedly said that our own Malaysian oil supply managed by Petronas, will already be exhausted in the next 45 years. That means, it will soon be gone.

What about our food supply? Already we are importing rice and we cannot even produce enough to feed our own citizens. What about water? Reports by Sahabat Alam Malaysia show that a major factor contributing to loss of 40% of water supply is by leakage and wastage habits. Rather than address this bad habit, the Malaysian solution was to build dams; another environment-destroying venture and very much frowned upon by respectable environmental communities around the world.

This is what’s happening now: We are not facing our own demons. We don’t seem to recognise that we are actually destroying the next generation’s future and their children’s future through simple habits like wanting to have a car for each person in the household, letting the tap run while we brush our teeth, switching on lights in every room in the house when everyone else is in the lounge watching television… If you tell me that “we live in the present and who cares about the future anyway”, I would say BOLLOCKS to that. If that were so, why send your kids to school and ensuring they have a good educational background? Why take insurance covers for them? Why save money for them if you didn’t care for their future? It’s just that you thought that the universe will always be supplying enough food, water, clean air and other resources for them. Sorry, here is the reality: IT WON’T BE ENOUGH FOR THEM FROM THE WAY THE PRESENT IS GOING NOW. Your child could be so intelligent and highly educated but may not have enough to breath on, to drink, to eat – WHAT GOOD IS THAT FOR THEM? To think that they will be struggling to survive just because YOU and I are irresponsibly wasting all of these resources today. They’ll be cursing us!

But here’s the good news: It is so simple to do something about it. Just kill those bad habits - No need to have a car bigger than the neighbours. And who cares how big your house is anyway? No need to drive if it is just to pick up something 200 meters away – just walk! Buy your local produce and less imported items. Plan your grocery store and market visits – you don’t have to go to the shops everyday, do you? Carpool when you can. Borrow a book, rather than buy a new one. Even better, buy an e-book. Photocopy on both sides of the paper if you can. Double check before you print. No need to wash your car everyday, there isn’t a competition on who has cleanest car in town..The list goes on. A bit a day, from you and me, can help save the world for your children and theirs. And - if there was anything that Flannery reminded me of on that reading night in November of 2011, it was that we humans are the most intelligent but also the most self-destructive creatures on this planet.