It is a measure of our alienation from Mother Earth that, once a year, we feel it necessary to set aside a special day for the planet: "World Environment Day". For most real people, living in most real communities, every day is World Environment Day. Throughout history, the rulers and the ruled, the rich and the poor, the privileged and the common folk have all lived closely in touch with the cycles and flows of nature’s seasons.
 
Life was not necessarily comfortable or easy. Indeed, it is only in this century that people throughout the world have, for the first time, had widespread access to the things that lead to a really high level of material and physical well being. Nevertheless, the problems of poverty, pollution, population and peri-pheralization are not only still with us but they continue to grow. Despite all the measures taken by governments towards the development of their economies, we appear to be losing ground. There are, on this planet today, more poor and marginalized people, more degraded places and lost species, and more manmade catastrophes each year than ever before - and the numbers are getting larger every day.
 
Thus, World Environment Day is mostly a need of those of us - the so-called professional class - who, by their actions and lifestyles cause the bulk of environmental damage, and recognize that it must be corrected. The big dams and thermal power projects, the huge steel mills and coal mines, the gigantic refineries and fertilizer plants, have displaced millions of people from their incomes and livelihoods, destroyed the forests and soils, and led to irreversible losses of genetic and other valuable resources. World Environment Day reminds us that we can continue in this direction only at our immediate peril.
 
World Environment Day also signifies the need for humanity to deal with a growing number of global issues. Saving the ozone shield that protects us from the sun’s ultra violet rays is one such issue. Avoiding sea level rises that are likely to follow the rise in global temperature that in turn, results from man made gases released into the atmosphere, is another. And no less important than all of these are the local environmental problems caused by poverty, inequity and social injustice.
 
Neither the problems of poverty nor those of pollution can be removed either by unthinkingly accepting one type of "development" as the only correct one or blindly rejecting another. In a country as diverse as India with people and resources whose characteristics span a range that is almost global, no single type of solution can be enough. Our needs will require solutions that are both big and small, public and private and combine the modern with the traditional.
 
The professional, partly because of the specialized training and partly because of varying degrees of greed and graft has, in a quite real sense, betrayed the society which has reposed its trust in him or her. While taking full advantage of the social and economic benefits of development for himself and his class of people, he has given very little thought to the needs of other classes or groups of people. This is a short-sighted view, likely at best to be self-defeating and at worst suicidal.
 
Sustainable development on a global scale can only be achieved if each society chooses development options that respond to its aspirations and needs within the opportunities and constraints of its resources. Developing countries like India have now; therefore, to evolve their development priorities in the light of their own realities, instead of continuing to use borrowed ones either from other traditions whose context is entirely different, or from former colonial masters whose aim was to exploit resources, not conserve them.
 
It is for this reason that self-reliance, the capacity to choose and design one’s own future, becomes a necessary pre-condition for sustainable development. For a society to design its development path meaningfully, it must build new kinds of institutions that deal directly and interactively with the administrative, scientific and technical issues. In this effort, it is the members of the professions, and particularly the design professions, broadly defined, that must play a leadership role.
 
If World Environment Day has any value and meaning, it is that it helps bring in focus these many strands of the alternative development strategies we now need to explore and adopt — at all levels from the national to the individual. 
 
q by Ashok Khosla