IIMA's Annual B-school Summit Confluence 2009 Discusses "Sustain" after "Survive"

IIMA's Annual B-school Summit Confluence 2009 Discusses "Sustain" after "Survive"

A similar line of thought was continued by Shri Kartikeya Sarabhai, Director, Centre for Environment Education, who said that we have a number of lessons to learn from nature.

Forests are self sustaining, zero waste bio systems and yet they have survived for millions of years. While the difference between our life style and natural lifestyle is that we are creating humongous amounts of waste. He said an effective way of measuring our impact on the environment is our 'Ecological footprint' - which is basically the land area in hectares equivalent to resources consumed by a person. In today's world the developed countries have the highest footprint while the developing countries have the lowest. This comparison is important because not only is the size of foot print directly linked to the development index of a country but it also shows the size of out future foot print is we follow the same lines of development as these countries did. According to him "The challenge of development is not how to get there, but how not to." Because if the footprint of the whole world increases to that level, we would need equivalent to four earth areas to sustain the future population levels. The solution lies not in technology, but in creating a new style of development. We must stop imitating the development path of the west. Their future is in following the motto "Kick the habit" of high consumption, while we have not even acquired the habit yet. Hence, we must follow the path of "Pick right" and make the right choices now itself. We should moce from "footprint" to "handprint" which shows our commitment to making a change and taking a lead, so that 50 years down the line we are the leaders on the Green Earth.

Shri Kartikeya Sarabhai, Director, Centre for Environment Education during Confluence 09 at IIMA

The evening session was chaired by Prof. Vasant P. Gandhi of IIMA. It continued on the theme of sustainability set by the morning sessions but additionally gained dimensions of social and economic sustainability beyond discussions concentrating purely on the environmental front. The sessions were guided into this broadening of scope by an exceptionally motivating and captivating discourse by the Shri Chanchalapati Dasa, the Vice President of Akshaya Patra.

Contributed by -
M. Arun,
Coordinator,
Media Relations,
Confluence 2009,
Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.

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