Lessons from the tsunami. By Vandana Shiva

Gaia, goddess of earth, could not have picked a more appropriate time and place to send us a message of her hidden powers. The message is that we are Indians and Indonesians, Sri Lankans and Swedes, Thais and Maldivian only secondarily; we are first and foremost citizens and children of the earth sharing a common fate of a shared disaster and a common desire to help and heal.

The Christmas-New Year holidays bring the entire world to Asia's beaches. The earthquake-induced tsunami on December 26 in the Indian Ocean became a global tragedy because it affected not just the Asians but visitors from across the world, including Swedes and other Western tourists, who had come to holiday on Asia's sunny beaches.

While the immediate tragedy faced by millions must be our first response, there are long-term lessons the tsunami brings to us. We need to listen to Gaia.

The first lesson is about development in coastal regions. Respect for fragility and vulnerability of coastal ecosystems has been sacrificed for hotels and holiday resorts, shrimp farms and refineries. Mangroves and coral reefs have been relentlessly destroyed, taking away the protective barriers to storms, cyclones, hurricanes and tsunamis.

When we carried out a study of the Orissa cyclone that killed 30,000 people in 1999, we found that the destruction was much more severe where the mangroves had been cut down for shrimp farms and an oil refinery. The people's movement against industrial shrimp farming led to a Supreme Court of India order to shut down the farms within 500 meters of the coastal line in accordance with the Coastal Regulation Zone Notification.

The order of the Hon. Justice Kuldip Singh and Saghir Ahmed cited the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI) finding that “the damage caused to ecology and economics by the aquaculture farming is higher than the earnings from the sale of coastal aquaculture produce. That may be the reason for the European and American countries not permitting their seacoasts to be exploited for shrimp culture farming. The UN report shows that 80 percent of the farm-cultured shrimp come from the developing countries of Asia.”
However, instead of obeying the order, the shrimp industry tried to undo the ecological laws for protection of coastal zones by influencing government to exempt the shrimp industry from environmental laws. This subversion of environmental laws to protect coastal zones by the shrimp industry has definitely had a role in increasing the destruction caused by the tsunami.

Every acre of the shrimp farm has an ecological footprint of 100 acres in terms of destruction of mangroves and land and sea destroyed by pollution. Every dollar generated by exports of shrimps leaves behind $10 of ecological and economic destruction at the local level.

Nagapattinam, the zone hardest hit by the tsunami, was also the worst affected by industrial shrimp farms. The indigenous tribes of Andaman and Nicobar, the Onges, the Jarawas, the Sentinelese, the Shompen, who live with a light ecological footprint, had the lowest casualties even though in the Indian subcontinent they were closest to the epicenter of the earthquake.

The government of Kerala, observing that the Tsunami left less destruction in regions protected by mangroves than barren and exposed beaches, has started a 8.5 million dollar project for insulating Kerala's coasts against tidal surges with mangroves.

Hopefully governments will learn a lesson that the earth has tried to give: “Development” that ignores ecological limits and the environmental imperative can only lead to unimaginable destruction.

The second lesson that the tsunami teaches us is that a world organized around markets and profits, forgetting nature and people, is ill equipped to deal with such disasters. Though we fool ourselves into believing that we live in an “information age” and in “knowledge economies,” the knowledge of the 8.9 Richter earthquake could not be communicated by the U.S. Geological Survey to the countries of the Indian Ocean in time to take action to save lives.

While the stock markets of the world react instantaneously to signals, and while the entire outsourcing economy of information technologies is based on instantaneous communication, it has taken the world days to count how many died and how many have become homeless. Each day the number rises; beginning with 20,000 on December 26, it reached 150,000 by January 1.

The tsunami tells us we do not live in an information age based on “connectivity” but in an age of ignorance, exclusion and disconnect. The IT revolution has evolved to serve markets, but it has bypassed the needs of people. Animals and indigenous communities had the intelligence to anticipate the tsunami and protect themselves. The information technology-embedded 21st-century cultures lacked the Gaian intelligence to connect to the earthquake and tsunami in time to protect themselves. We need to revisit our dominant concepts of intelligence and information and take lessons from Gaia about living intelligently on the planet.

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Vandana Shiva is an international campaigner for women and the environment. She received the Right Livelihood Award (Alternative Nobel Prize) in 1993.