Need to resurrect natural intelligence for a thinking nation

• Initiative by Nuwara Eliya Municipal Council and Nuwara Eliya Public Library in collaboration with Daily FT/Weekend FT Harmony Page kicks off today 
• Recycling hubs to commence
• Nuwara Eliya Public Library to be used as a key venue for recycling focused entrepreneurship training
• Aesthetic entrepreneurship for sustainability to be part of the recycling capacity building
• Thinking Sri Lanka aims at supporting the endeavour to Clean Sri Lanka
• Thinking is integral to a healthy mind and a healthy nation which can be rephrased as a clean mind and a clean nation

This article is aimed at public awareness on unleashing our natural intelligence, in a bid to support the Thinking Sri Lanka initiative which will commence in Nuwara Eliya today by the Nuwara Eliya Municipal Council and the Nuwara Eliya Public Library, supported by the Daily FT/Weekend FT Harmony Page. The ideation published in the Harmony Page pertaining to the garbage issue in Sri Lanka is to be used as part of the course material to be developed in the training modules for recycling and capacity building which will commence weekly in Nuwara Eliya and emulated also in Hatton.

By Surya Vishwa  

A few days ago, a friend contacted me on the telephone with fantastic news that basically could be summed up into six words. ‘I need not use my brain.’ 

Well, for a while it did seem delightful. My pal in all her kindness, seemed to have taken into account the time it takes for me to engage in the pilgrimage of the written word and found a shortcut. ‘Artificial Intelligence.’

“Imagine, you could write a book a day and not tire your head so much,” she gushed.

I pondered for a while. 

“So you are telling me that I should pause my natural thinking, and indulge in artificial thinking – meaning I have a shadow of an idea and let an artificially programmed intelligence take over and leave the grey matter between my ears to its own lethargic devices.”

“Well, you frame it in an odd way, but I tell you, artificial intelligence is taking over the world. You should begin to use it.”

I replied that I would first die trying to use to the maximum my ‘natural’ intelligence and then thereafter – who knows.

I then recalled a recent conversation, where an academic was explaining that the university was upgrading their technology – to be able to detect if a too good to be true thesis was a product of natural or artificial intelligence!

Of course one should understand that what is considered artificial is a segment of the natural world where man in the summit of his technological maturity has managed to create a cyber super brain which anyone can access without exhausting his or her own mind. 

This brings us to ponder on a range of connotations that we can give when categorising the two components – the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial.’

The ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’

Many humans eat with their fingers and consider that to be natural as others do using utensils such as forks and spoons made of stainless steel. Hands when used for eating have to be washed with some water and that is the end of it. The stainless steel can be washed too and stacked for later use. There was a natural logic used when man decided to first use their hands or create forks and spoons for consuming food. Probably a contraption in the form of what is now known as a fork was first conceptualised in the human mind when faced with the need of having to eat coal hot meat and preventing the necessity of washing hands in very cold weather. Natural thinking, yes. In some societies without drastic weather patterns, hands were used for the consuming of food and thought to be the best method to tackle foods such as rice easily. 

Then came another mode of existence. ‘One time use.’ Just as one would cast off a friend for another with a simple flick of the mind, one time plastic forks and spoons appeared on the face of the earth along with ‘one time plates,’ and ‘one time lunch-sheets,’ one time plastic cups and ‘one time plastic water bottles.’ 

This is the new ‘one time’ mindset replacing the old one our grandparents were used to, where for example, if one’s spouse was a cranky soul who messed up the kitchen and had multiple other deformities of behaviour, one did not toss the said individual into the trash can of marriage but polished up the corroded patches and continued relentlessly unto death. The same went for the use of natural resources and created products. A bag, cloth or synthetic merchandise would be used countless times. A coat would be used and reused and then made into a doormat or a glove would be stitched out of it. This was the ‘natural’ way of existence once upon a time not so long ago. Then arrived ultra super technology which is now ruling the intellect of man. 

Incidentally, is there an app that can order another whole new planet for us to live when this one dies? (Killed by us and our inability to use natural intelligence). 

As we wrote earlier in this page, modern scientists and indigenous communities such as the Kogi have warned repeatedly over the past two decades that the man’s unthinking behaviour has a price and that the planet will have resources to last us only for another 40 years or less. We, who take so great a pride in our progress and our modernity have transformed the seas and lakes to floating garbage reservoirs and the earth to stinking pits of refuse embedded with every form of non-biodegradable entity we have so egoistically created. 

This forces us to wake up from our narcissism. 

Awakening our dormant ‘natural’ thinking

Do we not need to prioritise awakening our dormant ‘natural’ thinking before we activate the genie of the artificial? It would indeed be useless to appear clever in the world and write a book a day if we are all going to be buried prematurely beneath piles of plastic and forest depleted earth in less than 40 years; starving because we have poisoned and robbed the soil of its resources, parched because the earth can no longer breathe normally and thus can neither give us the rain for our sustenance nor oxygen for our breath.

No problem, some would argue – ‘we have an answer to that too – like we have synthetic poisons to kill off the weeds (alongside all biodiversity) we have artificial rain.’ We also have artificial diseases, made in labs, and we have artificial injections for them. 

This world as we know it seems to be taking its deepest dive into the vortex of the artificial. 

In this context, this article is dedicated to retrieving from the same maelstrom of intelligence which is natural. The natural intelligence that has from the beginning of time been aligned with all of existence.

As I write, within a kilometre to where I am sitting, there are at least five mini garbage dumps and incineration spots mushrooming up at random. Within the premises of a garden, just outside the gate of a house, in front of a waterfall, in drains, on the high roads, on mountains, in alleys – they are everywhere. These are the dumps of non-thinking that dot the entire country – one that this current Government is desperately trying to clean. 

The anatomy of roadside garbage – packed into a bag and thrown on the high roads or being burnt on one’s doorstep or next to a pristine waterway – is a psychological study by itself. 

If one person engages in this type of action we can scrutinise the said behaviour and categorise it as ‘unruly,’ or ‘base,’ or ‘ignorant’ or ‘unclean.’ If many in a population engage in similar action, then we know there is something drastically wrong. An unclean action begins with an unclean mind. An ignorant action is unclean. Such an action begins in the vacuum of non-thinking or mindlessness which is the opposite of mindfulness. 

Let us walk our brains through this. 

What does it mean if within say an extent of 3 to 5 kilometres there are multiple garbage dumps and indiscriminate plastic burning. First of all it would mean that the societal administrative sectors that attend to garbage collection are malfunctioning. 

Let us think deeper. There is no AI app for this. 

The administration entities responsible for garbage collection includes Urban Councils, Town Councils, Village Councils and Municipal Councils. It is upto these institutions to ensure that there is no reason for people to dispose of garbage in such a non-dignified manner as happens in this country. 

Littering is costing us our tourism

Irresponsible, non-thinking littering is costing us our tourism, a sector that is a massive revenue earner.

If we wish to develop our tourism, one of the basic things we should commit to is to clean up the country and set systems where it remains unpolluted. As mentioned above, cleaning a country is linked to cleaning up the minds of the masses. Why citizens of one country would carry a toffee cover for miles until a trash bin is found to dispose of it, and why another in a different country would not hesitate to dump it anywhere is owing to years of conditioning. To change, takes time and requires a combination of actions. In a previous article we detailed out that the concept of Environment Police should be strengthened and that heavy fines should be introduced to dissuade careless garbage strewing. We also have written about the strict banning of plastic from all eateries and to dissuade food entrepreneurs from placing curries in small plastic bans which makes it challenging to recycle them. All eateries and cafes should be encouraged to serve food directly onto a plate devoid of lunch-sheets and to help in normalising people bringing their own lunch boxes to take home food. If we did it 70 years ago, we can do it again. 

Today we focus on what State organisations and other public and private institutions could do, alongside civil societies. 

Possible solutions

Let us look at some possible solutions:

1. Ensure that every citizen who works at institutions such as town, village, urban and municipal councils imbibe the immense responsibility vested in them towards their country. Currently most Government officials have no heartfelt connection with the role they play as part of their duties. They come to office, immersed in their own domestic worries and take no joy in the work they do. It is recommended that all town, village, urban and municipal councils hire professional motivators and psychologists to ensure that the staff are happy in carrying out their jobs and find meaning in their tasks. If they are engaging in their duties by rote and in a disinterested manner, the root causes have to be identified. If it is weak salaries, this has to be addressed at a macro level. 

2. Every staff member should be motivated to spend a quiet time reading and reflecting, during office hours. Reading books such as Man’s Search for Meaning by Vicktor Frankl and Power of the Subconscious mind by Joseph Murphy could help in re-directing the mind to its core and changing diseased mindsets. 

3. All workers who clean garbage should be enabled to do so in a dignified manner with items such as boots and gloves provided and changed regularly. 

4. All officials such as public inspectors, mayors and commissioners should be encouraged to walk on their inspection visits and interact with the people they serve. There is much that could evade the eye when gliding through in an official car. 

5. If government officials who are paid by the tax payer, walk, as part of their duty related engagements and converse with the public, they would find out exactly why Sri Lanka has such an abominable garbage problem. 

6. In carrying out for the past five months a continuous media research on the garbage issue in Nuwara Eliya, what is clear is that garbage collection needs to be streamlined and garbage collection regularised. Last week we carried the appeals of women in the mountainous village of Lovers Leap in Nuwara Eliya. They called for an increase in the garbage collection routine. At present domestic trash is collected only once in 3 weeks in this village. 

7. Although the above example is from a remote hilly village of Nuwara Eliya, if a media research is carried out in any other part of the country the result may be the same, revealing poor garbage collection. 

8. It is needed for garbage collection to take place daily and for the refuse collection lorries to stay stationed for a longer time period. 

9. Mobile handcarts should be increased, especially for the mountainous areas of the country and a people participation based garbage collection method introduced. For example if there are fifty houses on a mountain range these neighbourhoods could pay a nominal fee for the hiring of a mobile handcart from a town, village or municipal council for the explicit purpose of collecting recyclable material.

10. The above could be linked to introducing community recycling to Sri Lanka. This is a key need that has to be implemented immediately and in a sustained manner.

11. Recycling sustainability hubs could be introduced through village societies and the younger generation encouraged towards sustainability and recycling through public libraries. 

12. Below is a brief ideation on recycling paper, polythene and plastic bags.

13. Refuses such as plastic bags, biscuit packets and polythene covers (every kind of covering that we find consumable products packaged in) can be cleaned and used as filling for cushions, beanbags, sleeping bags, garden quilts and yoga mats. 

14. Low income groups could be identified through the Aswesuma program to encourage recycling based entrepreneurship. 

15. State-Private sector engagement could be explored to begin island-wide recycling commencing with the easiest – paper, plastic bags and packaging. 

16. The objective should be to normalise recycling as we have over the years normalised careless littering. 

17. Recycling collecting points could be established in homes as well as State and Private Institutions.

18. Professional global waste management experts from countries such as Japan should be contracted by the State as well as the private sector with the view of eliminating good garbage dumps and learning how some countries have created lucrative industries out of recycling. 

19. Town, Village, Urban and Municipal Councils should be encouraged to increase their earnings creatively to include recycling as a poverty alleviation strategy and to invest in doubling or trebling their garbage collecting vehicles. 

20. The private sector can be encouraged in supporting the creation of sustainability and recycling hubs in Sri Lanka. All schools, universities, government and business establishments should begin units that will focus on recycling.

21. Alongside the above civic education should be carried out, probably in some of the luxury buildings used by former Government officials. These buildings could be turned into institutions that teach children and adults how to be responsible citizens. 

22. Recycling of batteries and technological items should be carefully looked at.

23. Global waste management professionals should be identified for ensuring the safe disposal of hospital waste. 

24. State and Private banks should be encouraged to introduce loan schemes for recycling based entrepreneurship.

Note: This article was produced to support the Thinking Sri Lanka initiative that will commence tomorrow at the Public Library in Nuwara Eliya initiated by the Municipal Council and the Public Library of Nuwara Eliya. The Harmony Page is a media partner of the above initiative. The Thinking Sri Lanka program is expected to be a weekly training on capacity building for recycling focused entrepreneurship carried out in Nuwara Eliya. The first training program to be held on 8 March, the International Women’s Day, will encourage all women’s societies in Nuwara Eliya to set up recycling entrepreneurship centres. The program will subsequently work with artists to expand the recycling projects initiated. The Harmony page will feature the first Thinking Sri Lanka initiative in the country in its upcoming edition. 

We will also publish, in the weeks to come, interviews with waste recycling experts affiliated with the Eco Service initiative in Auroville, the universal town in Tamil Nadu that highlights peace, spirituality and sustainability.