Among all of the buzzwords of the age we are gradually leaving behind, founded in greed and designed to deceive, exploit and disempower people, perhaps none have achieved the currency or the traction that “development” has. When its exploits came around to hit hard at the um… exploiters, there was a massive scramble to qualify it with semantic nuancing. One of these was the word “sustainable”. It was attached to development, the UN got involved and a entire stack of thinking that was supposed to futureproof the world were frantically created. It was to be new-age thinking. This is well and good for those who never knew any better than to rampage roughshod over the earth, in a 400-year-old feeding frenzy that puts to shame the attacks of locusts. As with their insect counterpart, they lived murderously, flamed briefly and died quickly. We are carefully glad that some semblance of humanness has begun to express itself within the minds of these human locusts. But to us, sustaining a world is old hat. We have a history where there is circumstantial evidence to prove that two centuries ago, our population was three times what it was today and whose societal foundation was based on futureproofing itself.

Sadly, this is not the case today. Today, we, the Greens, have the unenviable task of trying to remind our country of that history, create the enablers to remove addiction to excessive use of resources and coach them on how to engage with a world only recently woken up to realities and the processes and policies it has put together to try to right the wrong. In a world where multiple crises of food, water, energy, finance, health and conflict seem to indicate that it has almost left it too late, the greens recognize the arduousness of the task and the infinitesimally small chance there is for success. Yet, the greens will gird their loins and go into battle as they have always done, doing not what it can but what it must.