ABSTRACT
What is sustainable development? Can ‘development’, as a byword for progress, ever be sustainable? Does sustainable development mean discarding tradition and embracing ‘industrialization’? As a child, I used to look forward to having tea in an unpainted and unglazed terracotta cup, the kulhar, in the morning on Indian Railways on the 36-hour journeys we took to get to our village in West Bengal from Delhi in the summer. After use, the kulhar could be thrown out of the window as biodegradable waste. Besides being hygienic and sterile in the tropical climate, it was also a considerable source of employment for the village potters. Also the tea tasted wonderful, apparently as the tea soaks into the wall of the kulhar, enhancing the taste (some posh restaurants in Delhi still serve kulhar tea if patrons ask). After the Indian Railways Minister visited the UK in the late 1980s, polystyrene cups were brought in as a ‘sign of progress’. People continued in their habit of throwing these new cups out of the window, now causing littering along the tracks and in the fields. These cups being light, travelled further in the wind than the terracotta cups. Some enterprising villagers started collecting these cups, washing them and reselling them to back to the Indian Railways or reusing them. So the next time I travelled on the train, I noticed a new instruction: ‘Crush after use’. At a press conference in London in 1992, I asked the then Indian Railways minister about this and received the usual evasive answer that only politicians can give (unbelievably he even argued that crushed polystyrene cups could be collected and used in domestic insulation or as fuel). In 2004, there was an attempt at reviving kulhar tea by Indian Railways. However, environmental critics argued that the production of 1.8 billion
kulhars annually used on Indian Railways would be polluting, owing to the use of kilns, and so this practice was not revived (Figure 5.1). However, I am happy to report that during my recent travels on Indian trains, I have been given china cups for having tea. Although this does not have the taste of kulhar tea, at least they are reusable. The story of kulhars illustrates for me the interconnections and the contradictions inherent in our attempt at building sustainable cities and development. The Bruntland Commission first coined the phrase ‘sustainable development’. It has become the most often-quoted definition of sustainable development, being described as development that ‘meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’ The very fact that by 1992, three years after the Bruntland report, there were 92 definitions of ‘sustainable development’ shows that it is a very difficult thing to describe accurately. Sustainability along with other words such as ‘diversity’ is such a ‘buzz word’ that it is being used indiscriminately. Writing in the New Statesman of 20 May 2011, Will Self says of his frustrations with the use of the word ‘sustainable’:
When we look forward to 2012 and consider what sort of strategies may be sustainable, given emergent trends, we need to bear in mind that sustainable can mean any – or all – of the following: maintainable, supportable, viable, self-supporting, justifiable, defensible, expedient, deniable, larger (as in the expression ‘sustainable profits’), smaller (as in the expression ‘sustainable rates of emissions’) and the same (as in ‘sustainable growth’). So long as we remain absolutely clear about this, I feel certain that a way of bullshitting that we’ve all come to revere will remain, in the medium term, sustainable.
