Archive for the ‘Environment’

Climate Change, Food Security & Virtual Water an Asymmetric Threat to Sri Lanka

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Image courtesy Mercy Corps Today, in an integrated and inter-dependent world, Sri Lanka does not have the leverage to reverse climate change but mitigate and adapt. Climate change is caused mostly by human actions which began with the industrialised West and followed suit by emerging economies exacerbating this. Some consider climate change to be a negative result of human efforts for development whilst others consider it as irresponsible efforts for profit making at the cost of the planet. Wherever the argument lies, Climate Change is real and an effective response is very urgent. Human development is a necessity irrespective of one’s bearing towards the West or East.  The economic & development planners and the political leadership should seriously consider the sustainability of the society, region, country and then the world to achieve development that satisfies human needs without tipping the ecological balance that supports us. Overriding market capitalism that drives on the seats of global power today is an obstacle…

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Agricultural Madness

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(Photo credit: Claude Dupuis, IDRC-CRDI) The current  ‘development’ madness that affects agriculture also prevails over agricultural research and does not bode well for this nation.  It begins with the fact that, young agricultural scientists have to find support for the projects that will ensure their career from the only available source, the ‘chemical agriculture’ companies. Thus they are forced to carve out their futures supporting the only system that they have been trained in. In this way agricultural science in Sri Lanka has largely ignored the knowledge and wisdom that had guided our agricultural traditions for the last three thousand years or more.  Although politicians and bureaucrats, in search of money or foreign jobs, have been insensitive to this destructive process, farmers have regularly questioned this approach to agriculture: For instance, in 1998 a meeting of farmers convened by the CGIAR (Consultative Group in Agricultural Research) to ascertain the farmers viewpoint of agricultural development, submitted the following statement. “We, the farmers…

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Packets of White Powder

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Photo courtesy Arsenic and toxins found in baby rice food – what you need to know Suddenly, scores of packets of white powder began appearing in the homes of many farmers we were working with. They were organic farmers, who respected their field and soil. They would never poison their farm knowingly.  When questioned, they made a wry face and declared that ‘the stuff was forced upon them’ as a part of some government program.  Some resorted to putting it onto their home gardens to get rid of it.  This means that, the poisoning of our soils is extending from the agricultural field to the very home garden and the farmer’s enslavement to the chemical salesmen becomes further confirmed. Addiction is an easy ploy for enslavement. In a port city in France, goes a story; there used to live some of the most unscrupulous criminals. They were the drug traffickers who deal in the cruel drug heroin.  Heroin is addictive, it…

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Climate Change

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Image from Climate Change Adaptation Sri Lanka While awaiting to hear of the brilliant contributions that Sri Lanka has made to the just concluded United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), conference in Durban, the view from Durban is somewhat clouded.  The global polluters are demonstrating extreme disdain of accepting any responsibility they have to the rest of humanity who share a common atmosphere with them.  The unilateral move by Canada in withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol, a move endorsed by the fossil energy industry, demonstrates how much public interest has been eroded from political enclaves. The UNFCC itself is a lame duck, it is still unable to recognize or identify the difference in value of carbon originating from biotic sources and fossil sources. This fact is commonsense; that while a diamond, petroleum, a lump of coal, piece of wood or piece of fruit is comprised of carbon, they are not the same, and they have different values.  So in…

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Old Dutch Hospital in Colombo: Now open to the public

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Image from The Seventeenth Century Dutch Hospital in Colombo by C.G. Uragoda and K.D. Paranavitana Being Poya with nothing much else to do, we strolled over to the newly restored and opened Old Dutch Hospital, which Colombo’s oldest building and now a shopping and dining ‘precinct’. A plaque at the entrance notes that restoration work was done by the Army and that the project was basically the brainchild of the Secretary of Defense Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who as head of the Ministry of Defence also directly oversees the Urban Development Authority (UDA), responsible for a lot of the beautification of Colombo. This at times involves the bizarre and wanton destruction of the environment. The Dutch Hospital restoration, however, is just beautiful. We don’t know when the Hospital premises were last open to and seen by the public, but it was only when restoration work began a few months ago (the area the Old Dutch Hospital is located in was heavily fortified…

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Restoring Shelter

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The World Meteorological Organization, part of the United Nations, have just stated that the warmest 13 years of average global temperatures have all occurred in the 15 years since 1997. That has contributed to extreme weather conditions that increase the intensity of droughts and heavy precipitation across the world, it said. “Our science is solid and it proves unequivocally that the world is warming and that this warming is due to human activities,” WMO Deputy Secretary-General Jerry Lengoasa told reporters in Durban. This view, articulated by a responsible organization should be recognized and acted upon by society at all levels. There are also the disturbing data sets that clearly show a co-relation between temperature and concentrations of greenhouse gasses. While it is an undeniable fact that global temperature and atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are interrelated. The question is when was it initiated? Once a change is initiated, that there exists obvious feedback mechanisms that keeps driving the process, until…

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Cutting down trees to make Colombo beautiful?

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Trees that have stood for decades are being wantonly cut down in Colombo today. Being a Poya Day, there’s not much of people and traffic in Colombo, which make the task of those around Independence Avenue easy. We received a flurry of SMS messages mid-day from people who at first didn’t believe what they were seeing. The Weeping Willows down Independence Avenue, which have been around since we are told the 1970′s, are being cut down today. View Independence Avenue in a larger map Currently they are cutting down the trees only on one side of the road, the side the National Library and Documentation Services Board is on. Groundviews spoke to the workers cutting down the trees under the supervision of Army personnel, who were present driving tractors bearing Army insignia and giving instructions on how to cut the trees down. The workers laughed when we noted that what they were doing was a joke and defacing Colombo, noting…

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Can a ‘Sinhala patriot’ explain pesticides, arsenic and fertiliser?

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Photo courtesy Arsenic and toxins found in baby rice food – what you need to know There is a new Sinhala nationalist political trend that now throws out a completely novel discourse, which ties up mythical gods as superior to “Jewish Christian Western Science” and claims, the entire Sri Lankan agriculture needs revamping. The Christian Jewish based MNCs have been providing us pesticides and fertiliser with “Arsenic”, these patriots claim. This has created many conflicts within this regime, that prompted the Agrarian Services Minister Chandrasena to publicly say and ask, “We were told to promote rice over bread and now they say rice has Arsenic. What do they want us to eat ? Grass?” And the same minister told the parliament on 06 July, the government has found the soil now has toxic contents in excess and would therefore control chemical fertiliser use by pruning its subsidy. The argument against the use of pesticides and chemical fertiliser goes thus. All…

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Future of Farming in Sri Lanka

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Original photo from asianews.it Farming in a sustainable, productive manner has been a hallmark of every human tradition that has endured history. There are many traditional farms existent today that have been productive for hundreds of years. Agrarian societies with long histories, posses the credibility of having sustained themselves successfully under the rigor of survival in a natural world. Having no access to fossil fuel driven technologies, they relied on renewable agriculture based upon energy sources internal to that society or region.  Expansion of farming was constrained by the environment and ecosystem of each area. The advent of fossil fuel changed all this.  The gasoline to power tractors, the biocides and fertilizer salts produced by fossil oil enabled agricultural productivity to transcend environmental constraints. It was not that movement to fossil fuel went unquestioned, when a display of the new ‘ agricultural tractor’ was done in Sri Lanka around 1933. A race was set up between the traditional buffalo drawn…

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Right to Food: Ecologically based agriculture

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Gannoruwa Agriculture Park. Photo credit Chaminda Wijesekara Background: “We” said the villager holding his dying child in that unspeakable agony only parents in such situations know, “don’t want the right to vote, just the right to live”.  In that statement lies the truth that seems to elude most development work.  There is a deeper human need than democracy or the right to vote, the right to life.  The more we look to science to validate modern society, the more evident becomes the conclusion that we humans share the same evolutionary heritage as all other life on this planet.  This evolutionary heritage, one of evolving to sustain genetic information through environments that vary in time, tells us that adaptation can only be made within finite limits.  All living things stressed beyond these limits die.  It is as simple as that.  Heat or cool a bacterium, algae or elephant beyond a certain threshold and they die.  The same holds true for all…

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Elephant Walk revisited: Mixing Tea, Jumbos and Monsoons

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[Editors note: For an in-depth interview on Sri Lanka's human-elephant conflict, see Humans vs. elephants: Sri Lanka’s tragic on-going conflict] If those hardy Englishmen and Scotsmen who ran large tea plantations in Ceylon were far removed from the local people and realities, western movie makers were much more so. They could just as well have come from another planet to catch glimpses of an exotic island. But feature film makers everywhere enjoy the artistic license to create whole new worlds, and we willingly suspend our disbelief when watching their creations. Elephant Walk (103 mins, colour), released by Paramount Pictures in April 1954, may not be the most artistic or technically perfect movie from that era. Yet, more than half a century after it was shot on location in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), the film can still hold an audience captivated with a sense of drama and intrigue. Elephant Walk was directed by William Dieterle, and based on the 1948 novel with…

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  • 13 May, 2011
  • 4 Comments
  • Colombo,
    Environment

Humans vs. elephants: Sri Lanka’s tragic on-going conflict

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The Daily Mirror a few days ago noted that in a bid to ease the growing human-elephant conflict in the country, the Wildlife Conservation Department had undertaken moves to restrict the habitat of rogue elephants to a 2500 acre jungle area in Veheragala, Lunugamvehera and Horawapathana. Quoting the Wildlife Conservation Department’s Director General, Chandrawansa Pathiraja, the paper noted that rogue elephants from other areas would be trans-located to these locations, which will be bordered with electric fencing. Similar efforts, however, in the past have failed. Jayantha Jayewardene is the Managing Trustee of the Biodiversity and Elephant Conservation Trust shared some thoughts on the human-elephant conflict in Sri Lanka on a televised interviewed. We begin our conversation by looking at precisely why there is a human-elephant conflict in Sri Lanka, looking at the issues over land use (framing) and demarcation (fencing and other means). Giving a detailed explanation of the nature and extent of the home range and the size of…

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In conversation with Iranganie Serasinghe: Environmentalist and cinematic icon

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Iranganie Serasinghe needs no introduction to many Sri Lankans. For decades she has graced stage, cinema and televisions with characters indelibly etched in memory. I grew up with Iranganie playing Sudu Hamine in Yashorawaya as staple viewing, as much as her role in Doo Daruwo which over 5 years was an epic narrative played out on our televisions every week. Iraganie is part of the old guard of actors, trained in English method acting, starting out in theatre and then branching out to cinema and television. Her entry into cinema was with Rekava, the first Sinhalese film which was fully shot in Ceylon, the first in the country to be shot outdoors and to date, the only Sri-Lankan film to be nominated for the coveted Palme d’Or at Cannes. Film-making was fundamentally different over 50 years ago, and Iranganie begins our conversation by recalling what it was like to be part of Rekava directed by the famed Lester James Peiris….

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Old Mannar Road and IDPs Access

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Photo of Mannar-Puttalam road, courtesy Panoramio Environmentalists have gone to courts demanding that the road connecting Mannar and Puttalam that runs through the Wilpattu National Park be permanently closed. The opening of the old Mannar-Puttalam Road on January 24 2010 was seen as a crucial step in supporting the Northern IDP return process, especially for Muslims displaced from Mannar district. The Southern-most division of Mannar, Musali had the largest concentration of Northern Muslims and was the only Muslim majority division prior to the expulsion in 1990. This road provides easy and low cost access from Puttalam to Musali in Southern Mannar as opposed to the other route that goes via Medawachchiya, which takes double the time (Puttalam- Medawachchiya – Marichchukadi 235km vs Puttalam – Wilpattu – Marichchukadi – 77km) and triple the cost, from Rs. 320 versus Rs. 100. Saving Rs. 220 per trip means a lot to the IDPs. For this cost, an IDP family struggling to have one…

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The Wild Elephant Census in Sri Lanka

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The proposed elephant census that is to be conducted in a few months’ time by the Department of Wildlife Conservation (DWLC) has generated a lot of interest among the public. Obviously, it is not something that happens every day, and there is much discussion and interest being generated in the press, as well as in other discussion forums. An elephant census is not a simple activity.  Many of us would perceive that an elephant census would involve a large number of people going around counting elephants physically.  Although the elephant is a large animal, sightings can be quite difficult in many areas because of forest cover. Also by nature elephants are wary of humans and will retreat into denser habitat when approached.  So, counting elephants and making a census, is a much more complex procedure. What is a Census? Understanding animal abundance, distribution and movement patterns is a very important aspect of wildlife management.  Measuring abundance of animal populations essentially…

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About Groundviews

Located at the Centre for Policy Alternatives in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Groundviews is a citizen journalism website that uses a range of genres and media to highlight critical perspectives on governance, reconciliation, human rights, the arts and literature, democracy and other issues. The site has won two international awards, including the prestigious Manthan Award South Asia in 2009. The grand jury's evaluation of the site noted, "What no media dares to report, Groundviews publicly exposes. It's a new age media for a new Sri Lanka... Free media at it's very best!"

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