ZEDWord

Here is a moving Declaration that was adopted by the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, in Bolivia. The Bolivian government has asked the United Nations to adopt this for all the rest of the world.

We the peoples and nations of Earth: considering that we are all part of Mother Earth, an indivisible, living community of interrelated and interdependent beings with a common destiny; gratefully acknowledging that Mother Earth is the source of life, nourishment and learning and provides everything we need to live well; recognizing that the capitalist system and all forms of depredation, exploitation, abuse and contamination have caused great destruction, degradation and disruption of Mother Earth, putting life as we know it today at risk through phenomena such as climate change: convinced that in an interdependent living community it is not possible to recognize the rights of only human beings without causing an imbalance within Mother Earth: affirming that to guarantee human rights it is necessary to recognize and defend the rights of Mother Earth and all beings in her and that there are existing cultures, practices and laws that do so; conscious of the urgency of taking decisive, collective action to transform structures and systems that cause climate change and other threats to Mother Earth; proclaim this Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, and call on the United Nations to adopt it, as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations of the world, and to the end that every individual and institution takes responsibility for promoting through teaching, education, and consciousness raising, respect for the rights recognized in this Declaration and ensure through prompt and progressive measures and mechanisms, national and international, their universal and effective recognition and observance among all peoples and States in the world.

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I think it is a combination of resistance from managers and a lack of certainty on what it can mean if a manager lower down the hierarchy took that decision to make the change at one hotel, when the company’s HQ is based elsewhere in India or the world. Now who would want to incur the wrath of senior management at the corporate headquarters with a decision taken locally? Read the rest of this entry »

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I took a factor of 2.5 to cover centralized air-conditioning, the pumps, and the array of cooking and other appliances that help a 5-star hotel serve its customers. That totted up to about 4.5 million units a year. Not much as money goes… about Rs 30 lacs a month, or Rs 3.6 crore a year. I may be wrong on my hazard of these estimates, for I have gone on a certain premise of use of power in the hotel without having had the opportunity to do what one calls a ‘load analysis’. Read the rest of this entry »

Image by The Library of Congress via Flickr

The writer is the Chairman of BCIL-ZED, the Bangalore-based global pioneer in green building.

It was ironic. It was a five-star hotel, one of the older ones in Bangalore. They had organized a green initiative this week; intending to do something toward making a better Bangalore on World Environment Day. Read the rest of this entry »

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Two startling facts

Bengalureans in particular will be shocked to know two very startling facts. One is that we get no more than 250 million liters a day in the city from all four phases of the Cauvery Water Supply plan. There is no more water that Cauvery can give us since it is a finite source. The rest of the water need in the city is today being met with over 5 lakh borewells that have increased the total demand load for power by as much as 1.2 million MW in the last 20 years alone! In every large and small city, this is the reality: 75 per cent is drawn from groundwater reserves of the earth. Read the rest of this entry »