Conservation concerns Simple living

Governments in general and the incumbent Government of the country at the Centre in particular are marked with the noble intention of working for the country’s progress and welfare of its citizens. The related plans and programmes, consistent with the set of policies appropriate to specific sectors of the economy such as agriculture, industry, education, health, revenue for funding public causes and so on, stated unequivocally in impressive narratives invariably leave a yawning gap between the intended goals and actually achieved at the end of the day, prompting the policy-makers to seek the expression work in progress and continue in the unending business of administration. That kind of a feeling of comfort in the face of unfinished tasks by the Government of the day, unarguably, leaves most citizens in a state of utter discomfort, euphemism for misery. The onus is on the individual to minimise that undesirable predicament of which the age-old prescription of the land’s seers and social reformers is to adhere to simple living, more easily said than complied with.

The advisory of simple living attributed to the luminaries and society’s mentors of the land who lived during the past many centuries and their counterparts in our times have suffered harsh comments in the circles of the land’s intellectuals, whom many consider as pervert.

Having moved away from ways of living that marked consumption of related resources by individuals in quantities and rates far less than their current consumption to ways of life marked by unsustainable exploitative technologies, prompted a renowned economist more than 60 years ago to remark that the greed-driven ways of life by the masses couldn’t last any further. Piped supply of water to urbanites, chopping giant trees for widening roads, emptying riverbeds of their sand to meet the unprecedented demand by builders of multi-storeyed structures, use of chemical fertilisers and toxic pesticides on crops for raising yields from the farm lands thus ruining soil quality, emission from automobiles congesting atmosphere, rendering air unfit for breathing, not to forget plastic proliferation, are major examples of the fallout of giving up simple living en masse.

Unless humanity at large decides to adopt simple living and slow pace of life, conservation of resources that support life of humans as well as flora and fauna is sure to be only talked about, that too not for a short time ahead.