Are we serious about sustainability matters?

How do you feel when there is no running water at your home while it has been raining regularly lately? What more when you are living near the equator where rainfall is aplenty? This is certainly a mystery to those who are not that educated about how we are living our lives and how much we care about the surroundings which we are living in.

Those who are living around the Klang-Valley would certainly appreciate this kind of question which is bothering my mind. Can we have rainfall and drought at the same time? Or it is simply a matter of mismanagement on the part of people who are responsible to manage our water resources. Have we, the society, been so indifferent so much so that those who are supposed to do the work (and get paid, not free ya) are also indifferent about the quality of their performance?

Perhaps one of the indicators of this indifference attitude is when we observe how Muslims, generally, perform their ablution, a practice of washing certain parts of their bodies with water, before performing prayers. Notwithstanding that Islam requires Muslims not to be wasteful, so many of them would use unnecessary amount of water. Some even leave the pipes running while they are folding the sleeve of their shirts before performing ablution. Here, we could observe the disconnect between the teachings of Islam and the practice of Muslims.

If this is extended to the society at large, we can see how our daily routines result in the waste of resources. What more when it involves things which provide us with wealth. For example, property development is a hot thing around Klang-Valley. Definitely this is a very profitable venture resulting in developers building houses on high grounds including those with high slopes. Not only our water catchment areas are slowly being encroached, hill slope failures do occur from time to time. It will be on the front pages of our newspapers for a while but when the incidence is forgotten, business will be carried out as usual.

I am not going to write about governance matters as it warrant an article on its own. However, sufficient to be mentioned here that in the absence of good governance, don't expect public interests to be the highest priority of those managing our water resources. So if we don't bother and do not indicate our interest about sustainability issues, who should we blame for any misgiving which we are facing?

Where do we go from here?