Environmental Rights Vs. Human Rights
Picture above only want to describe briefly about the whole article.
Have you ever heard of a monkey trespassed our home backyard and premises to scavenge anything edible? It’s quite normal in certain neighbourhood of Malaysia but in some part of America, the neighbourhood are used to see black bears raid rubbish and fruit trees in their home yard. How about the flash flood regularly happens in Kuala Lumpur in the past few years before the construction of SMART Tunnel. Last year people in Kuala Krai suffer from the phenomenal flood and disconnect the whole Kelantan from outside world. These occurrences bring clear message to us. Human and environment are in great conflicts.
In this context, the basic need of human are air, water, land and food in order for them to survive. All these elements should be well managed to give good health condition for human. In an article written by Garret Hardin entitled “Tragedy of Common”, he mentioned about all these elements in detail. When human start to face water shortage, polluted air, highly populated community and food security in danger, tragedy start to happen.
At the same time, all these element also are the needs for animal and plants. Good quality of air can give high yield of oil palm, clean water can helps mollusca species to breed, the production of cow milk will increase with enough space for living and survivability of panda highly depend on the bamboo species and temperature. All this time we didn’t realize their need also are our need.
When conflicts happen, we start to talk about sustainable development. The quality of life and human survival are closely related on the economic growth. The capital investment by multinational companies are welcome with open arms by many governments in the world. These scenario will offer various job opportunities in various sectors. The income gain by the workers will be spend on groceries and other things. But there should be a certain limit of human activities. Human only cross the line when the threshold level exceeded. This will make the relationship between human and environment out of equilibrium. The need for human being are not only for the current generation but also for future generation.
As a well behaved human being, the responsibility to manage the environment is not a burden. Our surrounding should be our “home”. There are no other planet can be accommodated by human being except planet Earth. This unique planet have diversity of plant and animal species and we live with them all the time. Can you imagine living in a messy house fill with rubbish and unpleasant odour? I hope this article will start to create awareness among us on taking care of our rights and environmental rights.
Now you understand the meaning of the picture.
