Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
proved elusive (Bridger and Luloff, 1999: 380). Many local communities have signalled
their engagement by devising sustainability indicators, specifically incorporating
action-related or environmental justice issues as ways of monitoring progress in
ecological restoration and community participation, and even of managing urban
growth and regional development (Warner, 2002). For many writers and activists,
community-inspired or -led ecological restoration projects offer a 'giving back to
nature' of what human beings have unjustly and damagingly expropriated from it,
in the process enabling significant learning experiences that widen understanding of
human society, of people's relationship to nature, to consumption and to production.
Leigh notes:
It offers the average citizen insight not only on how humans impact their
immediate landscape, but on the larger biotic community as a whole, an insight
that perhaps can be viewed as more valuable than the ecological restoration
itself. The environmental crisis and its connections to pollution, overdevelopment,
population, consumption and scarcity are strikingly realized by community
volunteers when the parcel of their restored landscape is shown to be affected
by these forces.
(2005: 8)
A clean and healthy environment is essential for human health and well-being. It
is only just and is as such a human right as the many thousands of people harmed
by the 1984 disaster in Bhopal, India, know full well. About 500,000 people were
exposed to toxic chemicals following a gas leak from Union Carbide's pesticide
plant. More than 7,000 people died within a few days and 15,000 died within the
next few years. Some 120,000 people are still suffering from chronic and debilitating
illnesses for which treatment is largely ineffective and for which adequate compensa-
tion from Indian and American courts has still to be granted (Amnesty International,
2004). The existence and effectiveness of community health monitoring, research
and treatment have been due to the continuing participation and action of individuals
in partnership with charitable bodies such as the Sambhavna Trust (Dinham and
Sarangi, 2002).
The importance of social capital: beyond self-interest
In the 1960s, ecologist Garrett Hardin illustrated the finite nature of our world and
the disastrous consequences that would ensue if we all rationally pursued our own
economic self-interest in the highly resonant modern parable 'The tragedy of the
commons'. It offers a vivid picture of a pasture on which a number of herdsmen
keep as many cattle as they can. As a rational being, each person inevitably attempts
to maximize his return by adding one additional animal to his grazing herd. His
gain is obvious but his loss is not, as the negative effect of grazing one extra beast
will be shared by all the herdsmen. Rationally calculating the obvious benefits and
gains, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course to pursue is to
add another animal to the herd. And then another, and another . . . However, this
same conclusion is reached by every rational herdsman sharing the common pasture
land, and that is the basis of the tragedy. Each person is locked into a system that
compels him to increase his herd without limit in a world that is inevitably and
