Green advocacy

NO HOLDS BARRED
Ike Señeres

The green advocacy is now very popular, and that is good news for everyone in this planet. Green is not everything however, because human beings have other needs that have nothing to do with being green. This is the reason why I think there is a need for another advocacy that could be in tandem with the green advocacy, and that is the blue advocacy.

Blue is the color of renewable energy, and it is also the color of good connectivity. This is the reason why a solar powered building is called a “blue building”, and the reason why a blue light turns on in your computer when you are connected to a network wirelessly.

There have been many attempts to define and quantify the number of basic human needs. On my part however, and for purposes of developing an attainable andsustainable development framework, I now propose that we define eight priority human needs, namely livelihood, transportation, health, education, water, sanitation, food and shelter, not necessarily in that order.

If we have energy, we could have more access to livelihood and transportation. Livelihood is the answer to poverty, being the answer as well to increasing the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), as defined in the Human Development Index (HDI). Transportation is directly related to livelihood, because people could not go to work if they have no means of mobility.

If we have connectivity, we could have more access to health and education. Health is the answer to high mortality, as defined also in the HDI. In addition, child health andmaternal health are two specific Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Education is the answer to illiteracy, as also defined in the HDI. Universal education is also an MDG.

If we sustain our ecology, we could have more access to water and sanitation. These two resources actually work in tandem with each other, because without water, there could be no sanitation. It goes without saying that in order to have clean potable water; we also have to clean our land, including what goes below the surface of our soils. Sanitation is the answer to the problem of pollution.

If we sustain our agronomy, we could have more access to food and shelter. In our definition, we should include forestry as part of agronomy, because restored forests could also give us food and shelter. We should also include fisheries in the definition, because that too, is a major source of food, most especially in an aquatic country like ours. Ending hunger is also an MDG.

As it is now, green advocates are moving in a direction that is apart from the direction of blue advocates, still a small movement as of now. My wish is to bring them together in a joint Blue and Green advocacy or BAG for short. I am hoping that this would be a natural union, because the two are very much compatible with each other.

With sustainable ecology, we could have sustainable energy, and vice versa. This is also the case of water. We could create energy out of water, and using energy, we could increase our water resources. With better and broader connectivity, we could market the outputs of our agronomy better and faster, using the powers of electronic commerce.

On one hand, agronomy will give us the inputs to create energy, plant fuels being just an example. On the other hand, cheaper energy will also enable us to irrigate our farms and process our farm outputs, thus giving us more value added for what we could produce out of the soil.

Our eight basic needs are not just for the short term survival of our people now. These are also for the long term survival of our nation in the long run, for the long term. As a people however, we should not just stop with survival as our long term goal. We should go for regional economic dominance, but first, we must survive.

As a people, we could go nowhere without a unified development framework. In the past, I have advocated for Integrated Area Development (IAD) as a framework. I am still doing that, but this time with a new twist, to meld and blend the eight basic needs within a framework that combines energy, connectivity, ecology and agronomy into one. I would welcome your comments about this framework; let us work on this together.

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