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Text of my ‘When Worlds Collide’ column published in Ceylon Today Sunday newspaper on 17 February 2013

See also column on 23 Dec 2012: Avoiding the ‘Mother of All Tsunamis’

Follow up column on 3 March 2013: When Worlds Collide #56: Communicating for Survival – Who will save Earth?

Sometimes it takes a dramatic event to open the world’s eyes to certain hazards.

The meteor that exploded in the skies over Chelyabinsk, in Siberia, Russia, on 15 February 2013 is now being seen as a ‘wake-up call from outer space’.

The object’s size, before it broke up in the atmosphere, has been estimated to have been around 17 metres (55 feet), weighing around 10,000 tons. Scientists believe that some 500 kilotons of energy was released – which makes it 20 to 30 times more powerful than the atomic bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Fortunately, no one was killed, even…

Text of my ‘When Worlds Collide’ column published in Ceylon Today Sunday newspaper on 17 February 2013

Growing up in a very different Sri Lanka during the 1970s and 1980s, I used to have a recurrent dream.

A daring press baron takes on an overbearing Lankan government. As the irate head of state lines up the formidable powers of bureaucracy, police and even the military to muzzle the last untamed newspaper standing, the publisher ups the game.

A special evening edition, laden with incriminating exposés of government misdeeds, rolls out and is distributed for free. As people scramble to get copies, battle tanks line up outside the newspaper’s suburban printing press, and take aim…

I always woke up at this point, alarmed and restless. Oh, we shouldn’t interpret our dreams too seriously, but as later events showed, my childhood imagination had some eerie parallels in the real world.

We haven’t…

Text of my ‘When Worlds Collide’ column published in Ceylon Today Sunday newspaper on 10 February 2013

Sometimes it takes a personal tragedy to open our eyes to monstrous realities.

A few years ago, 17-year-old Shivam Bajpai was struck down in a traffic accident in an Indian city. He lay bleeding on the busy road for more than 40 minutes and then died.

His cousin Piyush Tewari, a successful private equity manager, was horrified. “People literally watched him die…but nobody came to his aid,” he recalls.

This scenario unfolds every day and night all across India, where 15 people die every hour from road accidents, and 60 more are seriously injured. Road accidents in India are the leading cause of death in the age group 15-40, the most productive section of society.

“We have the dubious distinction of being World Number One in road accident deaths,” says Tewari, who…

Text of my ‘When Worlds Collide’ column published in Ceylon Today Sunday newspaper on 3 February 2013

“How did you come here?”

This was a question that the late Ray Wijewardene – maverick engineer, agronomist and inventor – frequently asked of his visitors to his Colombo home cum office. Most travelled in a motor vehicle – bus, car or motor cycle.

“Just think about it for a minute,” Ray would tell them. “You came here in an imported vehicle, fuelled by imported oil — and you drove it on roads paved with imported bitumen (tar).”

After waiting a few seconds for this to sink in, he delivered his punch line: “Do you still believe we’re an independent nation?”

He had a greater vision of independence, not limited to political self-governance that Ceylon obtained in February 1948. He argued that countries should aspire to be as “non-dependent” as possible.

Ray wasn’t…

Text of my ‘When Worlds Collide’ column published in Ceylon Today Sunday newspaper on 27 January 2013

The new Global Burden of Disease (GBD) report, released in December 2012, says air pollution has become one of the top 10 killers in the world.

GBD, a global initiative involving hundreds of experts and the World Health Organisation (WHO), studied deaths and illnesses from all causes across the world. Its latest analysis shows that in South Asia, outdoor air pollution has become the sixth most dangerous killer.

Even more alarmingly, indoor air pollution (IAP) – right inside our homes and offices — is the second highest killer in our region.

IAP rarely gets much attention from environmental activists. Maybe because it affects mostly women and children, especially those in poorer households. But no one is immune from its health impacts.

This isn’t just about cigarettes. Second hand tobacco smoke is certainly…

Text of my ‘When Worlds Collide’ column published in Ceylon Today Sunday newspaper on 20 January 2013

For a year, this column has explored the power of ideas – some proven and celebrated, others still emerging and experimental but worth watching.

We have been especially interested in innovation: ideas applied to solve problems and make life better.

Today, in this 50th column, I want to share two uncommon yet charming ideas that, in their own way, defy conventional wisdom. That’s how change often starts – as a bright spark in unlikely places.

Why bother with outlandish ideas?

One of my Asian heroes, the Malaysian social activist Anwar Fazal, put it so well: “In a world that is increasingly violent, wasteful and manipulative, every effort at developing islands of integrity, wells of hope and sparks of action must be welcomed, multiplied and linked…”

Pay It Forward

You help someone who…

Text of my ‘When Worlds Collide’ column published in Ceylon Today Sunday newspaper on 13 January 2013

My column on 30 December 2012, which assessed the lasting influence of Silent Spring and its author Rachel Carson, was focused on the United States where she first raised the issue in 1962 amidst adversity and controversy.

Her advocacy, sustained by many other activists after her untimely death, eventually led to greater scrutiny and regulation of agro-chemicals in the industrialised world. Yet the global agrochemicals industry – which rode the wave with the Green Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s — thrives in the developing world.

According to the Pesticide Action Network Asia Pacific (PANAP), an advocacy group, pesticides prevail because a multi billion dollar industry is behind them, exerting great influence on international standard setting bodies, national governments and local communities.

Their website says: “The enormous influence that these chemical corporations…

I couldn’t write the When Worlds Collide column this week. Instead, here is a news feature I wrote for Ceylon Today, published on Sunday 16 Dec 2012:

It helps to take a look at the bigger picture once in a while. Today’s modern space and imaging technologies allow us to explore the biggest picture possible – at a planetary level.

Images of our Earth from space have been available for around 40 years. The first images that emerged from early space missions in the 1960s – showing a blue marble hanging in the darkness of space – energized the environmental movement worldwide.

But as technology advances, that vantage view keeps getting better.

Earlier this month, the US space agency NASA released a series of new images that offer an unprecedented new look at our planet at night.

A global composite image, constructed using cloud-free night images from a new…

Text of my ‘When Worlds Collide’ column published in Ceylon Today Sunday newspaper on 30 December 2012

“The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modem and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects, it has also turned them against the earth.”

With those cautionary words ended Silent Spring, a popular science book that first came out 50 years ago, and is now widely regarded as a book that changed our thinking about the environment.

Its author was a marine biologist turned science writer, Rachel Louise Carson, who…

Text of my ‘When Worlds Collide’ column published in Ceylon Today Sunday newspaper on 23 December 2012

The much-hyped End of the World didn’t happen on December 21.

As I wrote in my blog that morning, Ass-trologers (my new name for those claiming to read our destiny in the stars) and other dabblers in pseudo-science and non-science have a lot of explaining to do.

Perhaps the greatest damage these false prophets of doom – and their uncritical multipliers in the media — did was to distract us from the real hazards that we are confronted with.

The long list includes better known threats like nuclear weapons and accelerated climate change as well as the more slowly building up ones like water scarcities, antibiotic resistance and demographic changes.

There are also some hazards that are not frequent, but have the potential to inflict planetary scale damage when they do occur. The…