I first went to Sri Lanka in 2001 when the Tamil separatist movement was at its height and large parts of the country were no go zones for foreign visitors. Ten years on and with the Tamils decimated, the country is shifting into tourism overdrive. At one end of the scale this means people are trading up from hyper-efficient two stroke ‘tuk-tuks’ to cars and people carriers, at the other it means the country is commissioning its first ever coal fired power station on Tuesday 22nd March.
As Eastern parts of the country (among the worst hit by the civil war and the Tsunami) reel from a massive spate of floods that have seen over 325,000 people displaced and up to 400,000 children facing a food crisis, it is clearly wrong to argue against the need for economic development.
All too often we in the West treat these countries as separate from us, as an exotic other place to be visited briefly and then left behind. The fact is that we are very connected. A high proportion of the clothes in our wardrobes have probably been made in Sri Lanka. Lots of the tea we drink is grown in the country’s lush central highlands. We are bound together through travel, through trade and most importantly through our shared environment. Carbon dioxide knows no boundaries. Climate change affects us all.
What is odd is that we do not really want to think about this stuff. In a sneak preview of a report collating UK attitudes to sustainability I was struck by the fact that people want and expect ‘brands to do the heavy lifting’ around sustainability issues. We want a badge on our brand to take the guilt away. We want our ‘easy solutions’ served up in easy to digest chunks.
The real challenge facing us as buyers of stuff and as travelers and tourists is that it can never be that easy. Just before I left Sri Lanka I saw two men and a woman being ferried out of a garment factory convulsing and unconscious after a solvents accident. The horrified look on their colleagues’ faces as they held on to them in the back of a tuk tuk has stuck with me. The people with me said these kinds of accidents are common even in ‘good’ factories. The fact is that in order to produce the stuff we need at the prices we want to pay the people behind the factories struggle to put in place the measures required to make their working environments safe.
So what can we do? On the big stuff like energy generation it’s tough to see how we can have an impact. Coal beats all in terms of short-term costs and reliability. But thinking it through maybe our role is to be pushing for faster development of clean technologies here in the west so they can be exported elsewhere more quickly. Mobile phone technology is doing this already, enabling countries with less fixed phone infrastructure to skip an expensive out-dated and environmentally costly tech-stage for something lighter, cleaner and more effective.
On the smaller stuff the answer is simpler. We need to keep pushing to make sure the stuff we buy is made ethically. We cannot assume brands are taking care of this we have to take more of the responsibility for the heavy lifting here.