School of Rural Management

CONSERVATION FOR GENERATION

“Towards a sustainable future”

The word SPARDHA means competition, in the vague of moving ahead of time and fellow
mates, we as humans and part of this world are overusing our resources with a closed eye
thinking least about the generations to follow. So, why would the future generations remember
us? What are we leaving behind…? Tales of injustice with the nature and mankind, a hazy
ideology of choice, heaps of lifeless buildings or mechanized state where everything is organized
in a systematic manner.

The heart of argument for sustainability is conservation. We realize that our action and our use of
resources affect future generation, and when we talk of action the best quote one can remember
is by none other than the father of the nation. “There is sufficiency in the world for man's need
but not for man's greed”

Conservation is not an infant concept to mankind, We’ve often heard, Please conserve food its
very limited, Conserve money it will make your future safe, Time is precious and irreversible so
conserve it, Look how expensive are your clothes please conserve them for your younger
brother, Conserve this newspaper it will be sold for Rs5 /kg, these are some endless statements
that we often hear off. Humans have been trying to conserve their beliefs, integrity, wealth,
culture, heritage, economy, religion, tradition and themselves since ages, but the awareness of
ecological conservation is just about five decades old. It is now that we have realized that the
ecological conservation is most important aspect in the process of conservation of all the nuances
of mankind and his culture, if there is no earth, no air, no water, no forests, what will man boast
about?

There are two schools of thoughts underpinning the importance of nature conservation. The first
is that areas should be protected because they may harbor species that are useful for humans.
This view is based on the idea of human dominion or ownership of the planet. This school of
thought can be represented as a pyramid with humans at the top. The second school is that
humans are part of an interconnected web of nature not separate from or outside of nature. Both
schools of thought have influenced different approaches to nature conservation.

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The balance between have and have not’s began to deteriorate with the increasing population,
urbanization and man’s greed for comforts at the expense of nature during the beginning of 20 th
century as the global economy expanded and local ecosystems were collapsing at accelerating
pace effecting the environment. How greedy man was and man is, man always thinks of
preserving something or managing something when he faces a jolt, the statistics say that since
1961, the world population has increased by 112%, it is not only the increase in population that
has added pressure on natural resources but also the increase in the amount of per capita
requirement of resources with the current scenario of growth mechanism we witness, so,
conservation is not only the amount of resources we use but the pattern of usage of resources that
will determine what we leave behind for generations to follow. If our ecology is intact, our
resources stable, it is then we can talk about development in a sustainable manner. As already
mentioned earlier due to insensitive industrialization, the climate is changing at an increased
pace resulting into depleted resources and therefore conservation is need of the time.

The impacts of climate change are not evenly distributed - the poorest countries and people will
suffer earliest and most. And if and when the damages appear it will be too late to reverse the
process.

Change is a grave threat to the developing world and a major obstacle to continued poverty
reduction across its many dimensions. First, developing regions are at a geographic
disadvantage: they are already warmer, on average, than developed regions, and they also suffer
from high rainfall variability. Second, developing countries - in particular the poorest - are
heavily dependent on agriculture, the most climate-sensitive of all economic sectors, and suffer
from inadequate health provision and low-quality public services. Third, their low incomes and
vulnerabilities make adaptation to climate change particularly difficult. Because of these
vulnerabilities, climate change is likely to reduce further already low incomes and increase
illness and death rates in developing countries. Falling farm incomes will increase poverty and
reduce the ability of households to invest in a better future, forcing them to use up meager
savings just to survive. At a national level, climate change will cut revenues and raise spending
needs, worsening public finances. This situation demands a solution.

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An effective response to climate change will depend on creating the conditions for
international collective action. International frameworks for action on climate change should
encourage and respond to the leadership shown by different countries in different ways, and
should facilitate and motivate the involvement of all states. This can be the initial important step
to conservation.

Developing countries are already taking significant action to decouple their economic growth
from the growth in greenhouse gas emissions. For example, China has adopted very ambitious
domestic goals to reduce energy used for each unit of GDP by 20% from 2006-2010 and to
promote the use of renewable energy. India has created an Integrated Energy Policy for the same
period that includes measures to expand access to cleaner energy for poor people and to increase
energy efficiency.

Conservation is like development, as development is for people and it also aims to achieve
human goals largely through use of biospheres, conservation aims to achieve them by insuring
that such use can continue for ages to come ensuring essence of sustainability. Holistic
sustainable development is multi dimensional concept with three interacting angles for natural
resource management- ecological securities, economic efficiency and social equity. Sustainable
development does not end with the sustainability with just the environmental and resource
system but also requires the sustainability of economic and social system. Economic growth can
be attained if poverty, which is the major cause of natural resource degradation, is addressed.
Distribution of growth must undergo a change and it must become wasteful of natural resource
not only between the rich and the poor countries but also rich and the poor in the same country.
Sustainable development further is the result of political order in which a society is so structured
that it learns fast from its mistakes in the use of natural resources and rapidly rectifies its human
nature relationship in accordance with knowledge it has gained. The necessity of ensuring that
utilization of an ecosystem is suitable varies with the society’s dependence on the resources in
question. The greater the diversity and flexibility of economy, the lesser the need to utilize
certain resources sustainably. Sustainable utilization is also necessary for rational planning and
management of industries dependent on the resources concerned, for example timber and fish.

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The vicious cycle by which poverty causes economical degradation which in turn leads to more
poverty can be broken only by sustainable development and conservation helps in making it so.

The conservation and sustainable development are mutually independent which can be illustrated
by the plight of the rural poor. The dependence of rural communities on living resources is direct
and immediate. For more than 500 million people who are malnourished or 1500 million people
whose only fuel is wood, dung or crop waste, or the more than 1000 million people with income
of $50 or less a year…. For all these people conservation is the only thing between them and at
best abject misery, at worst death. Unhappily, people on the margins of the survival are
compelled by their poverty, and their consequent vulnerability to inflation, to destroy the few
resources available to them. To conclude this one can say that conservation is sufficient response
to such problem. People whose very survival is precarious for them, conservation must be
combined with measures to meet short term economic needs.

The rights-based approach to conservation is to ensure equity. The harmonization of the two
dimensions – nature conservation and people’s rights, and their integration “simplifying” the
concept of sustainable development, which covers a range of ideas that bring together
environmental, social, and economic development. The rights-based approach will ensure that
special attention is given to the needs and rights of the weak and disempowered members of the
human community, those who stand to lose the most as a result of the changing climate.
Moreover, it will help to respect and enforce human rights and therefore markedly level the
power imbalances between those who will gain, at least in the short term and those who will lose
from climate change.

Conservation is important to everyone for two basic reasons that are to meet the demands of
natural resources and to maintain the quality of life. This current scenario of growth and
development has been ignoring the conservation part for a period of time; it has lately seeped
into everybody the whole concept of depleting resources and the need to conserve them.

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The main obstacles to achieve conservation are:

a) The consequent failure to integrate conservation with development, A development

process that is often inflexible and needlessly destructive, due to inadequacies in
environmental planning, a lack of rational use allocation and undue emphasis on narrow
short term interests rather than broader longer term once.
b) The lack of capacity to conserve due to inadequate legislation, policies and lack of
enforcement, poor organization, lack of trained professional, and lack of basic
information on priorities, on the productive and regenerative capacities if living
resources, and on the trade of between one management option and another.
c) The lack of support for conservation, due to lack of awareness of the benefits of
conservation and of the responsibilities to conserve among those who use to have an
impact on living resources, including in many cases Governments.
d) The failure to deliver conservation based development where it is most needed, that is the
rural areas of developing countries.

Clearly, something must change. In words of great anti- war author Henrik Tikkanen; “Because
we don't think about future generations, they will never forget us.” Who wants to be remembered
like this? It seems simplistic to say that what really needs to change is our attitude, but in fact the
basis of a sound conservation plan does come down to the inescapable fact that we must change
our way of thinking about the issue. If each one of us stops thinking in isolation breaking the
barriers of religion, region caste, and creed and considers this earth as one with geographical
boundaries only on papers not in our hearts and minds, we shall pace the path of holistic
development at an accelerated and effective manner.

Conservation’s concerns for maintenance and sustainability is a rational response to the nature of
living resources and also an ethical imperative, expressed in the belief that ”We have not
inherited the earth from our parents, we have borrowed it from our children”.

Submitted By:
MANTHAN (KSRM)
Aarti Mishra
Abhinav Ahluwalia
Ritika Sood

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