Does having a bicycle day and environment day mean anything to us?

Does it really change anything to have one particular day to remember something – like the concept of love or parents or earth or the environment? The answer to that question we do not know. However, we could argue that having one day dedicated to something that we should remember everyday is better than not at all. 

With that rationale let us look at two such days. A day dedicated to bicycles and biking which is 3 June and a day dedicated to the environment which is 5 June.

Acknowledging the versatility of the bicycle and its role as a sustainable means of transportation and health promoter, the UN General Assembly in a resolution adopted in April 2018 decided to declare 3 June as World Bicycle Day. Much earlier in 1973 the UN began the commemoration of World Environment Day on 5 June after it was mooted at the UN Conference on the Human Environment held in 1972 in Stockholm. 

So here we are, with two individual days to commemorate a mode of transport we hardly ever use – and an environment we have polluted with luxury vehicles that we drive upon roads strewn with plastic – the refuse of our modern technology and convenience. 

Is there another way of living? Why is it that once traditional countries such as Sri Lanka are obsessed with big, shiny ostentatious vehicles that people buy on loans they cannot pay back while the counties which give nations such as ours loans, have premiers riding cycles!

Amid much talk of system change we seem to have omitted reflecting on these salient truths. Let us air out some facts and ponder:

1. Why cannot we ride cycles to work? At least we will be fitter.

2. While having one day to remember the environment we ruined seem quite cute, although pathetically so, it is also distinctly inane when we are roasting, boiling and evaporating under a wrathful, revengeful sun and upon a cracking earth. The glaciers along with our brains are melting. So now that we have had an environment day for nearly five decades, how has it impacted this wilting brain of ours? 

3. The world saw during COVID lockdown how the environment thrived without the pests that we are on the roads. The dirty fumes had disappeared along with the massive throng of vehicles that crowded the roads. The other creatures of the environs celebrated the absence of humans and their contraptions. 

4. As another bicycle day and environment day comes and goes, let us remember the above and understand that we cannot drive our luxury adult toys to the moon, where we may have to soon go in exodus after packing up our technology and our superiority. 

But possibly, before that fanciful sojourn, we may become premature fodder for the earth.

5. As with much else, saving the environment is up to each individual and there could be immense power in each individual action in how it influences others. In each suburban lane, if one person took the cycle to work the ripple effect of influence could lead to others following suit.

6. Primary and secondary schools and university educators have a major role to play in conceptualising knowledge on the environment and the dire straits it is in alongside what each student could do to rectify the situation; 1. Plant a tree. 2. Campaign for replacing plastic. 3. Promote authentic sustainability in green teen entrepreneurship. 4. Research into the continued relevance of universe related traditional knowledge of the ancestors of the nation. 5. Use it in diverse ways where relevant to bringing back the reverence to the earth, water and plants. 

7. Mainstreaming earth and environment education is the only way where children and youth are going to learn the dangers themselves and other creatures are in. It is high time that we start educating for climate adaptation and rescue. If done in earnestness with integration into other subjects as appropriate, such an education especially at primary and secondary level will help make our planet habitable once again. Before it is too late. 

(SV)