Responsibility to Ourselves

With the ubiquity of smartphones, the images coming out of Nepal into our feeds following the devastating landslides and deadly floods – caused by the collapse of a massive slab of rock under the pressure of melting glacial ice – are a sobering reminder that nature can be both magnificent and merciless.
Entire communities can be overwhelmed within hours, roads buried, homes swept away, and thousands of lives lost, leaving Governments and citizens struggling to cope with forces far beyond their control. We have also seen images of earthquakes in neighbouring Venezuela and so many other countries across the world.
Guyana, by comparison, has been remarkably fortunate. We do not live under the constant threat of earthquakes. We have no mountainsides with glacial ice sheets waiting to collapse onto villages – even in our Pakaraimas. We are not in the path of hurricanes that batter our neighbours in the Caribbean nor volcanoes threatening communities with rivers of lava. Nature, for the most part, has been extraordinarily kind to us.
But perhaps that very good fortune has made us complacent. Our most serious challenge posed by Mother Nature has been the periodic floods that are not the result of some irresistible act of nature since we have consciously chosen to live on a coast below sea level. Our floods can be exacerbated by something much more mundane: garbage.
Our coastland, where ninety per cent of our population lives, is built around water. Our canals, drains, trenches, kokers, conservancies, and rivers are not decorative features of the landscape. They are essential components of a drainage system created by our founders upon which the safety of communities depends. When bottles, plastic bags, food containers, old appliances, mattresses, vegetation, and other rubbish are dumped into them, the consequences are predictable.
When the rain falls during our rainy seasons, water has nowhere to go but into drains that then overflow, causing roads – even in Georgetown – to become rivers, flooding homes and businesses and spreading disease and economic ruination. The Government – even in the municipalities – is then expected to mobilise trucks, pumps, excavators, and emergency crews to clean up the mess, for which we, the taxpayers, ultimately pay.
There is something particularly perverse about a society being spared most of the great natural disasters of the world only to create smaller disasters for itself. Folks cannot prevent an earthquake or order a hurricane to change direction, but we Guyanese can decide where we throw our garbage, which is where citizenship comes in.
It is lazy to regard drainage and flood prevention as solely the Government’s – local or central – responsibility. Certainly, the Government has an obligation to maintain canals, clear major drainage channels, enforce environmental regulations, and provide adequate waste disposal services. But no drainage system, however well engineered, can indefinitely withstand citizens treating it as a giant rubbish bin, which therefore makes the responsibility shared. A citizen who throws a plastic bottle into a trench may regard it as one insignificant act, but multiply that act by thousands of people, and the “insignificant” bottle becomes part of a very significant blockage.
We Guyanese should therefore rethink what we mean by “civic responsibility”. Keeping our communities clean is not merely about appearances but is a form of flood prevention. The lesson from countries regularly devastated by natural disasters should not be that we are lucky and therefore have little to worry about. Rather, it should be the opposite. Because we have been spared so much, we should be more determined to protect ourselves from what we can control.
We should not blame the Government for every flooded street when some of the very obstructions causing the problem were put there by citizens. We have been blessed with a relatively benign natural environment, so let us be thankful and not abuse that blessing. We may be unable to stop the heavens from opening, but we can make sure that when the rain comes – and it will – the water has somewhere to go.
That is not the responsibility of Government alone, but the responsibility of all of us.