June, 2007

ENVIRONMENT AND HEALTHS
Consumerism and Development at All Costs

Man Si-wai

(The author is an intellectual who practises ecological farming and organised a farmer's co-op.)

Chasing Red Herrings in the Age of Globalisation
Both the environment and health as significant aspects of our personal and social well-being have remained conceptually underdeveloped and have become practically more unrealisable after the 1997 transfer of sovereignty. More precisely, under British rule, and later under the governance of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) of the past 10 years, both the environment and health have been taken as "something out there" to be protected or sought for outside the realm of our daily life. There has been little, if any, attempt to look for root causes of environmental degradation and human ill-health in our entrenched habits and personal and social goals. Changing such habits and critically examining many of the accepted goals would, of course, almost automatically mean questioning consumerism and the mainstream, affluent lifestyle to which many of us aspire. Hence, it is not surprising that the HKSAR, which continues to subscribe adamantly to the ideology of "prosperity and stability," has hardly ever confronted the issues of the environment and health in such a reflective and critical context. In fact, any discussion which alludes to the darker side of pursuing economic growth and developmentalism would be taken as "obscene" or "blasphemous" in this land long colonised by the worship of material possessions and packed with self-congratulations for its own wealth-acquisition tenacity.

It is with such a conservative approach to the environment and health on the part of the government, business sector and many civic groups that the past 10 years have seen a continuous surge of campaigns and promotional endeavours for "environmental protection," "social hygiene," "food safety," "epidemic control," etc. Yet, without pointing out that the worsening state of the environment and human health lies mostly in the increasing dictates of people's livelihood and lifestyle by large corporations, as well as government policies and civic efforts which accommodate such dictates, these campaigns and promotional endeavours can, ironically, only lead to further deterioration of the environment and people's health.

For example, when people are told that they can restore the environment by taking part in tree planting activities in designated sites while no attention is paid to the felling of old trees in numerous areas acquired by developers for property development, they, in fact, become more and more alienated from the living environment which has been nourishing them and connecting them in a complex ecological web. Moreover, when they follow the advice of experts to consume numerous pills, nutritional supplements or different kinds of natural food to improve their health or lose weight, while failing to notice how globalised food industries have long taken away nutrients from and put too many additives into our daily food, they become more and more alienated with their own bodies and physique. In sum, people have been exposed to more and more environmental and health (mis)information that turns them further away from the road of reflection on how they have been overconsuming, overworking, throwing away too much and regenerating too little.

The lack of awareness of, or the will to confront, the close relationship between our living style as dictated by the globalised economy and culture and degradation of the environment and human health has, in the past 10 years, led to the escalation of two specific trends in Hong Kong: (1) no meaningful discussion on crucial ethical values relating to the environment and health as all values not reducible to monetary ones are sidelined; and (2) a lack of a local perspective and a growing urban-biased approach in tackling environmental and health enigmas.

When GNP Rules
Gross national product, or GNP, is the dominating factor in not only public policies of the HKSAR but also the consciousness of most of its citizens. Hence, decisions relating to land use and related matters are made with practically no attention paid to values not reducible to monetary worth. These diminished values include an ecological reverence and the physical and psychological fitness of humans.

Under British rule, especially in the last few decades of its governance in Hong Kong, construction projects, large or small, undertaken by the government and private sector were cheered as "progress" without any consideration of the projects' short- or long-term adverse impact on the sustainable life of the community. In times of "social and political crises"-e.g., the loss of people's confidence in the future of Hong Kong after the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989-huge construction projects to rejuvenate the economy have been universally seen as effective remedies. Often, despite one or two sceptical voices warning about the potentially huge environmental costs generated by large projects, such as the Airport Core Programme, the whole society has been behind the idea of creating more investment opportunities for business. For instance, when the communities of Ma Wan, Yum O, Chek Lap Kok, etc., were dissolved because of the Airport Core Programme, hardly anyone felt sorry for the disappearance of yet a few more forms of local economy and communal life.

In addition, there has been the further extermination of non-mainstream local communities under the banner of economic, social and cultural progress after the handover through such projects as Hong Kong Disneyland and other large construction projects on Lantau Island, the creation of the Urban Renewal Authority (URA) in 1999 to more aggressively push forward urban redevelopment in Wanchai, Kwun Tong, West Kowloon and many other old neighbourhoods and quite a number of railway and subway lines either completed in recent years or currently under construction that connect to sites with increasing property prospects. Naturally, there have also been numerous high-rise buildings and luxury apartments that have continued to mushroom all over the territory in the past 10 years.

Needless to say, these various construction projects have, each in its slightly different way, contributed to further erosion of unique landscapes and ecological sustainability involving humans and non-human members of the affected communities. Yet the most disturbing concern is that most members of neighbourhoods under threat of dissolution chose to eventually accept some form of compensation and move out. A culture of defending the way of life of one's community with firm resolve is yet to be formed and consolidated.

Disowning the Local and Subsistence Perspective
A local perspective inevitably implies sustainability as there is no external body to bear the adverse consequences of unsustainable practices. Such a perspective is also most likely to be one of "subsistence" as "subsistence" implies non-expansionist, independence and self-reliance. In abandoning subsistence, a society is easily manipulated by consumerism, which celebrates the desire for lots of products and discarding them freely when new ones are acquired. As a result, sustainability is lost either in one's own community or, in most common cases, in poorer communities outside one's own territory where havoc on other people's livelihood and environment is inflicted without being realised by those overseas "consumers" living in a non-subsistent economy, or so-called affluent society. This scenario is the power relationship so commonly found among today's countries, and the HKSAR is no exception. More and more we abandon production for our own consumption and dump our rubbish in our neighbours' homes in this age of escalated globalisation.

Locally, the countryside, commonly known as the New Territories and the outlying islands, was home to certain forms of subsistence economy and culture. Small farms and fishing villages in these areas used to supply a significant proportion of meat, fish and vegetables that locals consumed. Small shops and marketplaces which sold local handicrafts, fresh and processed food, etc., were abundant in number.

However, in the past few decades, Hong Kong has experienced the gradual dismissal of the subsistence and local perspective in matters of economics and in terms of cultural identity. This phenomenon has occurred through the government's "genocidal" measures, such as helping massive numbers of New Territory villagers emigrate to the United Kingdom, Holland and Germany since the 1970s, as well as through the "modern" curriculum of schools providing universal education that spreads the message of Hong Kong's new identity of, first, an industrial economy and currently a knowledge-based economy, both of which are consumer-oriented and far excel the "primitive," subsistent way of living as typified by the rural communities which the new economies have displaced and replaced. Beginning in the 1990s, and increasingly so in the new millennium, Hong Kong's self-proclaimed trait as a "knowledge-based society" is narrowly defined by its capability to generate incessant consumption among its population. Its countryside, which throughout the ages has engendered indigenous knowledge that entails ecological sustainability, has been almost completely discarded and lost. By destroying its own countryside and the basics of life therein nurtured, Hong Kong as a community is fast approaching a stage where it no longer has any material or sensual basis for leading, or even envisioning, a life not totally dependent on monolithic and monopolistic global economic forces.

In the past 10 years, Hong Kong's people have been informed by the government and the media about how serious their food safety problems are and how much they are under the threat of epidemic outbreaks. After every anxious round of news about SARS, bird flu, various sorts of food contamination, dengue fever and Japanese encephalitis, etc., people have come to realise that the government is not able to provide much help in preventing health disasters from occurring or recurring. For example, food safety inspection in Hong Kong is not at all transparent and seems to be always lagging behind the times, for, as in previous cases, almost all local alerts and subsequent inspections in recent years have come after other countries or communities have raised the alerts or done the inspections.

Ironically, not only has the government never reminded people that an ecologically sustainable countryside is the root of a healthy environment for all, it actually continues to spread the antithetical message by taking the food safety and epidemic scares as a pretext to further diminish the countryside's capacity for food provision and nurturing of the environment. The government, for instance, instead of helping to make local free-range chicken farming an option for greater diversity of local agricultural practices, so as to prevent an outbreak of bird flu which is often generated by factory chicken farming, and to break the habit of reliance on imported food, the origin of which is often hard to trace, has adopted a three-pronged policy to, in effect, eliminate all local chicken farming. The policy is to crush local free-range poultry raising, to introduce imported chilled poultry from the mainland and, for the longer term, to establish a central poultry slaughter house in Hong Kong which would virtually put an end to all local poultry raising as it would eliminate the only competing edge of local poultry farming-namely, freshness. Never though has the government drawn the public's attention to the simple truth that Hong Kong cannot be a healthy place without the preservation of its countryside as the home of local food production as well as gradually reverting or converting to more sustainable farming practices and subsistent livelihoods.

Meanwhile, the "conservation endeavours" of government, business and green groups in the countryside have set very dangerous precedents in opening the door to future exploitation under the disguise of conservation. These precedents include, first of all, a "nature conservation policy" which invites public-private partnership or non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to undertake various development-cum-preservation projects on environmentally sensitive sites in the countryside. In all such projects, what has been conveniently overlooked is the most crucial factor of conservation, namely, sustainable human activities-agriculture, fisheries, etc.-co-existing with other members of the ecological community. The aforementioned model of "nature conservation" hailed by the government, business and green groups, in fact, drives away both sustainable human activities and delimits an arbitrary boundary for "nature."

Neglecting the importance of a "sustainable livelihood in the rural context" to a community's environmental viability and people's health leads inevitably to the impoverishment of one's cultural awareness and sensitivity. Recent campaigns for cultural heritage conservation conducted by professional and civic groups have, not surprisingly, focused on urban "landmarks" (e.g., the old Star Ferry Terminal in Central and the neighbouring Queen's Pier) while mass destruction in the countryside has gone basically uncontested. While one may take an interest in questioning the reclamation of Victoria Harbour in recent years, the populace at large tends to be totally apathetic to the damage of harbours, coastlines, river valleys, scenery and ecology of the New Territories.