Greening Aid: Aid Worker, Question Thyself

Running a series this week by Brooks Keene looking at the intersection between aid and the environment, focusing on whether aid interventions are truly sustainable.  Brooks previously worked as a development policy consultant in Kenya, and now works for a US-based NGO.

For previous posts in the series, see here.

Aid Worker, Question Thyself

How do aid organizations bridge the gap between our rhetoric about sustainability and our actions in a more substantial way?  We need a framework for our thinking that will let us dodge our own cultural proclivities.  I think there are three basic cultural barriers keeping us from making progress.

First, though the majority of aid workers work in their own country, the organizations themselves and usually senior management are, for the most part, from “the West.” This makes aid organizations subject to the “culture of life.”  Death, or at least death at the wrong time, is the enemy that we are trying to save everyone from.

The focus then becomes on immediate short-term needs of individuals versus needs for a healthy society in the long run.  You’re less likely to accept short term costs for long term gains.

Second, I suspect that, though we’ve worked hard to exorcise it, there’s still a lurking thought that everyone should live like us or at least be able to if they want.  Aren’t our lives great?  Well…sort of.  The fun of playing Guitar Hero (Metallica edition) notwithstanding, a lot of our technologies and “advancements” are also killing society as we know it.

Just because we have abundant cheap food doesn’t mean that we have agriculture figured out.  Conventional modern agriculture is destroying our topsoil and is highly dependent on synthetic fertilizers produced with fossil fuels.  We’re killing ourselves slowly, then quickly once we’ve finished “mining” our topsoil.  New topsoil forms at the rate of inches over hundreds of years.  Reckoning to come.

Third, the world isn’t set up for people to live sustainably in the true sense (you’re excused from this statement if you’re Amish).  We all commit grievous environmental sins daily.  One example of this would be using a laptop with tons of heavy metals in it that will eventually end up in the ground water with energy that was created unsustainably to type frivolous ideas in a blog while flying in huge metal contraption spewing carbon an ocean away from where you live.

[Photo from eastafricaaidproject.org]