ENVIRONMENT AND MAN’S SELF-DESTRUCTION IN EAST AFRICA

Jacob Waiswa
Situation Health Analyst
Dishma-Inc.
P.O. Box 8885,
Kampala-Uganda
Tel. +256392614655/+256752542504
dishma.imhs@gmail.com
www.situationhealthanalysis.blogspot.com

In recent years, globalization in all facets has taken its share of influence on ways individuals live. It is the nature of their lifestyle that yields certain consequence –which, ultimately, impacts the environment –negatively or positively.

As a natural interaction phenomenon, the natural environment too gives its feedback proportionately to how individuals interact with it.

The feedback, once negative, takes the forms of natural disasters like food shortages, disease epidemics, and uncertainty of the future. The opposite will be true if the interaction is positive –like sustainable utilization of natural resources.

Lifestyle choices towards management of natural resources depicted food availability and a healthy population to manage them. Modernization is so –if there are tarmac roads, high administrative and commercial building, corporate life and not all, in terms of development of the natural environment of which humanity was part.

In just one year 4/5 days in the coolest month (July) in Kenya was as warm as Uganda unlike the previous year. There were seasoned flooding that broke sewerage systems –which in turn went on to contaminate food, water and other human environments –denying affected population access to main roads, and without electricity.

Rather than the selfish and egocentric yet destructive behaviors towards nature and feedbacks from the natural environment characterized by generating conditions for infectious diseases and “wild” rains, and famine –the people of Uganda districts of Kampala, Jinja, Mayuge, Iganga ought to borrow a leaf from their Nairobi counterparts by learning to really co-exist with nature and sustainable use of natural resources.

Buddhists cultivate their relationships with the natural environment through insight meditations. The matter of conserving the natural environment ought to go spiritual –as integral part of worship.

That will help dissolve aggression and greed towards the environment. However, recent months have showed that even a model country like Nairobi (Kenya) almost falls in the bracket of countries like Uganda in terms of food shortages and implications of climate change.