May 15 - 31 Issue

Ministering to a sick planet...

In the past 10 years, 50 per cent of the butterfly population has been eradicated. I did not know this... did you? It was a statistic that affected me deeply.

As a child, I loved watching butterflies. And whether they were tiny yellow ones with wings transparent enough to let the sunlight through, or big black and gold ones with intricate polka dots, their allure often kept me gazing at them, instead of into the book that I had taken into the garden to read.

Butterflies do not feature actively in our daily lives; we can live for years without sighting one and not miss the sight. It’s a bit like sighting a rainbow... you don’t miss it till you see it, then you stop to marvel at its perfection. Yet the tiny, beautiful insects do play a vital role in Nature, as any school child can tell us.

Thanks to butterflies, a thousand varieties of plants live and multiply. And provide us with beauty and means of sustenance.

Now for another shocker: In the past 10 years, which means in our lifetime, yours and mine, half the wetlands of the globe have vanished. Look around you and you will see how. Every little pond, tank or lake in your area must have in your time been covered... by silt, then mud and then by concrete, to make way for people like us, at the cost of thousands of fish and other aquatic creatures.

While diminishing wetlands means less rain and less water all around, it also means we are robbing ourselves of one of life’s most vital resources.

Yet it was 10 years ago, at Rio de Janeiro, that environmentalists from across the globe met, to try to find ways to save the Earth from man.

Ten years later, in an effort to begin to make things work, 60 women, 20 of them ministers holding the environment portfolio in their respective countries, met on International Women’s Day in Finland.

Their agenda: To bring a gender perspective to sustainable, environment-friendly development.

In rough terms, it translates into ensuring that women are involved in the process of saving the world they live in. In ensuring that the water they drink is safe, is available; that forests can give them produce, that there are trees for fruit and shade, and that the land stays fertile for crops.

A tall order? Not really, considering, that despite all the hot air that emanates from global conferences, it is the woman who has to tend the home and cope with the diminishing resources offered by a plundered planet. It is she who will think of the tomorrows without the amenities she has been used to, and worry that her children will never see a butterfly or play under the shade of a leafy tree.

Women thanks to practice at holding their purse strings firm, at working around situations, at being the agents of real change would have to be motivated and included in any agenda for real environmental preservation. And in the multi-point agenda that the Meet worked out, methods of involving women were stated.

The agenda will be presented to the UN, before the Rio Plus 10 Meet in August this year. Meanwhile, the women ministers hope to implement their own recommendations in their respective countries. And stay in touch to monitor their progress.

It is the first concrete step towards changing the scenario, to setting the clock back on environmental devastation. It gives people like me room for hope.

That though the lost butterflies may take another millennium to return, perhaps our descendents will get to see the species that have survived, still flitting around in the years to come.

Editor - Sathya Saran

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