Carbon Footprints and Sustainability

“Sustainability is no longer about doing less harm. It is about doing more good.”

Be it Gartner’s Hype Cycle or human perception, Sustainability is at its all-time high. Every individual is speaking the language of Sustainability these days. Ranging from one’s home to industries and expanding towards the whole community, Sustainability plays an integral role.

We all know what a carbon footprint is and how with every passing second, we are responsible for increasing the same. But, with increasing awareness people understand that it’s time to do more good than doing less harm.

Individuals have started to contribute towards combating footprints and attaining sustainability via small efforts including replacing plastic pens with fountain pens, designing of bio toilets, and using solar cookers.

Community is made of individuals and when they join hands, big changes take place. To elucidate, Jamshedpur has come up with plastic roads made of recycled waste; Africa is using Bottle Bricks to make their homes which are ten times stronger than normal bricks; America practices sustainable schools.

But do you think this is enough?

Do you think that Sustainability is all about Reduce, Reuse and Recycle?

Sustainability comes when we not only find an alternative to a problem but a permanent solution.

There is one international practice where we don’t have to eliminate the carbon footprint rather, effectively utilize the same. There are two major ways it has been implemented in the current scenario:

• Emission Trading

In countries where there is negligible carbon footprint because of the lack of resources for their daily activities like running factories, there is a mandate that the emissions can be traded from high emission countries so that there is economies of scale obtained and both the parties are at the winning end. The receiving country will now be having resources to run their business in an efficient way and the provider country is maintaining its level of emissions, thus, contributing to the well-being of the society.

• Reviving the Lost Art Forms and Traditions

The concept of Urban Planning is not new but long forgotten and reviving this art will save the world to a great extent. It is an art of contemplating on the relation between sea and land to design an urban ecology and an infrastructure of urban settlement. This will bring back the ways in which earlier civilizations were setup where there were no resource wastage or carbon footprint generation. Also, the traditional weaving, craftsman ship and Kalakari Art forms is long lost and has been replaced by mechanic textile furnishing, and this must be revived back. In addition, there is also one practice followed in Thailand which we believe is a fantastic way of reviving the lost essence of sustainability and that is Seed Saving. They believe in procuring the source rather than the production. Thus, they save seeds and keep them preserved so that their future generations can use them and also feel the presence of what these people have already lived in their lifetime.

To end this beautiful concept here, there are two recommendations which we personally want to make. One is the creation of Art Forms from the waste, which will be one of the ways of Waste Management. This will not only create a gallery of Arts for our future generations but also use today’s waste in a better manner. And, the second is achieving Sustainability in our Cultures and History. That is, saving our cultures and histories so that they also don’t get extinct like our natural resources.