storing green coffee beans
I recall a slogan from our mythology –Kshiti, jal, pawak, gagan, sameera, paanch tatva mil bana shareera--It implies that human body is made up of five elements of nature namely Earth, Water, Fire, Sky and Air; hence it is desirable to be in harmony with these elements.
Coexistence suggests relating not only to the landscape and climate, but also to the culture of the place. A trivial example of the life of a villager I would like to mention.
He co exists with the flora and fauna indigenous to that place. The waste in various forms released by him and the animals he keeps, is ultimately utilized for enriching the soil of the fields where he grows his crops. Remains of crop become the primary diet of his domestic animals which in turn provide him food and aid in farming & transportation, etc. while the food grains are his own staple diet.
It’s a kind of mutualistic symbiosis, a relation in which the output of one is the input for the other and vice versa.
The waste produced by the animals is also used as cooking fuel as well as a disinfectant for smoothening the walls and floors of the mud houses. The agricultural waste is further used in many forms into making mats, mattresses, containers, and so on. Thus he exists in harmony with other elements of life around him.
The essence of co-existence is togetherness. But one of the central challenges is that of individual growth and development.
Say Mr. X has a house in destination A, he produces two children Y and Z, grows them well, and they also turn out to be successful and in pursuit of their success and status they too build separate houses each for themselves at destinations say B and C.
Then, Y and Z also settle and produce children Y1 Y2 and Z1 Z2. Y1,Y2,Z1,Z2 also grow up and excel in their career and to prove their potential they too buy their own houses at four other destinations D,E,F,G…and hence the development goes on and on.
Had they all stayed together in the same house and had undertaken the same occupation, don’t you think they would have been more energy and resource savvy? Are we not exceeding our needs? Every time we initiate action to raise our living standards we enhance the burden on the natural resources, the thing which is fast depleting and cause irreplaceable loss to the nature which produced us and our environment.
Finally and perhaps most importantly, co-existence is the highest degree of self reliance.
One has to be self reliant till such extent that she/he overcomes the need to exploit others to meet her/his own needs. There is a fine line between working with someone and exploiting someone. With the passage of time we have crossed this distinction and have believed that we are the born leaders and are entitled with all rights to exploit each and everything that falls on our way.
What we call human development aims at achieving higher and higher standards of self-reliance and in our attempt to achieve that we are becoming more and more dependent—dependent on more energy, more resources -- denying the existence to others.
A friend, a mentor and a core colleague called me this evening. He had read a report in the morning’s papers of a researcher rediscovering and mapping some of the species in the land that Henry David Thoreau inhabited in those immortal times he wrote Of Walden Pond and those other works that have since then become guiding lights for a century of thinking on the environment.
The first thought came to me even as this colleague spoke to me about is that David Thoreau has become so irrelevant to our times. However radical that thought may be, you can’t refute the fact that the world has now redefined itself so far beyond recognition from the early 20th century that a Thoreau or an Aldo Leopold or many such leaders and pioneers of thought on environmentalism lived and wrote of a world to be.
They were not wrong in aspiring for a world that would remain sane and not destroy as much as they saw as damage in their times. Only, things are far worse today than their worst fears. What would perhaps make sense for us in our current times is that that world has changed so much, in a sense, for the good, that the sheer necessity for changing the way we abuse our planet has led to many different innovations for the good. So much so, that we don’t have to worry as much in our current times about the purer forms of environmentalism that protect sanctuaries and national parks, but work more toward homing in on solutions that will offer reduced dependence on external municipal or state resources for energy, water, waste water and waste. A whole new set of technologies, protocols and practices in these areas is what will drive the future before us, in the urban context. For this is where the challenge will lie in the decades ahead.
So why would this be? It takes no stretch of imagination for us to see that this sharp and decisive turn toward urbanization of the kind that we have seen in the last decade in the world, with the historic landmark of the urban population for the first time having exceeded the rural number this year, shows that the world, into the next hundred years, will be governed by decisions and destinies that two per cent of the world’s land mass will shape for us all.
A startling statistic that bears repetition is that this 2 per cent of the world’s landmass produces nearly two-thirds of the current GDP, has 55 pc of the world’s population living in it, and consuming 75 per cent of the world’s natural resources that come from the eco-systems that the other 98 per cent of the world’s land mass represents.
What does this mean and how will the world respond to this challenge? However impractical it may sound, the contour of the future tells us that the world will adapt the best of a sustainable, pre-industrial era, and that of the market-led world’s advantages. What it shows, therefore, as a trend into the future, is a clear turn to a point where these ecosystems beyond the urbanized regions will soon see a sharp reduction in the harm and damage that this 98 per cent of the lands are suffering today.
Business and Local Governments will quickly see that what are today nascent notions of, say, urban agriculture; treatment of all city waste to a point where we don’t just reuse them as a socially responsible thing to do, but as an economic imperative; producing power at levels were renewable energy either from the sun or the waste of cities becomes an economic reality; ‘growing your own water’ becomes a necessity where dependence on fresh water is reduced by nearly 70 per cent, and therefore growth of these urban nodes is made more possible….
When you have such inclusive, self-sustaining systems acquired by these urban pockets of the world, the city’s need to rely on the vast outlying ecosystems of forests and sanctuaries and the wealth of natural resources residing there will fall steadily.
Some examples of such sustainable growth are : top soil-free building blocks; increased use of lime and not limestone-based cement; non-forest timber or certified plantation timber; CFC- and HCFC-free air-conditioning systems that are non-ozone-depleting; energy-efficient building systems for hotels and hospitals, and so on.
What does all this mean in the context of naturalism or environmentalism that the Americas articulated a hundred years ago? What we will see is that the case for protection of these ecosystems needn’t quite be made with the same earnest that the early 20th century did, because of the sustainable processes that our urban nodes would have put into place pretty firmly over the next thirty years.
Remember, that there are indeed no precedents from the past for this future that is to be upon us soon, if it is not already upon us now. But today’s trends clearly presage such a future.
Naturalism will quickly be replaced by processes that will ensure that these systems continue to exist the way they have for long aeons of times, while they get monetized such that the urban world knows the significance and recognizes it in the marketplace with financial attributes provided for such carbon sequestration that these vegetated systems