“Only when the last tree has died, and the last river has been poisoned, and the last fish has been caught, will we realize that we cannot eat money.” –
American Indian proverb
Sustainability is a long term human well-being on earth, in harmony with nature. Sustainable development means sustainable economic growth, meeting the diverse needs of all people, improving their quality of life while safeguarding the earth’s life-supporting ecosystem. This was adopted as developmental model by the international community in 20th century. Unfortunately sustainable development has been hijacked and twisted to suit government and corporate that really wants to continue with their business as usual. Since the concept involves environmental limits, it has been stretched from conservation management to economic development. There is no such thing to be sustained when we continue to use non-renewable resources. It has become easier to trade-off short term economic/social gains against long-term environmental effects.
Jammu & Kashmir has a rich geographical diversity covering complex mountain chains complemented by innumerable rivers, lakes, springs and rich biodiverse wetlands. Thus it has a great potential for tourism. Though our economy largely depends on agriculture and horticulture, tourism is considered as the backbone of the economy as it generates large scale employment opportunities. In order to promote tourism and boost our economy further, eco-tourism- conceived as environment friendly practice, is slowly emerging as a tool for the sustainable development. We are identifying new unexplored tourist destinations like Bungus, Lolab and Gurez valleys and discovering new areas in our remote forest lands. We held the view that these far off beautiful mountainous regions with meadows and snow clad tops can be converted into beautiful tourist destinations for the economic development of the people living in these areas. However such novel ideas can never be conceived without environmental and ecological problems.
Over the past few decades, we have destroyed our forests, rivers, lakes springs, wetlands and other water bodies beyond repairs. The rise in man-animal conflicts particularly in the rural areas has caused extensive damage to life and property. We see the daily news headlines of bear, leopard, wolves, monkeys attacking and severely injuring children, women and big guys. The people are apprehensive about their safety, especially that of children. The monkeys are causing extensive damage to the crops, vegetables, apple orchids, and kitchen gardens. They are wreaking havoc by breaking into the homes rummaging stuff and stealing food. Many farmers are not sowing crops in their land. This has resulted a huge economic loss to them. Why this is happening? The simple reason is that our forests have been depleted and it is no longer a habitat or safe haven for wild life. The growth of human settlements around forest neighborhood leading to their disturbance and shrinking habitat, have added to the problems. So it is not a surprise that in search of food items these animals come down to the plains. The administration and the wildlife department have failed to curb this menace.
We have seen SROs, PILs and other laws banning/allowing the manufacture, supply, sale and use of polythene. Even when the High Court has directed the Govt to devise a mechanism to deal with the polythene menace at the entry points to J&K, the polythene continues being widely sold and used by the traders everywhere. We started anti-polythene drive, we did it again and we will start it again after a decade because we don’t mean a real business. The surge in the population growth and its concentration at one place, the large scale construction works, bad urban planning has alarmingly shrunk our available land space and decreased green areas. There has been an alarming increase in the number of vehicles in Kashmir during the last three decades which are adding billions of tons of CO2 to the atmosphere every day. Where does it go? They have the property to absorb heat. With enormous traffic congestion, jams, heaps of refuse on road sites, the smoke and the dusty roads, the quality of air is fast deteriorating.
We have a tendency to pollute our atmosphere and exploit things in every possible measure. Although we keep our homes spotless, when we go out we do not think twice before littering. It is for sure that under the banner of promoting tourism we will damage and pollute these deep and silent forest areas and destroy our environment further. The worst will be, just in few years time we will be facing drinking water problems on large scale. I am quite sure about that. We can’t afford to ruin our environment and ecology in the name of such tourism. It will cause more problems than benefits for us in the long run. So I believe that we must not highlight and expose such deep unexplored areas for tourism. For the time being we cannot envision a tourism which is people-centered, accountable and sustainable. Let these silent areas remain as they are for sure they will be used by our next generation in a better way. They are indispensible for keeping the glaciers calm and equally important for the dissipation of heat our atmosphere.
Moving towards the goal of sustainability requires fundamental changes in our attitude and behavior and the progress in this direction depends on education and public awareness. The most important thing for all of us is that if we don’t protect and preserve our environment particularly the forests and the water bodies, we will be destroying not only our future but the future of our posterity. Our economy may grow temporarily but in the long run we can’t offset the environmental boomerang. Our children will curse us for having left them with so many problems for their survival. Protecting the environment makes a good economic sense as long as we look at issues on long-term basis and not just from selfish perspective. It becomes our moral responsibility to leave this place in better shape for the future generations than we found it. The best charity would be to repair the past damages and refrain from disturbing the present.