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©The Sun
(Used by permission)
by Datuk A. Bakar Jaafar
Coming of age at 26 in the autumn of 1975, I flipped through the centrefold of
the October issue of Playboy which was accessible only at the special collection
section of the Miami University library in Oxford, Ohio.
To my surprise, there it was, a male figure. He had a big chest for having
inhaled polluted air, messy hair for having been exposed to acid rain, spotty
dark skin for having been bombarded with excessive ultraviolet radiation, glassy
eyes for having stared at a glaring sky, and stubby finger tips for having
punched too many electronic pads and computer key boards.
It was an illustration of what future Man might look like, if the environment
continued to be polluted at that current level.
In the summer of the same year, the official opening of the new US Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) Office for Research and Development in Cincinnati, Ohio,
by the late President Gerald Ford, had to be cancelled as the city experienced,
quite appropriately at that very moment, a “temperature inversion”; the air
pollutant index had gone beyond a dangerous level.
Back in Malaysia, my former Factories and Machinery Department office at the MIC
headquarters off Jalan Ipoh in Kuala Lumpur had been bombarded with, since the
late sixties to mid-seventies, non-stop telegraphic messages captured by police
intelligence, containing unsolicited communist propaganda and other subversive
elements:
“Look at the capitalistic government, encouraging the setting up of factories in
the interior, polluting the waters, and affecting the masses.”
Such an unwelcome element had raised serious security concerns, though the
number of communists in the country had been kept to a minimum, or at a safe
enough level to keep the armed forces “busy”.
As a response, the Environmental Quality Act of 1974 was enacted.
Since then, a series of regulations has been introduced and enforced as much to
prevent pollution – largely through the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA)
Order of 1988 – as to control pollution from palm oil mills, rubber factories
and other industries and motor vehicles, and to manage the disposal of toxic and
hazardous wastes, the use of halon and chlorofluorocarbons, oil tankers and
other maritime sources of pollution, and to control the release of untreated or
partially treated sewage.
The control of other human or animal waste, however, has not been subjected to
the same federal law.
In the meantime, the air continues to be polluted by an exponential increase in
the number of fossil-fuel dependent vehicles on the road, as the multi-modal
public transport system has yet to be fully developed quickly and adequately
enough to cope with the increasing demand from sprawling commuters.
Furthermore, the nation continues to depend more on transport and logistics by
road and highways, than by waterways, even though it would require much less
energy, thus less pollution, to transport goods and services by water than by
land.
This is certainly in contradiction to our understanding of the Archimedes
Principle. In physics, one learns that the buoyancy of water is displaced by the
full weight of a vessel with its cargo, hence negating the pull of gravity.
Thus, no energy would be required to carry the weight in water; whatever little
energy required is only to overcome water resistance when the vessel is in
motion.
After the air we breathe, the second most important resource of all is water.
Unfortunately, though, if a brunette were to jump into the nation’s rivers, she
would most likely turn blonde as 80% of our rivers continue to be polluted more
by suspended sediments from uncontrolled land clearing or lack of control in
earthworks than by untreated or partially treated sewage and other sullage
waters.
For safe supply of drinking water, prior treatment and chlorination is a must.
However, increasing numbers of residents can still resort to bottled supplies of
spring, ground-mineral, or distilled water for drinking and cooking purposes.
But once contaminated, ground-water will take at least 30 years to recover.
Would we one day have to wrap every other tree in the country with a plastic
cover or shield in order to capture fresh, clean, and safe water for our daily
survival?
At the same time, our rivers carry tonnes of floating debris and rubbish to our
seas due to littering and indiscriminate dumping of garbage and other household
or commercial waste. Should such a trend continue, the country might have to
establish a Royal Rubbish Commission (Suruhanjaya Sampah DiRaja). That would be
unfortunate.
However, with some optimism, there could be an enviro-economic policy instrument
in place, based not on the polluters-pay principle, but more appropriately for
developing economies like Malaysia, on the indifferent consumers-pay principle
which would entail returning all unwanted goods or materials to designated
collection centres for re-use or recycling. In return, consumers would be
rewarded with levy-equivalent “credit points” to pay off a required levy.
Hopefully, in 50 years, a new cultural norm would have developed.
Every household or workplace would have recycling bins for wet and perishable
waste (for composting), dry and non-perishable waste (for recycling), and toxic
and hazardous materials (for recovery).
The recyclables would be traded in the Malaysian Commodity Exchange. The new
goods, for both consumer and industrial purposes, would contain a certain
percentage of recyclables. With highly favourable tariffs, materials, with some
calorific value which can no longer be recycled, will become another source of
fuel for electric-power generation.
Despite all the effort and policies in place, the environment will not be as
safe a place as it used to be even though Malaysians are more likely to be
killed on the road, than to die from communicable and industrial diseases.
Hopefully, more Malaysians would learn to adopt healthier diets. In short, one
would have to unlearn, to adapt, to adjust, and to survive in the future.
Datuk Ir Dr Abu Bakar Jaafar was Department of Environment Director General
from 1990-95.
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