CultivatingAGreenConscience

THE PERILS OF CLIMATE CHANGE WERE BROUGHT HOME, LITERALLY, in 2004, when an unusually high tide combined with torrential rain to flood my house. It had not happened in nearly four decades, and we watched in horror as the water crept over the doorstep, spread all over the first floor, and rose inexorably for another 20cm.

We scurried to pile things on tables and chairs, but many things got soaked and had to be tediously dried in the sun over the next week. Other things, like furniture that warped, had to be replaced.

It wasn't New Orleans, and picking up the pieces was left to ourselves and a borrowed maid, who very systematically cleaned out parts of the house we hadn't even thought about - like the store room in which tools were kept. She explained her formidable organisational skills: "It happens quite often where I come from."

Now, if global warming projections by reputable scientific bodies are accurate, it might happen more often where we come from too.

While I appreciate the efforts of BCA and NEA to fight climate change by promoting energy efficiency, these efforts lag the rest of the world, and they only address one part of a multifaceted issue.

Only recently have there been advertisements to educate the population on saving energy. One can't help but notice that their appearance coincides with the perfect storm of the subprime meltdown that is rocking the world, stratospheric oil prices, rising inflation and the food crisis, which is causing Singaporeans such pain in their pockets.

Dr Yaacob Ibrahim, Minister for the Environment and Water Resources, introduced the 10% Energy Challenge targeted at Singapore households in April by saying that "a smarter way in how we consume electricity … could help lower our electricity bills at the end of each month. This will also help stretch our dollars in the wake of rising prices of oil, food and other commodities."

But there's more to being environmentally friendly than just saving energy in the face of stratospheric energy prices. We have to be cognizant of the fact that a more holistic approach is needed to tackle the whole environment issue, and that sustainable development can only come on the back of sustained efforts in cultivating a green conscience.

We could educate people more on recycling rather than just putting recycling bins around. We could even have an anti-paper wasting campaign - paper-milling is particularly harmful for the environment, and if you need a monetary incentive, the price of paper has risen by nearly 700 per cent from 1982 to 2002.

It would also be wonderful if Singaporeans could relinquish their grip on plastic bags. According to NEA, we use about two plastic bags each per day - twice that used by Americans - working out to about 2.5 billion bags annually, or 19 million kg of waste.

And what about spreading the message about living more simply? If we don't buy so much stuff, we will also generate less waste, and put less strain on Pulau Semakau, our last landfill.

We're all on this low-lying island together. So why don't we encourage each other to do all that we can?