Sustainability

My one friend prophesied that I would come home with from Ghana with a new found awareness of how unsustainable Canada is. Well, I have come home and I have to say that I have mixed feelings. Let me illustrate:

Ghanaians do not treat their environment very well. People tend to throw their trash anywhere and they almost seem to not feel guilty about it. You will often see informal garbage dumps created on the most sensitive land such as the banks of streams or in forests. There is a considerable amount of deforestation as natural habitat is converted to farmland. Some will even burn the bush to flush out wild game. A variety of older vehicles can be found on the road that produces more emissions then newer models.

Where Ghanaians do achieve some sense of sustainability (and probably allows 20 million people to survive in a country less than the size of Alberta) is in their limited use of resources. Here are a few points

• The clothes they buy are often second hand from some developed country.
• To get around, people will usually share a private vehicle to their destination and in turn use less fuel per person.
• People simple use less electricity because of the limited supply of in the country.
• It is actually cost effective to fix broken items rather than throwing them out because labour is so cheap. To illustrate, when my electric kettle died I was thinking that maybe I should go and buy a new $20 item. However, I took a chance and went to see if I could get it fixed at the local electric store. I left it there and returned to find that it was fixed for a total fee of $1.
• They use very little water for their domestic duties. For example, I estimate that I used approximately 60 litres of water a day while in Ghana (that is 30 litres for a bucket shower and washing, 24 litres flushing a toilet twice, 3 litres for drinking, and 3 litres thrown in for miscellaneous such as laundry). Now in Canada we use 335 litres per day!
• They are continually fixing their old vehicles rather than buying new ones.
• For those who live in villages, a lot of their building material comes from the land they live upon; wood for cooking and building homes, clay for walls, thatch for roofs, water from a well or creek, food from their farm and grazing animals.
• Pop and beer bottles are expected to be returned to the vendor.
• There is very little industrialisation

So, sure, Ghanaians are overall more sustainable then we are, even will considering how they use their land. The question one should ask though is, “for how long?” I say this because most of the Ghanaians I met want the lifestyle of the west. They want to buy fancy cell phones, new cars, new clothes, computers, digital cameras, etc. They want power to be available everyday. They want paved roads, clean water, schools, and health care. They want their country to be “modern”. And if you read such books as The End of Poverty: How We Can Make it Happen in Our Lifetime this may actually be achievable.

Great right? Well, one has to consider that if everyone lived like we did in Canada, we would need a few more planet Earths. We drive in our individual cars, we buy products with layers of packaging, our power is produced by the likes of coal, natural gas and nuclear energy, we are continual expanding our communities and destroying habitat, etc, etc. I just do not think that there are enough resources to sustain a western lifestyle for the entire world.

So what do we say to Ghana? “Sorry mate but you will have to live in the Stone Age; there are just not enough resources to go around”. I think that would be rather selfish, to say the least. However, some countries, China and the US in particular, are working to make that happen by insuring that the world’s resources all flow to them.

Alternatively, I personally believe that the civilisations of this world are going to have to find a means to “meet in the middle” if everyone is going to be able to enjoy a healthy and fruitful life with out completely destroying the planet. What I mean is that while developing countries become more modern, and produce more pollution in the process, developed countries such as Canada are going to have to cut down on the amount of resources they use. Hopefully, this will lead to a point where all the countries of the world achieve a balanced level of both development and sustainability.

How will this happen in Canada? Well, I do not think that we have to go back to living on the family farm. Nevertheless, we may have to make some significant changes in our lifestyle by simple learning how to live with less. This means less electricity, less water, less fuel, and less junk. This may be achieved through technology advances, adopting more sustainable modes of transportation and energy production, by building sustainable communities, etc. However, it may entail just buying fewer things (wild idea I know).

My point in all this is that the development of a country also has to be considered in the context of sustainability. And not only the sustainability of one particular country but the entire world. We are all in this together.