Last week, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, announced that all new buildings would have to meet high environmental standards from January. His decree will make Dubai a leader in sustainable building that does not overburden the environment.

The announcement set me thinking – building standards are great. They will shape the world outside us and make our society use less energy and endanger less life. I was happy the leader of Dubai had seen this.

At the same time, I was worried.

What are building standards if the people who inhabit the buildings don’t live up to high standards themselves? We could have buildings saving energy, but we’d still have people wasting it. I realised that we need something more to complement environmental building standards. We need standards for how we live our lives – standards that only education and upbringing can provide. After thinking about it, I call these “inner building standards” – “inner” meaning in our hearts and minds.

Not only do we need standards for buildings, we need standards for what goes on inside us. Just as construction sites can pollute and be a mess, so can people.

The World Wildlife Fund’s 2006 report says we are currently using 125 per cent of the life the Earth can sustain. We are eating away at the life that renews itself with each generation, shrinking what our future generations can count on. At the same time, the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment – written by 1,350 scientists from all over the world – noted that 60 per cent of the world’s ecosystems are degrading or being used unsustainably. Yet our population increases exponentially, and our societies continue to industrialise.

We’re a mess.

I cannot stomach giving my grandchildren a world where we’ve destroyed life, but that is what we are doing. If we don’t become environmental people, all the environmental building will come to naught, and the standards Sheikh Mohammed proposed will be wasted.

That being so, I set to thinking about my inner building standards, and here are the first three I found:

Do I think that all life is worthy of respect? Do I understand how my actions affect the Earth’s systems of life? Do I endeavour to give future generations a renewable Earth, like I inherited?

Each one of these questions contains a standard by which I can evaluate my own heart and mind.

Just as environmental building standards have a checklist, so I can have a checklist for the environmental soul. I speak as someone who wants Dubai to be a city of the 21st century that is worth celebrating. In order for Dubai to be that, though, its future generations must behave differently than the present inhabitants.

Our role is to invest as much in education and upbringing as we do in quality construction. While we create environmentally-friendly buildings, we should also build environmentally-friendly individuals.

Source: Emirates Today
Posted Date: 31/10/2007