PROCEEDINGS OF THE REGIONAL PUGWASH WORKSHOP IN HONOUR OF JAYANTHA DHANAPALA PRESIDENT OF THE PUGWASH CONFERENCE ON SCIENCE AND WORLD AFFAIRS

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1 PROCEEDINGS OF THE REGIONAL PUGWASH WORKSHOP IN HONOUR OF JAYANTHA DHANAPALA PRESIDENT OF THE PUGWASH CONFERENCE ON SCIENCE AND WORLD AFFAIRS SRI LANKA NOVEMBER LEARNING FROM ANCIENT HYDRAULIC CIVILIZATIONS TO COMBAT CLIMATE CHANGE SRI LANKA PUWASH GROUP i

2 Acknowledgements This book is a record of the first Pugwash meeting in Sri Lanka that was recognised by the Pugwash Council 26 years after the Sri Lanka Pugwash Group was set up in April I wish to thank Sarvodaya Vishva Lekha for their co-operation to meet a tight printing schedule, Mr. Piyasena Pitadeniya Publishing Manager, Mr. Nimal Somachandra Production Manager, Mr. Udayalal Mananahewa and the efficient saff of the Type-setting department, specially Ms. Sujatha Lopez, Ms. Wayomi Godahena, Mr. Noyel Padma and Mr. Janaka Illangaratne. Finally, as always I wish to thank my wife and children for their inspiration love and affection for all my activities that has kept me going for a long time. D L O Mendis Secretary / Convenor, Sri Lanka Pugwash Group. ISBN Sri Lanka Pugwash Group Printed by Sarvodaya Vishva Lekha Pvt. Limited Sri Lanka 2008 October ii

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11 SIR JOSEPH (JOZEF) ROTBLAT 4 November August 2005 Elected FRS 1995 By R. A. HINDE 1 CBE (HON.) FBA FRS AND J. L. FINNEY 2 1 St. Johns College, Cambridge CB2 1TP, UK 2 University College, London, London WC1E 6BT, UK Joseph Rotblat, having suffered considerable hardships in his youth in Warsaw, graduated in physics from the Free University of Warsaw. On a fellowship to work with James (later Sir James) Chadwick FRS in Liverpool, he joined the Manhattan Project early in Resigning as a matter of conscience when he learned that the bomb was not needed as a deterrent against Hitler s Germany, he subsequently devoted the rest of his life to radiation physics and radio-biology and to the abolition of nuclear weapons and of war itself. He was one of the founders and the moving spirit of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, with whom he shared the Nobel Peace Prize in EARLY LIFE xi

12 Joseph Rotblat was born on 4 November 1908 in Warsaw, the fifth of the seven children of a Jewish family. Although the two eldest died in infancy. His father had a nationwide horse-drawn paper transport business and bred horses in the countryside: Joseph described his early childhood as idyllic. However, circumstances changed dramatically almost overnight in World War I. His father s horses were requisitioned for the army, and the business collapsed. A wave of anti- Semitism did not help. Thrust into penury, the family was forced to move into a wretched flat with no bath and an outside toilet. All the childhood diseases were rife, food was scarce, and he was never afterwards able to eat potatoes because of his memories of the taste of potatoes that had been frozen. The hardship, illness and intolerance that he experienced at that time generated by the war, did much to determine his later dedication to promoting world peace. His education was severely disrupted: he could not regularly attend school and at the age of 12 years started training as an electrical technician. As a result he did not obtain the matura secondary-school certificate necessary for admission to the University of Warsaw. However, while working as a domestic electrician, in 1929 he began studying in the evenings at the Free University of Warsaw and read everything he could in English and Russian as well Polish. His parents had wanted him to be a rabbi, but with his mathematical and experimental abilities he obtained a master s degree from the Free University in From 1933 to 1939 he was a Research Fellow at the Radiological Institute of the Scientific Society of Warsaw under Professor Ludwik Wertenstein (who had been an assistant of Maria Sklowdoska Curie and had also worked with Lord (Ernest) Rutherford FRS in Cambridge). He sat for and passed the matura as an external student and qualified as Doctor of Physics at the University of Warsaw in Rotblat described Wertenstein s humanitarian approach to science as having had a deep effect on his life, and he came to see himself as Wertenstein s heir. From 1937 to 1939 Rotblat was Assistant Director of the Atomic Physics Institute of the Free University. EARLY WORK ON NUCLEAR PHYSICS The year in vhich Rotblat began his research life was that in which James Chadwick had published his discovery of the neutron. Two years later, in 1934, artificial radioactivity was discovered by the Joliot-Curies. Artificial radioactivity work had already started in the Warsaw Laboratory using a-particle bombardment. Rotblat began to explore the field by using neutron bombardment. The main source of neutrons that could be exploited at the time was radium. His early experiments used 30 milligrams of radium in solution as a source of neutrons: every few days the accumulated radon was pumped into a tube filled with beryllium powder; the a-particle bombardment of the beryllium produced the neutrons. This source was very limited, as were other experimental facilities, causing Rotblat to comment years later, we had to compensate for lack of facilities with ingenuity. The Warsaw experiments included the discovery of nuclides and, more importantly, evidence for the inelastic scattering of neutrons, the subject of Rotblat s doctoral thesis and of his first nuclear physics paper. This first experimental demonstration of what was previously only a hypothesis of Niels Bohr s added an important building block to the growing young edifice of nuclear physics. During his five years or so in the Warsaw laboratory, Rotblat produced 15 papers on different aspects of this developing field. He discovered induced radioactivity in nickel and cobalt, phenomena the much better resourced team under Enrico Fermi (ForMemRS 1950) had failed to find. His work on the production of artificial radioactivity by fast neutrons led him to devise an ingenious yet simple way of enhancing weak signals, and a method was found for measuring the ranges in air of particles emitted in nuclear disintegration. At first he used gold in his detector system, but in 1938 he was beginning to experiment with uranium. When he heard of the fission of uranium by Frisch & Meitner (1939) he realized that the reaction would result not only in energy but also in the emission of some additional neutrons, and demonstrated this experimentally. It thus became clear to him, at the same time as scientists xii

13 in other countries, that a divergent chain reaction, leading to an enormously powerful bomb, was a theoretical possibility. Horrified by this thought, and distracted by is move to England and the necessity of learning English, he put the possibility to the back of his mind. But the thought that the Nazis would make the bomb persisted: if they were to, he was sure that they would use it. He came to think that the only way to prevent the Germans from using an atomic bomb would be to make one first, so that the Allies could deter the Nazis from using it by threatening immediate retaliation. LEAVING POLAND After he obtained his PhD, Rotblat received two offers, one from the Joliot-Curies in Paris and the other from James Chadwick at Liverpool University. He chose the latter, reasoning that participating in the development of the cyclotron facilities being created there would enable him to bring back related expertise to Warsaw to help establish a world-class nuclear physics facility in Poland. He went to work with Professor Chadwick in March Initially Chadwick could offer him only a very small salary ( 120 p.a.), barely enough for one person to live on, so he had to leave his wife, Tola Gryn, whom he had married in 1937, in Warsaw. At first he found the language barrier very difficult. His wife persuaded him to persist and not to move to Paris and thus, he said, saved his life. During his first few months in Liverpool, he developed a time-discriminating electronic detector system that enabled the study of radionuclides with sub-second lifetimes. In addition to opening up an experimental window on artificial isotopes with lifetimes down to about 10 seconds, this development was also particularly useful in determining absolute source intensities (particularly of weak ones) and in measuring the efficiency of Geiger counters. It was on the basis of this imaginative work that, in August 1939, Chadwick offered him the Oliver Lodge Fellowship, doubling his salary and raising hopes that he could fetch his wife. His attempt to do so was tragically frustrated because she had developed acute appendicitis with complications and was unable to travel. Rotblat had to come back to England alone, and two days later the German army entered Poland. During the coming months he made several attempts to arrange for her to leave Poland. The first, with the aid of Niels Bohr (ForMemRS), was to be through Denmark, but Denmark was invaded by the Germans before the plan could come to fruition. A similar plan for her to leave with the help of cousins in Belgium was frustrated when that country, too, fell to the invaders. Then she tried through Italy, but while she was actually on her way to the border, Italy entered the war as a German ally and she was turned back. Tola returned to live with her parents in Lublin, and Rotblat had only one more letter from her, in December 1940; unknown to him, she and her widowed mother died in Majdanek concentration camp. That his wife had died was known to British Intelligence in 1941 but was not communicated to him until His brother survived as a partisan, while his mother and five other family members had the enormous good fortune to survive hidden in a Gentile family s house in Otwock, near Warsaw. NUCLEAR FISSION In his brief visit to Warsaw, Rotblat discussed his scruples about the terrible possibilities of atomic weapons with Professor Wertenstein, who was convinced by Rotblat s calculations but refused to advise him on the moral issue. Back in Liverpool, where he taught an honours course in nuclear physics and also lectured on radio, his lectures were received with great enthusiasm by the students, one of whom referred to a friendly tension between students and Rotblat. Using his skill as an electrician, he also replaced the aged direct-current wiring of the laboratories and installed alternating cur rent which they needed for radar research. When the Blitz came to Liverpool, he took his full share of the fire-watching duties. In November 1939 he discussed with Chadwick his plan for research xiii

14 on the feasibility of the atom bomb, and wrote later that the reply was typically Chadwickian : Chadwick grunted without letting on whether he had already had the same idea. A few days later Chadwick told him to go ahead and gave him two young assistants, one of whom was a Quaker and a conscientious objector; Rotblat had qualms of conscience about using him without revealing the real purpose of the research. Rotblat realized that the chain reaction would have to be propagated by fast neutrons; otherwise the nuclear explosion would not differ much from a chemical explosion. It was therefore important to measure the fission cross-section for fast neutrons, their energy distribution, their inelastic scattering, and the proportion of those captured without producing fission. It was also necessary to find the probability of spontaneous fission of uranium, to ensure that stray neutrons would not cause a premature reaction. These problems were tackled with the Liverpool cyclotron, causing other pioneering work that had been started with this new facility, for a study that Rotblat had initiated on radioactive bromine, to be abandoned for what Rotblat later called more urgent duties. Meanwhile the Frisch Peierls memorandum (Frisch & Peierls 1940) was effectively a blueprint for an atomic bomb. Otto Frisch (FRS 1948) and Rudolf (later Sir Rudolf) Peierls (FRS 1945) consulted with Rotblat and Chadwick, and Frisch came to Liverpool and measured the fast-neutron fission cross-section for uranium-235. It was thus established by Chadwick s team that a nuclear explosive based on fission was feasible. However, its manufacture was beyond the resources of wartime Britain. THE MANHATTAN PROJECT Churchill and Roosevelt signed the Quebec agreement for UK USA collaboration on development of the atom bomb. It was decided that Chadwick, Frisch and Rotblat should work on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. In late 1943 Rotblat was visited by a policeman who took down a few superficial particulars and, on enquiry, told him that he was to become a British citizen in a week s time: apparently the agreement had been that scientists taking part in the Manhattan Project had to be US or UK citizens. Rotblat, who later remarked that this instant citizenship procedure later allowed Klaus Fuchs to slip through the net, was deeply torn. He had shared nightly bombing with the Liverpudlians and had come to love Britain dearly, but on the other hand he felt a deep loyalty to his native Poland, devastated by the war. He refused citizenship, and the UK group sailed in December 1943 without him. However, two weeks later he was told that General Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, had, uniquely waived the citizenship requirement in his case. Upon arrival at Los Alamos he immediately questioned whether wartime Germany could mount a scientific project on the scale to make an atomic weapon. The only available record of his work at Los Alamos concerned four detectors to analyse fast neutron pulses. All the workers at Los Alamos were subject to strict security and censorship. Jean Thomson, a friend whom Rotblat had known in England, had asked him to get in touch with a young woman, Elspeth Grant, who was living in Santa Fe and gradually becoming deaf, lonely and depressed. The scientists were allowed to take a bus into Santa Fe, but meetings with outside people required security clearance. Rotblat decided that this would involve Elspeth in being interrogated, and with Chadwick s permission visited her once. Her brother was killed on D-Day, and he saw her again briefly. Later he went to Santa Fe with colleagues to learn to fly, and so could see her more regularly. His visits not only provided her with company but were also relaxation for him, with his increasing disillusion with his work. General Groves, in charge of the Manhattan Project, was a frequent dinner guest at the Chadwicks. On the evening of 4 March 1944 Rotblat was present when Groves said that the real purpose of making the bomb was to subdue the Soviets. (Groves corroborated his 1944 remarks 10 years later when giving evidence at the Oppenheimer hearings. He is recorded as saying that, from soon after he took charge he had no illusion but that Russia was the enemy and that the xiv

15 project was conducted on that basis.) Rotblat was deeply shocked: the USSR was an ally against the common Nazi enemy and was suffering heavy losses on the eastern front. His dismay was exacerbated by conversations with Niels Bohr, who even then worried about the consequences of an arms race between East and West. Towards the end of 1944 Chadwick told him that intelligence reports indicated that the Germans had abandoned their bomb project. Rotblat felt that his presence at Los Alamos, helping to make an horrendous weapon, was no longer justifiable and asked permission to leave. Disillusioned with the project, he also worried about the fate of his family in Poland. Rotblat was probably the only project scientist to resign for moral reasons. The majority had insufficient moral scruples. As Professor Hoodbhoy of Islamabad put it, Joseph Rotblat did exactly what was right. And moral. No equivocation, no this-or-that. He simply quit. In Rotblat s view those who took no action were motivated by their continuing scientific curiosity, a belief that using the bomb would save many American lives, or a fear that their careers would be jeopardized. Informed of his decision, Chadwick was not pleased that a member of the British team should be the first to leave. He informed the intelligence chief at Los Alamos and was shown a dossier with evidence apparently incriminating Rotblat as a spy: his conversations with Elspeth had been reported, and his flying lessons were interpreted as part of a plan to be parachuted into Sovietoccupied Poland, to hand over the secrets of the atom bomb. Rotblat came to believe that he had been subject to extra surveillance because he lacked US or UK citizenship. Fortunately the dossier contained details of conversations and dates that could easily be disproved, and he was allowed to leave, ostensibly for personal reasons, provided he did not discuss his real reasons with his former colleagues. But he had been branded as a traitor and a turncoat for listening to his own conscience. He was allowed to say goodbye to Elspeth only in an open place, not telling her why he was leaving. She visited London as a married woman in 1950, and Rotblat enjoyed playing with her three children. Later, when she returned to the USA, she was interrogated several times by CIA agents, who told her that Rotblat was a Communist agent. On his return journey a box containing all his personal possessions, reprints, notebooks, personal correspondence and photographs mysteriously disappeared from the train to New York. He sailed from New York and resumed his post as lecturer (later senior lecturer and director of research into nuclear physics) at Liverpool University. Contact was established with the surviving members of his family in Poland, and his sister had the terrible task of telling him over the telephone that his wife had died at the hands of the Nazis. Rotblat obtained visas tor his family and found them accommodation in Liverpool. He never remarried, saying that he never knew anything definite about his wife, although many believe that his dedication to science and to peace was also an issue. His brother and family came to live with him, and later he brought his brother s widow to live close to him in London. Partly because his family circumstances had changed, and partly because he did not want to live under a totalitarian regime, he took British citizenship in POSTWAR WORK ON NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND MEDICAL APPLICATIONS After his return to Liverpool, Rotblat was effectively in charge of the laboratory s research in the periodic absences of Chadwick, and fully in charge from the time of Chadwick s move to Cambridge in 1948 until his successor took over in At a conference on nuclear physics held at Harwell in September 1947 to celebrate both the start up of the first British pile, and the restarting of nuclear physics research in Britain after the war, he reported on the extensive range of work at Liverpool, largely based on the (then recently improved) cyclotron, which included elastic and inelastic collisions of protons, deuterons and with a range of nuclei. The whole field was growing rapidly, and Rotblat was in the thick of it. xv

16 Outside Liverpool, in the immediate postwar years Rotblat played a key role in the wider tent of nuclear physics in the UK. Recognizing the potential of atomic energy, the UK government set up an Advisory Committee on Atomic Energy. Rotblat took the leading role in two areas of its work: the development of more powerful particle accelerators and of improved photographic emulsions for the detection of elementary particles. His own research was instrumental in improving the photographic technique as an efficient energy-sensitive detector of elementary particles. Earlier work with photographic emulsions including their use in the critical experiments on uranium in , had indicated that improvements were needed to improve their efficiency and reliability, and Rotblat s work at the time was directed at overcoming the problems involved. Under his chairmanship, the work of the emulsions panel of the Advisory Committee realized major improvements, with Ilford and Kodak, working to the panel s programme, producing several different kinds of nuclear research emulsion to meet the different requirements of the experimental nuclear physicists. Offering a range of sensitivities and grain sizes to meet these different demands, the photographic detection method became a standard experimental technique. The new emulsions made the detection of rare events much easier and facilitated the discovery of the pi meson by Cecil Powell (FRS 1949) and colleagues. The camera that Rotblat devised in Liverpool to use these photographic plates, which was later improved for the Birmingham cyclotron, provided the workhorse for a range of important nuclear.periments through the 1950s. Energies of detected particles could be measured reliably, cross-sections of nuclear processes could be determined and, given certain model assumptions, information on spins and parities of different nuclear states could be obtained. One of the inherent limitations of the cyclotron was that particle energies were limited to about 25MeV The increasing scientific need to produce particles with higher energies than this led to proposals for building synchrocyclotrons, particle accelerators in which this limitation could be overcome. Obtaining a large grant to build one in Liverpool, Rotblat took on the responsibility for the design and planning of this new-generation machine. While this planning work was underway, Powell s discovery of the pi meson in cosmic ray studies showed the need for even higher energies than the 250 MeV that the Liverpool machine was designed to achieve. Working within the severe material and production constraints of the postwar period, Rotblat s practical and engineering expertise, allied to direct discussions with the steel manufacturers, pushed the design of the machine to one capable of producing 400 MeV protons. Out of loyalty to that project, he turned down the offer of a professorship in Warsaw. He was determined that in future he himself would decide how his work should be applied. Accordingly he changed gradually to a topic that would certainly benefit humanity: the med ical aspects of radiation. Deciding against qualifying as a doctor, he preferred to work with doctors on the medical effects of radiation. Although Chadwick did not approve of the change, he put Rotblat in touch with Henry Cohen, Professor of Medicine in Liverpool, who in turn gave him further contacts. An immediate result was a study of the use of radioactive iodine as a diagnostic aid for intrathoracic goitre. For this he developed a primitive scanner using a well-collimated Geiger counter mounted on a mobile X-ray stand that allowed the scanner full movement. Published in 1948, this may have been the first medical application of a scanning defector. It also used the first specimen of 131 I produced in the UK s first nuclear reactor at Harwell. He also studied the possible application of radioactive copper, iodine and phosphorus in the treatment of melanomata and the application of radioactive phosphorus in skin cancer research. In 1949 he was elected to succeed F. L. Hopwood as Professor of Medical Physics at St Bartholomew s Hospital, London, a chair that he held from 1950 until he retired in Chadwick tried to stop him from taking up the post, saying he would never be an FRS if he worked in radiation medicine, but Rotblat was never easily deterred. Some of the medical staff at Bart s objected so strongly to his appointment that he was forced to delay leaving Liverpool for some months. Initially, as a physicist he was treated as an outsider by the medical staff, and his xvi

17 only friend was the Australian endocrinologist A. J. Marshall; neither of them took kindly to the blimpishness of the establishment. Much later some of the doctors, notably Sir Geoffrey Keynes, came round, but even in those days Rotblat was a very forceful figure: this often had positive constructive consequences, but sometimes destructive ones. At Bart s he became active as an administrator and was instrumental in setting up several research and development groups. He led a team developing the therapeutic uses of particle accelerators; parallel work was going on elsewhere. In partnership with Professor Patricia Lindop he did extensive work on the effects of radiation on living organisms, studying espe cially ageing and fertility effects. He was particularly interested in the effects of strontium-90, which affects bone, and became a world authority on the effects of radiation on humans. He was largely responsible for two major World Health Organization studies (1, 2)*. He also set up a Medical Engineering Group under Bernard (later Professor) Watson. As a research worker, he always strove for accuracy and never exaggerated the effects of exposure to radiation. As editor-in-chief ( ), he built up Physics in Medicine and Biology. Although the focus of his work at Bart s was on medical applications, he continued his involvement in fundamental nuclear physics. One of the earliest publications he produced from Bart s was very much a nuclear physics paper but one with strong medical implications: the use of nuclear emulsions to locate a radioactive atom by tracing the origin of the tracks emanating from it. Much of his fundamental nuclear physics research from this time onwards was in collaboration with others, using the Birmingham cyclotron. The continued development of particle sources and detectors, and the arrival of computers, enabled more complex problems to be addressed, and permitted sophisticated theoretical models of nuclear structure and processes to be tested by more precise experiments. Nuclear probes with low charge (for example, deuterons, 3He and 4 He) were used to sample the potential due to nuclear forces. A series of fundamental nuclear physics papers that he co-authored between 1951 and 1964 relied extensively both on the emulsion techniques he had been instrumental in developing and on further improvements to his plate camera. Although this work was not central to his primary nuclear medicine interests, he did consider these studies of energy levels and other nuclear properties with the use of high-energy beams of light particles to be among his major scientific achievements. His citation on election to the Fellowship of the Royal Society quotes work on determining the angular distribution of protons from the (d,p) reaction, research that led to an important tool for measuring the spin and parity of nuclear levels. He was an inspiring teacher, even at the relatively elementary first MB level. One student describes how the physics lecture theatre became the source of increasing wonder and that Rotblat was clearly someone different, a committed soul, a man who loved knowledge and communicating knowledge. AGAINST THE BOMB Rotblat described hearing that the nuclear bomb had been used on civilians at Hiroshima as one of the worst moments of his life. He had hoped that the bomb would not work, and felt strongly that it should not have been used against civilian centres. Once it had been used, he released from the pledge of secrecy imposed when he left Los Alamos. At first he wondered if a moratorium on further development would be possible, but leftleaning colleagues, such as Patrick (later Lord) Blackett FRS and Cecil Powell, were against it because it would leave the USA as sole possessor of the bomb. The Association of Scientific workers offered help, but Rotblat felt it was too left-wing. Accordingly, in late 1945 and early 1946 he was co-funder of the Atomic Scientists Association (ASA, or BASH) in the UK, and served as executive vice-president from 1952 to This consisted largely of Liverpool and Oxford * Numbers in this form refer to the bibliography at the end of the text. xvii

18 scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project or its British predecessor, codenamed tube alloys. Its vice-presidents included many prominent UK scientists, including Blackett and Lord Cherwell FRS, and its members included Harrie (later Sir Harrie) Massey FRS, Peierls, Nevill (later Sir Nevill) Mott FRS and G. P. (later Sir George) Thomson FRS. The ASA was smaller than its US counterpart, the Federation of Atomic Scientists, but did much to stimulate public debate. A statement on UK policy, proposing controls on nuclear weapons, was put forward. Within the framework of the ASA, Rotblat was the principal organizer of a travelling exhibition, which he called the Atom Train, explaining the good and evil aspects of nuclear energy. For this he obtained a loan from the Ministry of Supply. Although aid, the sale of booklets, which he wrote to explain the exhibition, funded the ASA for years. He also became editor of the Atomic Scientists Journal, and was in with his colleagues in America, especially Eugene Rabinowitch. The Americans managed to influence their government to the extent of making nuclear policy a civilian rather than a military matter. In 1951, although at first refused a visa, Rotblat attended a conference in Chicago that enabled him to discuss plans for collaboration with Leo Szilard and Eugene Rabinowitch: he said later that plans for international cooperation could be discussed meaningfully only after Stalin s death. In 1954 the Americans tested the first hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll. A Japanese fishing boat was showered with radioactive dust: one of the crew died and the rest required treatment. By analysing data on the fallout, provided by a Japanese scientist, Rotblat showed that it was a three-stage hydrogen bomb of devastating power, and published his results. Largely because of this he became more widely known, and an increasing number of people became worried about nuclear weapons. His disclosures brought him into disfavour with the government. Nevertheless the British Association for the Advancement of Science helped with the running of the ASA, and a committee was set up to study the radiation hazards from nuclear testing. He later determined the LD 50 of radiation for humans (that is, the dose that would be lethal for 50% of those affected) from data on mortality at Hiroshima. The vice-presidents of the ASA, some of whom were inclined to be right-wing, forbade future public statements, and that led to the demise of the association, or rather its transformation into the British Pugwash Group. This was at first refused charitable status, probably because it was seen as too political. Later, however, a charitable trust was created. Soon after the first hydrogen-bomb test, Rotblat met Lord (Bertrand) Russell FRS on a BBC Panorama programme. Russell, himself agitated about the developments in nuclear weapons, started to come to Rotblat for information, and gave a BBC lecture in December 1954 entitled, Man s peril on the dangers of the bomb. Russell decided to persuade several eminent scientists, from around the world to join him in issuing a statement outlining the dangers of thermonuclear war and calling on the scientific community to convene a conference on averting the danger. Albert Einstein responded enthusiastically to Russell s request, and signed what became known as the Russel Einstein Manifesto (Russell & Einstein 1955) shortly before he died. This was an eloquent and stark statement of the dangers of nuclear weapons. Rotblat was the youngest of the 11 signatories, and chaired its launch by Russell in London on 9 July It contained the injunction: Remember your humanity and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open for a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death. PUGWASH The manifesto drew considerable attention; it called for a conference of scientists to discuss the abolition of nuclear weapons and of war itself. Rotblat started to organize such a meeting of scientists of different ideological and geopolitical backgrounds. A plan to meet in New Delhi in 1956/57 was aborted because of the political situation and because of the difficulty of raising xviii

19 travel funds. However, a Canadian-born businessman, Cyrus Eaton, had offered Lord Russell his house in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, covering all expenses. Twenty-two scientists from 10 countries attended: these included 16 physicists, two chemists, one biologist, two physicians and a lawyer. Three scientific staff who attended the meetings included Ruth Adams, then assistant editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. For the first time in the nuclear age, scientists from East and West met to discuss the implications of the new weapons. Rotblat was one of two coorganizers; he wrote the section of the report that dealt with the Consequences of the use of nuclear weapons and the development of nuclear power. In his own paper he stressed that it was important that scientists should not attempt to gain public attention by exaggerating the effects of nuclear weapons, and that scientific issues should be separated from political and ethical ones. He then reviewed the current state of knowledge about the biological hazards and discussed the predictions to which it led. The conclusions of the conference were sent to leaders in the USA, Canada, the USSR and the UK and to the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Only Britain s Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, did not reply. This was the start of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs to which Rotblat dedicated the major part of the rest of his life. There has been at least one major Pugwash conference every year, and Rotblat attended every one up to and including Conference participants, mainly scientists but also government observers, military men, and others, come from over 60 different countries and attend as individuals whose remarks are non-attributable as representatives of their countries or of any other organizations (occasionally official representatives from international organizations, mainly the United Nations, are invited as observers). This was of special importance during the Cold War, for scientists from both sides of the Iron Curtain could speak freely and then report back to their governments. Pugwash challenged the view that scientists should stick to science and spoke directly to politicians. Its high scientific standards and its objectivity ensured that the politicians listened. Inevitably some, especially in the American administration, saw him as naively serving the Soviet Union. In the early days of the Cold War, Pugwash was an important, and in some ways unique, channel of communication between East and West. (The Edinburgh Conversations, organized by Professor John Erickson, were another.) Never abandoning its long-term aim of disarmament, it focused on arms control. Operating mainly behind the scenes, Pugwash carried out sustained work over decades on nuclear arms control. It was influential in laying the important groundwork for several international treaties, including the Partial Test Ban Treaty (1963), Biological Weapons Convention (1972), the Chemical Weapons Convention (1993) and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (1972), as well as laying the foundations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (1968, strengthened in 2000). It also contributed groundwork for some of strategic nuclear arms treaties (for example the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties) as well as some European confidence-building measures. In addition, because of its stature as a respected international scientific organization, Pugwash could act as an honest broker between parties in conflict. It established contact between the USA and the North Vietnamese in the late 1960s and sought to keep the channels open in the Cuban missile crisis. It has been concerned in attempts to resolve the Arab Israeli dispute and the Greek Turkish disputes over Cyprus, the tensions on the Korean peninsula and those n India and Pakistan in Kashmir. U Thant spoke of the attention paid to Pugwash statements in the United Nations. Rotblat and Jack Boag participated in a 1987 meeting of scientists in he USSR and helped raise with President Gorbachev the results of a Pugwash study non-offensive defence. Further correspondence between Pugwash and Gorbachev led to Gorbachev s decision to remove tanks from eastern Europe, paving the way for the conventional Forces in Europe Treaty. In addition to the annual meetings, Pugwash runs workshops each year on such matters as the control of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, the Middle East, scientific ethics, energy, environment, food security, security in southern Africa, economic inequities, xix

20 Figure 1. Rotblat lecturing at the First Pugwash Workshop on East Asian Security in Seoul, South Korea, in April (Photograph copyright ( Pugwash Conferences; reproduced with permission.) and international cooperation in science; Rotblat attended a high proportion of these (figure 1). A statement issued in 2002 states that Pugwash s mission is to bring scientific insights and reason to bear on threats to human security arising from science and technology in general, and above all from the catastrophic threat posed to humanity by nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction..,. From the first meeting in 1957, Rotblat was the guiding spirit of the Pugwash movement. I Ic was Secretary-General from 1957 to 1973 (with Patricia Lindop as Assistant Secretary-General from 1964 to 1970), and President (later Emeritus) from 1988 to He was Chair of British Pugwash from 1978 to His extraordinary commitment to disarmament and peace, his great organizational skill, and his exceptional human qualities have undoubtedly been the main engine of Pugwash s success. He donated his Nobel Peace Prize money and other awards to support Pugwash activities. GOVERNMENT ATTITUDES Not surprisingly, Rotblat, ASA and the Pugwash organization were regarded as probable Communist sympathizers by both the US and UK governments. In the UK, Prime Minister ( Icnicni AllIce had refused to visit the Atom Train in Two reports, full of anti-communist language, by the Subcommittee on Internal Security of the US Senate s Committee on the Judiciary ostensibly explored The extensive use to which the Communist propaganda has made use of the Pugwash Conferences (US Congress, Senate Committee on the Judiciary 1961, 1964). After Pugwash was formed, the UK government tried to inculcate an attitude of scepticism towards it. But when Rotblat asked Sir John Cockcroft FRS to suggest who might attend the 1958 conference, the government decided that it would be politic to go with the flow and sent a senior member; however, it continued to be suspicious, seeing Pugwash meetings as little better than Communist-front gatherings. Nevertheless, UK government policy gradually shifted and xx

21 Cockcroft attended the 1960 Moscow conference. Indeed, the government sought to take over the Pugwash movement by suggesting its own representatives, but Rotblat then dug his feet in. By 1962 the government was describing Pugwash as now a very respectable organization, and after the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty Rotblat was awarded the CBE. SCIENCE FOR PEACE Rotblat s efforts were not limited to the ASA and Pugwash. He was a founder of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (1958) and an initiator (later governing-body member, ) of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. He was expert adviser for the United Nations for the 1986 Year of Peace and helped establish the chair of Peace Studies at Bradford University. Rotblat was a member of the Management Group of the World Health Organization ( ). The Nobel Peace Prize for 1995 was awarded jointly to Rotblat and the Pugwash Conferences: congratulations from John Major, then the UK s Prime Minister, was conspicuous by their absence. Rotblat lamented that about one-fifth of the world s scientists and engineers work on military projects. Furthermore, they are usually better paid and have better facilities than scientists in other fields. He was convinced that present nuclear policies, particularly but not only those of the USA, are perpetuating nuclear weapons and putting the whole world at risk. Initially concerned with nuclear weapons, he was also aware of the dangers of chemical and biological weapons. However, he also worried that the continuing unchecked advance of science and technology would produce weapons even more devastating than nuclear weapons. His concern with the role of ethics extended to science in general, not only nuclear matters. He advocated that ethical principles should be taught in all science courses, and that graduating scientists should undertake not to be involved in projects harmful to humankind. He regretted the role of financial gain in the motivation of scientists or their employers, and the secrecy imposed by commercialization and also by scientists themselves in seeking the prestige of being first past the post. His ethical concern went far beyond these issues. His philosophy was based on respect for the majesty of nature: we master the forces of nature to our benefit, but also to our great peril. Hussain Al-Shahristani, who met him after spending 11 years behind bars for refusing to work on Saddam Hussein s nuclear weapons programme, said he symbolized humanity s reach for peace and respect for life. Rotblat was deeply concerned with abolishing the death penalty and campaigned actively for whistleblowers, especially Mordechai Vanunu, who served a long prison sentence for revealing Israel s manufacture of atomic weapons. THE YOUNGER GENERATION His elder niece described Jo Rotblat as someone who knew how to find his way to a child s heart. He loved to preside at his two nieces birthday parties, which he made more interesting and lively than anyone else s. His great-nieces loved to play with the elaborate system he installed in his bedroom to control the lights, the TV, the record-player and even the curtains from a console by his bed. Whether or not that was related either to the adulation he received for his university lectures or to his stress on the importance of recruiting young people into Pugwash, he certainly recognized the importance of ensuring that the pursuit of peace should be continued well into the future. He reached out to the Student/Young Pugwash movement, recognizing the importance of engaging the next generation if the goals laid out in the Russell Einstein Manifesto were to be achieved. He had a special way of reaching students, energizing the room with the force of his arguments and gentle humour, and making them feel he was a bridge across generations. xxi

22 Figure 2. Rotblat with President Gorbachev during the 2nd Pugwash workshop on the Status and Future of the Nuclear Weapons Complexes of Russia and the USA, Moscow, in February 1995, on a visit to the Gorbachev Foundation. (Photograph from the Russian Pugwash archieves; reproduced with permission.) PROMOTING PUBLIC AWARENESS Pugwash has mostly operated behind the scenes, trying to influence politicians directly rather than the general public. However, Rotblat had been a founder member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and was active in many related enterprises. He recently created a Weapons of Mass Destruction Awareness Programme to increase the general public s conciousness of nuclear weapons issues. This programme, which involves cooperation between several organizations concerned with promoting peace, was launched in London in 2004 by Rotblat and former President Mikhail Gorbachev (figure 2). It organizes a range of awareness raising events, often involving international figures, with recent examples including Robert McNamara, Richard Garwin, Sir David Attenborough FRS, Senator Douglas Roche and Lord Rees FRS. Consonant with Rotblat s emphasis on involving the young, the programme has produced educational materials for use in citizenship modules in schools. It also maintains an informational website. Always courtly and polite, Rotblat had enormous charm. However, when serving on a committee with him one soon learned that he had great determination. His energy was unlimited: he travelled extensively (economy class until he was well past 90 years old) and lectured all over the world. He wrote over 300 books and papers on nuclear physics, medical physics and radiation biology; radiation hazards and the consequences of nuclear war; nuclear power; arms control; and the Pugwash Movement and the responsibility of scientists. He continued to write and to lecture until shortly before his death. On hearing of Rotblat s death, John Holdren, director of the Program on Science, Technology and Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a Pugwash stalwart, said, we have lost a towering figure in the struggle for peace. Joseph Rotblat was one of a kind: brilliant, eloquent, tireless, demanding, impatient, completely committed to the pursuit of a saner, safer world for all of its inhabitants. xxii

23 Rotblat with President Gorbachev during the 2nd Pugwash workshop on the Status and Future of the Nuclear weapons Complexes of Russia and the USA, Moscow, in February 1995, on a visit to the Gorbachev Foundation. (Photograph from the Russian Pugwash archives; reproduced with permission). DEGREES 1932 MA, Free University of Poland 1938 Doctor of Physics, University of Warsaw 1950 PhD, University of Liverpool 1953 DSc, University of London HONOURS 1965 Commander of the Order of the British Empire 1966 Foreign Member of the Polish Academy of Science Foreign Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences Hon. DSc, University of Bradford 1983 Bertrand Russell Society Award 1985 Hon. Fellow, University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology 1987 Commander of the Polish Order of Merit Foreign Member and Gold Medal, Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences Order of Cyril and Methodius (1 Cl.), Bulgaria Dr honoris causa, University of Moscow 1989 Hon. DSc, University of Liverpool Knight Commander s Cross, Order of Merit, Germany Distinguished Citizen Award, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War 1990 Hon. Member, British Institute of Radiology 1992 Albert Finstein Peace Prize (with Hans Bethe) 1993 Hon. Professor, University of Blagoevgrad 1994 Foreign Member, Ukranian Academy of Sciences 1995 Fellow of the Royal Society Nobel Peace Prize (with the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs) 1996 Hon. Freeman of the Borough of Camden Copernicus Medal, Polish Academy of Sciences Hon. Fellow, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London Hon. DSc, City University Hon. DSc, Slovak Academy of Science Member of the Canberra Commission 1997 Lifetime Achievement Award, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Hon. Fellow, Institute of Physical Sciences in Medicine Fellow, Royal Society of Edinburgh Knight Commander of Saint Michael and Saint George Knight Commander s Cross and Star of the Order of Polonia Restituta Hon. Fellow of the Royal College of Radiologists Hon. DSc, Acadia University, Wolfville, Nova Scotia Hon. Dr of International Relations, University of Richmond 1999 Jamnalal Bajaj Peace Award xxiii

24 2000 Toda Peace Prize Hon. Fellow, Academy of Medical Sciences 2001 Hon. Fellow, Institute of Physics DSc (Medicine), University College London 2002 Linus Pauling Centennial Award ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We are indebted to many relatives and friends of Joseph Rotblat who helped with this memoir. Two books (Rowlands & Atwood 2000; Braun et a/. 2007), published not long after his death, contain reminiscences from those who knew him, as well as more detailed accounts of both his peace and scientific work. The frontispiece photograph was taken in 1995 by Prudence Curving Associates. Copyright The Royal Society. REFERENCES TO OTHER AUTHORS Braun, R., Hinde, R., Krieger, D., Kroto, H. & Milne, S. (eds) 2007 Joseph Rotblat: visionary for peace. Berlin: Wiley-VCH Frisch, O. R. & Meitner, L Disintegration of uranium by neutrons: a new type of nuclear reaction. Nature 143, Frisch, O. R. & Peierls, R Memorandum on the properties of a radioactive super-bomb. carchive.com/docs/begin/frischpeierls.shtml Rowlands, P. & Attwood, V. (eds) 2006 War and peace: the life and work of Sir Joseph Rotblat. University of Liverpool. Russell, B. & Einstein, A Russell Einstein manifesto. (Republished in 2001 by Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs ( US Congress, Senate Committee on the Judiciary 1961 The Pugwash Conferences. Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws. The Pugwash Conferences. A staff analysis. 87th Congress. Washington DC: US Government Printing Office. US Congress, Senate Committee on the Judiciary 1964 The Pugwash Conferences revisited: the Pugwash Movement viewed as of October th Congress. Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, BIBLIOGRAPHY The following publications are those referred to directly in the text. A full bibliography is available as electronic supplementary material at or via (1) 1984 Physical effects of nuclear weapons. In Effects of nuclear war on health and health services (International Committee of Experts in Medical Sciences and Public Health to Implement Resolution WH034.38), pp Geneva: World Health Organization. (2) 1987 Physical effects of nuclear war. In Effects of nuclear war on health and health services (2nd edn) (International Committee of Experts in Medical Sciences and Public Health to Implement Resolution WH034.38), pp Geneva: World Health Organization. xxiv

25 CONTENTS Page Message from the President of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, His Excellency Mahinda Rajapakse Message from the High Commissioner for Canada in Sri Lanka, Her Excellency Angela Bogdan Rotbalt Archives 1 Dedication Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Award, 3 Dr C G Weeramantry Editioral Overview D L O Mendis 5 Prologue Abdus Salam, Nobel Laureate Preamble Learning from Ancient Hydraulic Civilizations: 29 the Kalaweva-Jayaganga ecosystem Caesar Voute Preface Three modern projects: A Telling Tale - 37 the Jain story from Jalgoan, Maharashtra, India, The Ralegan Siddhi project in Maharashtra, India, 41 Reaching for the sun, in Sri Lanka, 47 Dr Ray Wijewardena Foreword An Indian Rejoinder to a Worldwide Issue, 55 Dr M S Swaminathan Introduction Dr Ph. B Smith 59 Workshop Actual Program 66 Victoria Masonic Temple hall, Colombo, November 22, 2008 Welcome Keynote Address 69 Jayantha Dhanapala, President of Pugwash Chief Guest s Inaugural Keynote Address 71 Hon. Tissa Vitarana, Minister of Science and Technology Ancient water and soil conservation ecosystems of Sri Lanka 83 Udula Bandara Awsadahami The Mahathupa of Sri Lanka, An Insight 99 Architect Shereen Amendra Vote of Thanks 109 Professor Arjuna Aluvihare, Chairman, Sri Lanka Pugwash xxv

26 Page Proffered Abstracts 111 Proffered Papers 132 Background papers 198 List of Supporters 344 Workshop Resolutions 346 Epilogue D L O Mendis 347 xxvi

27 Message from the President of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka HIS EXCELLENCY MAHINDA RAJAPAKSE

28 xxviii

29 Message from the High Commissioner for Canada in Sri Lanka HER EXCELLENCY ANGELA BOGDAN xxix

30 Sir Joseph Rotblat and D L O Mendis at the AGM of the British Pugwash Group in April 1996 on the occasion of the celebrations of the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Sir Joseph and the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs xxx

31 National Cataloguing Unit for the Archives of Contemporary Scientists The Library, University of Bath, Claverton Down, Bath BA2 7AY, United Kingdom Telephone: (internal 3522). Fax: Sir Joseph Rotblat. The appraisal, sorting and arrangement of this huge archive are still at a comparatively early stage and therefore these remarks must be considered preliminary and provisional. However, there appears to be a comprehensive record of Sir Joseph s life and career from the end of the Second World War. There is virtually nothing relating to his life in Poland before he came to Liverpool in 1939 except two very small notebooks 1937 and 1938, which may be a record of daily expenditure, though there is more substantial documentation of his continuing interest in later Polish developments. The three main areas of Sir Joseph s post-war work, nuclear physics and the University of Liverpool, Medical Physics and St Bartholomew s Hospital Medical College (Barts), and the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs and peace campaigning more generally, are all represented by archival material of great quality and quantity. There are one or two research notebooks and a little data from the first Liverpool period (before his departure for Los Alamos) and a more substantial record from his time as Director of Research in nuclear physics, : especially research (emulsion techniques, isotopes, etc) and equipment and facilities, including architect s plans and photographs. An unexpected discovery from this period was papers of the Nuclear Physics Sub-Committee of the Cabinet 1

32 Advisory Committee on Atomic Energy, Sir Joseph s involvement with which is perhaps indicative of the regard in which he was held after his return from Los Alamos. Another very welcome discovery was the records of the Atomic Scientists Association, which he co-founded in In addition to correspondence and committee papers, there is a photographic record of the famous `Atomic Train exhibition, which he organised to educate the public about the peaceful and military applications of nuclear energy. There appears to be an excellent record of Sir Joseph s years at Barts, : administration and committees, appointments, equipment, funding, radiological protection, re-organisation, research, teaching, visitors, etc. Likewise, his vast network of professional affiliations is documented: Association of Radiation Research, British Cancer Research Committee, British Institute of Radiology, British Radiological Protection Association, Hospital Physicists Association, Inter-University Council (medical physics appointments overseas), other London medical colleges, Medical Research Council, for example committees on medical applications of nuclear physics and radiology, North East Thames Regional Health Authority, Queen Mary College, London (advising on biophysics) and the World Health Organisation, for example Advisory Committee on Medical Research, Development Programme in Radiation Medicine, Management Group (as rapporteur mainly responsible for Reports on Effects of Nuclear War on Health and Health Services). There are also records of conferences, for example the First International Medical Physics Congress, Sir Joseph s publications in medical physics and radiation biology, the journal Physics in Medicine and Biology, and public and invitation lectures on such topics as radiation hazards and electronics in medicine. Another unexpected discovery was papers of Sir Joseph s predecessor at Barts, Professor F.L. Hopwood, which may take the story of medical physics there back to the 1930s. Sir Joseph s Pugwash papers currently occupy some 290 of our standard archive boxes. These boxes contain a great range of archival material: committee papers, strategic Advisory Committee and the Committee on the Future Organisation of Pugwash (early 1960s), and records relating to the British Pugwash Group including its Executive Committee. We believe there is material relating to all the Pugwash Conferences held in Sir Joseph s lifetime, from the first in Pugwash, Nova Scotia in 1957, to the 55th, held in Hiroshima in 2005, and records of a great number of the symposia, workshops, regional and other special conferences held under Pugwash auspices including those marking Sir Joseph s 80th and 90th birthdays. It is particularly pleasing that much documentation from the early conferences appears to survive. There are very many drafts of Sir Joseph s talks and lectures. A large part of Sir Joseph s own contribution to Pugwash occasions reflects his professional background but he also talked on Pugwash and related issues to all types of audiences from scientific colleagues to schoolchildren. A rather random selection of titles might include: Arms race and disarmament, Biological effects of radiation, the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, Los Alamos and after: A scientist s dilemma, Medical consequences of nuclear weapons, Nuclear energy and the proliferation of nuclear weapons, Science as a pioneer in East/West understanding, and Scientists in world affairs: the Pugwash conferences. The Pugwash archives are rich in correspondence but it is too early to make any thoroughgoing assessment, though there are certainly exchanges with Dorothy Hodgkin, Bertrand Russell, Linus Paining, Rudolf Peierls and Cecil Powell. There are records of other peace and nuclear disarmament organisations and initiatives with which Sir Joseph Rotblat was associated including the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the United Nations Disarmament Committee and the United Nations Year of Peace, There is also a record of his interest in such organisations as the British Nuclear Test Veterans Association and in the case of Mordechai Vammu, who revealed to the wider world Israel s secret nuclear weapons programme and was subsequently sentenced to a long prison term in Israel served in solitary confinement. 2

33 DEDICATION Judge Christopher Weeramantry Receives NAPF Lifetime Achievement Award David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation He is a councilor of the World Future Council. The mission of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation is to initiate and support worldwide efforts to abolish nuclear weapons, to strengthen international law and institutions, and to inspire and empower a new generation of peace leaders. Founded in 1982, the Foundation is comprised of individuals and organizations worldwide who realize the imperative for peace in the Nuclear Age. The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation is a non-profi t, non-partisan international education and advocacy organization. It has consultative status to the United Nations Economic and Social Council and is recognized by the UN as a Peace Messenger Organization. By David Krieger On April 12, 2008, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation presented a Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Peace Leadership to Judge Christopher Weeramantry of Sri Lanka. Judge Weeramantry is a former Supreme Court Justice of Sri Lanka and former Vice President of the International Court of Justice in The Hague. He was also a professor of law at Monash University in Australia. Judge Dr. C G. Weeramantry Judge Weeramantry currently heads the Weeramantry International Centre for Peace Education and Research. He views justice as the prerequisite to peace, and peace education as a prerequisite to justice. He is an active educator, lecturing throughout the world and writing prolifically. He is the author of more than 20 books and 200 articles related to peace, cross-cultural understanding and international law. He is an expert on the moral influences of religions on international law, and is currently completing a book on the influences of five major religions on peace and international law. Judge Weeramantry has received many honors for his tireless work for peace and justice. In 2006, he was awarded the UNESCO Prize for Peace Education for his indefatigable campaign for peace education, promotion of human rights, intercultural faith and understanding. In 2007, he received the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize, for his lifetime of groundbreaking work to strengthen and expand the rule of international law. In 2007, Judge Weeramantry also received Sri Lanka s highest civil honor, conferred for exceptionally outstanding and most distinguished service to the nation. As a judge on the International Court of Justice, Judge Weeramantry wrote a lengthy dissent to the Court s Advisory Opinion on the Legality 3

34 of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons. The Court found that the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be generally illegal, but held open the possibility of legality in an extreme circumstance in which the very survival of a state was at stake. In his dissent, Judge Weeramantry concluded that there was no instance in which the threat or use of nuclear weapons could be considered legal under international law. Judge Weeramantry s dissent in this case remains the most comprehensive and important legal opinion written on this critical issue. In his acceptance speech upon receiving the Foundation s Lifetime Achievement Award, Judge Weeramantry spoke on Peace, International Law and the Rights of Future Generations. He pointed out that the 20th century had begun with high hopes for peace on the heels of the 1899 Hague Peace Conference. The Conference, convened by Czar Nicholas of Russia, sought to avert the resort to war in the 20th century. But, the judge pointed out, as we all know, the 20th century was witness to two devastating world wars. Judge Weeramantry described the 20th century as the century of lost opportunity. He characterized the 21st century as the century of last opportunity. The judge expressed the concern that unless the international community is able to resolve conflicts peacefully and abolish its most destructive weapons, we may foreclose the human future. Thus, each of us alive on the planet today has special responsibilities to assure that the decisions made today will not destroy the planet for ourselves or future generations. The Lifetime Achievement Award of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation is presented to outstanding individuals who have made significant long-term contributions to building a more peaceful world. Its purpose, like other Foundation awards, is to honor distinguished individuals and to shine a light on peace leadership as a model to inspire a larger societal commitment to peace and to help empower a new generation of peace leaders. Previous recipients of the Foundation s Lifetime Achievement Award are former Canadian Senator Douglas Roche (2005); psychiatrist and author Dr. Robert Jay Lifton (2005); scientist of conscience Sir Joseph Rotblat (1997); civil society leader for the law of the sea Elisabeth Mann Borgese (1995); and two-time Nobel Laureate Dr. Linus Pauling (1991). The Foundation is proud to add Judge Christopher Weeramantry to this list of distinguished previous honorees. 4

35 EDITORIAL OVERVIEW D L O Mendis Introduction These Proceedings of the regional Pugwash Workshop on Learning from Ancient hydraulic Civilizations to Combat Climate Change is a companion volume to the Jayantha Dhanapala felicitation volume honouring his election as President of Pugwash for The purpose of the Workshop in November 2007, was to draw attention once again to the stability and sustainability of some ancient civilizations, and examine the reasons for their ultimate decline; and to discuss the problem of climate change which is a global issue today. In particular, Workshop participants learnt about the intrinsic stability and sustainability of the ancient water and soil conservation ecosystems of Sri Lanka in contrast to the potential instability of modern irrigation and multi-purpose development projects that have been imposed on some of them, that were discussed in Pugwash conferences by this author in the 1990s. This had been presented at the very first Pugwash meeting I had attended in Racine, Wisconsin, USA, in 1978, the 32 nd Symposium on Social Values and Technological Choice in an International Context. This was followed by papers at the Breukelen, Netherlands conference, No 30, in 1980, and the Banff, Canada conference No 31 in 1981, that are republished in the Dhanapala volume, Chapters 2 and 3. It was most gratifying to see some of these issues, presented in the Dagomys Declaration of the Pugwash Council in 1988, Ensuring the Survival of Civilization which is also published in the Dhanapala volume (page 166). But, prior to this, 1979 Nobel laureate in Physics, Abdus Salam s paper in the 1983 Pugwash conference was on International Commons: Sharing of International Resources, which is the Prologue in this volume. Several papers by me in Pugwash conferences are Background papers, in this volume, including No 41 in Beijing in 1991, and No 42 in Berlin in Three chapters from the Pugwash Special Study Group report The World at the Crossroads Towards a Sustainable, Equitable and Livable World compiled in and published by Earthscan, London, in 1994 have also been used in this volume.. These are the Introduction by Ph. B Smith, and two chapters, as Background papers - my chapter on the ancient irrigation ecosystems of Sri Lanka, and the Summary and Recommendations by Ph. B Smith. The saga of the tragic history of our ancient water and soil conservation ecosystems that are being destroyed in the name of development was continued in my papers at Pugwash conferences No. 45 in Hiroshima, No. 47 in Lillehammer, Norway, No. 48 in Mexico, No. 49 in Rustenburg, S. Africa, No. 50 in Cambridge, England, No. 53 in Halifax, Canada and No. 55 in Hiroshima. The Commons In the Pugwash Special Study Report in 1994, Ph B Smith had discussed the Commons, as follows: The global enclosures movement (illustrated by UNCED) now taking place will not in contradiction to the tenets of conventional economic theory create sustainability, because there is little assurance that the existing institutions are capable of, or even have the goal of, preserving the commons. Another kind of enclosures movement, the colonization of the future, is implied in the rapid depletion of the remaining natural resources. No political remedy for this colonialism is possible because future generations cannot be politically empowered; self-restraint of the present generation is the only answer. 5

36 A proffered paper at the Workshop from Japan is on the Commons (p. ---), which is now also known and discussed in environmental issues, such as in the Worldwatch Institute 2008 State of the World report, 25 th Anniversary edition, titled Innovations for a Sustainable Economy, which concludes: For centuries we have been told that there are only two choices for the management of scarce resources: corporate self-seeking or the bureaucracy of the state. But there is another way. Commons management has worked for centuries and is still working today. It can be adapted for the most pressing global problems, such as climate change. Reverting to the Dhanapala felicitation volume, Chapter 10 is the Max Perutz memorial lecture by Jayantha Dhanapala titled Mainstreaming Rights, Responsibilities and Duties, where he refers (on p. 85) to Professor Jared Diamond s impressive book, Collapse, published in Jared Diamond s picture was included in that chapter in anticipation of these Workshop Proceedings. Diamond who holds three professorships in the University of California, Los Angeles, acknowledges his debt to an earlier publication by the green activist Clive Ponting of the University of Swansea A Green History of the World in In 2007, a revised updated version of this book titled A New Green History of the World subititled the Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations was published. Both Diamond and Ponting describe how ancient civilizations failed to survive, and adduce reasons for their lack of sustainability. However, neither author has even mentioned the ancient hydraulic civilization of Sri Lanka which flourished from about the mid first millennium BCE till after the 12 th century CE. This has been documented by historians and archaeologists, and referred to by scholars like former Vice President of the World Court, Judge C G Weeramantry, a Sri Lanka Pugwashite famous for his judgments including his minority judgement on the Illegality of Nuclear Weapons. Some participants met Dr Weeramantry in his Colombo office on the last day of the Workshop, and received copies of his much cited Separate Opinion in the Danube dam case. He quoted the Arahant Mahinda who introduced Buddhism to Sri Lanka in the 3 rd century BCE, who had said to King Devanampiya Tissa at Minintale: Great king thou art not the owner but only the guardian of all this; the birds of the air and the beasts in the forest, all have equal right to it. This, Dr Weeramantry said, was the earliest known statement of the principles of modern environmental law. We may add that this was synonymous with a description of the Commons. Just as Clive Ponting and Jared Diamond have presented a western perspective of the collapse of ancient civilizations, some other earlier studies that are fundamental sources, have presented information concerning dilemmas of development today, relevant to this discussion. These include: 1.) Rachel Carson s landmark Silent Spring published in 1962; 2.) Garrett Hardin s much cited essay The Tragedy of the Commons in Science, 1968, and his Extensions of The Tragedy of the Commons, in Science, 1 May, 1998; 3.) Gadgil and Guha s path-breaking work, This Fissured Land: an Ecological History of India (1992) referred to on page xl of the Dhanapala felicitation volume; 4.) Gadgil and Guha s sequel Ecology and Equity (1995); 5.) Peter Barnes Capitalism 3.0, A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons (2006) and.6.) F A Hayley s The Laws and Customs of the Sinhalese or Kandyan Law, (1923, republished 1993). Rachel Carson s book has been described as one of the 25 most read books in the English language. The 25 th anniversary edition published in 2007, had the following review comments on the inside flap: It is rare that a single book actually changes the course of history. Silent Spring did exactly that. It spurred revolutionary changes in government policy toward the environment and was instrumental in launching the environmental movement that has made ecology a part of everyone s vocabulary. It is one of the landmark books of the twentieth century, and its message is as pertinent today as it was when it was fi rst published. As Paul Brooks writes in his Foreword, Twenty-fi ve years after original publication, Silent Spring has more than 6

37 a historical interest. Such a book bridges the gulf between what C P Snow called the two cultures Rachel Carson was a realistic, well-trained scientist who possessed the insight and sensitivity of a poet. She had an emotional response to nature, for which she did not apologize. The more she learned, the greater grew what she termed the sense of wonder.. By waking us to a specifi c danger the poisoning of the earth with chemicals she helped us to recognize many other ways (some little known in her time) in which mankind is degrading the quality of life on our planet. And, Justice William O Douglas of the US Supreme Court said: This book is the most important chronicle of this century for the human race. Rachel Carson focused specially on the harmful effects of DDT, and by extension on all other chemicals used mainly in modern agriculture promoted by agribusiness. The uproar it created still continues, on account of hostile reaction of multinational companies that felt threatened. Poisoning of the earth by chemicals is referred to by Caesar Voute, in the Jayantha Dhanapala felicitation volume (page xliii) with respect to sugar cultivation in Pelwatte which was visited by Workshop participants. A senior Pugwashite now living in Bulgaria, he could not attend the Workshop, but contributed a Preamble in this volume. Garrett Hardin s essay presented a hypothesis that went back to Adam Smith s 1776 classic An Inquiry into the Wealth of Nations recognized as one of the origins of modern economic theory. Hardin argued that whereas Commons were an essential part of all early civilizations, collapse of those civilizations was inevitable on account of increase in human population, and resultant over-grazing of the commons. Hardin described early river valley civilizations in Asia, Africa and America, but failed to recognize hydraulic society in ancient Sri Lanka. The Hardin Obituary is given in the Annex. Karl Wittfogel in his Oriental Despotism (1957) using the example of China claimed that hydraulic civilizations developed simultaneously with the development of an extensive bureaucracy in a despotic society. The Cambridge engineer turned historian E R Leach, disagreed; he averred in his well known essay Hydraulic Society in Ceylon (1959) that the monumental earthen dams and channels, and the stone sluices and spills, many of which still remain functional, were built using Rajakariya or service tenure of labour in ancient Sri Lanka. Hayley however states that there was slavery in early Sri Lanka society. (Hayley, Chapter II, Slavery. pages ) Identification of the problem of loss of commons in India by Joitreau Phule back in 1881, as quoted by Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha (1992), was commented on as follows in the Jayantha Dhanapala felicitation volume (p. xl): In India, the British destabilized an existing stable and sustainable ecosystem, or way of life, but in Sri Lanka we ourselves committed massive acts of vandalism by the wrong location of Lunuganvehera and to a lesser extent Uda Walawe. It is thus evident that the lessons to be learned from our ancient hydraulic civilization, have not been learned by hydraulic engineers, who have ignored the living evidence of the ancient systems that are still very much in use. Peasant farmers know this, but the social gap between engineers and peasant farmers was not bridged when new projects were selected for implementation from the Water Resources Development Plan, Gadgil and Guha published another book Ecology and Equity in 1995, arguing for an ecological approach to development. Projects which implement these principles, are the Jain Agri-Park of Jain Hills and the Jain Food Park of Jain Valley, which this author visited in July 2008, and the Raleghan Siddhi project, both in Maharashtra, described in the Preface, and the qanats of Iran which were seen in May

38 Reclaiming the commons Peter Barnes in his Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons (2006), refers to what he calls Capitalism 1.0 or shortage capitalism, which dates back to Adam Smith, and Capitalism 2.0 which he calls surplus capitalism, which John Kenneth Galbraith described in his Affl uent Society in 1958 as follows: The ordinary individual has access to amenities foods, entertainment, personal transportation and plumbing in which not even the rich rejoiced a century ago So great has been the change that many of the desires of the individual are no longer even evident to him. They become so only as they are synthesized, elaborated, and nurtured by advertising and salesmanship, and these, in turn, have become among our most important and talented professions. The Vicious Spirals of Over-development (Source: Mendis, 1976) Figure 1 An original model titled The Vicious Spirals of Over-development (Figure 1) presented at the Sri Lanka Association for the Advancement of Science in 1975 (Mendis, 1976) is relevant in this context. It was presented as a counter to Radnor Nurkse once popular Vicious Circle of Poverty. (Figure 2, Forced savings-, Foreign aid-, and Technological Breakthroughs added). That 1975 SLAAS paper also anticipated issues that were discussed in the 1993 Pugwash Study Group mentioned above, and shows congruence of thinking with the findings of that Study Group in 1993, a few years before this author attended his first Pugwash meeting and became a Pugwashite in

39 The Vicious Circle of Poverty (after Nurkse) (Source: Mendis, 1975) Figure 2 Peter Barnes says that the anachronistic software that governs capitalism today leads willynilly to three pathologies: the destruction of nature, the widening of inequality, and the failure to promote happiness despite the pretense of doing so. Barnes defines the commons as a generic term like the market or the state. He says that it refers to all the gifts we inherit or create together. these diverse gifts are like a river with three tributaries: nature, community, and culture. (Figure 3). He says all three branches of the commons - nature, community and culture - are under assault from corporations and need to be fortified (Barnes, p. 131) The Three Forks of the Commons River (Source: Peter Barnes, page 5) Figure 3 9

40 The Workshop Pugwash protocol was followed in the conduct of the Workshop with an inaugural plenary session that was open to the public, and closed workshop sessions that were for Workshop participants only. Likewise, these Proceedings carry Abstracts and Papers by participants, and do not have any report of discussions. Some Background papers are included however, many but not all of which were distributed to participants at the workshop, including papers already presented at international Pugwash conferences by this author. Brohier s 4 stage hypothesis (1956) republished by Needham (1971) Figure 4 In the 1970 s I had discovered Joseph Needham s monumental study Science and Civilization in China that is without parallel in this field. Next, correspondence concerning the evolution and development of the ancient irrigation systems in Sri Lanka began, because I disagreed with his published 4 stage hypothesis (Fig. 4). This resulted in three visits to his Needham Research Institute in Cambridge University, England, in the 1980s, after which he agreed with my alternative seven stage hypothesis (Fig. 5), and wrote: My treatment of the subject can be improved upon and I am counting on you to do it. This inspired the idea for a Science and Civilization in Sri Lanka project, as mentioned by Jayantha Dhanapala in his Welcome Keynote Address at the inaugural session. It is the subject of a paper at the Institution of Engineers in In selecting the theme of the workshop, after discussions with Jayantha Dhanapala, inspiration was also drawn from visits to China, Egypt, Iran and India, over the years. I had the opportunity to visit China on a few occasions, and also presented a paper at the 41st Pugwash conference in Beijing in 1991 (Background paper) where the idea for a Pugwash Special Study Group was discussed. The Special Study Group was set up at the 42nd Pugwash conference in Berlin in 1992, which I could not attend although I had submitted a paper (Background paper), my application for a travel grant having been turned down by the Sri Lanka National Science Council. Professor Noel Baptist, the first Sri Lankan (then Ceylonese) scientist to attend a Pugwash conference, in 1968, when he was President of the Ceylon (Sri Lanka) Association for the Advancement of Science, was in Berlin, and later told me they were looking for you in Berlin (see Introduction). Later still I participated in water related international conferences in Egypt, Iran, and India, which countries all have ancient hydraulic civilizations. 10

41 Highlights of the International Water History Association, IWHA, conference in Egypt, in 2003, were visits to the Bibliotheque in Alexandria, built on the foundations of the ancient library, and to the Nilometer at Roda (Rawda). I was struck by some similarities of the Nilometer to the ancient sluice (sorrowwa) with its bisokotuwa or access tower, invented in Sri Lanka in the pre- Christian era (Parker, 1909). The Roda Nilometer has a massive central chamber, functionally equivalent to the bisokotuwa, but architecturally very different. Functionally, conduits built in stone connect it to the river Nile on one side, and other conduits on the opposite side take water to the fields to be irrigated. There had been wooden gates controlling issue of water to these latter conduits just like in the Sri Lanka bisokotuwa. Evolution and Development of Irrigation Eco-Systems in Ancient Sri Lanka Figure 5 11

42 Architectural differences with the Sri Lanka bisokotuwa are striking. The large chamber has a roof inlaid with ceramics on its underside, and a flight of steps and viewing galleries at different levels. Functionally, it also had a central column marked for use as a gauge to estimate the amount of flow in the Nile river on a given date and hence the quantum of water that would be available, determined from past experience, in order to estimate the extent of land to commence land preparation for cultivation by inundation irrigation. The Iran International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage, IRNCID conference in May 2007, was a learning experience in many respects. Highlights were a visit to see the qanats, in the cities of Teheran and Yazd, and a UNESCO cultural heritage Water Museum in Yazd. The Water Museum at Yazd is also architecturally similar in outside appearance to the Nilometer at Roda. The qanats were a revelation of how the ancients had conserved the very scanty rainfall in those arid regions to create oases for human habitation that function to this day in a multireligious society. The average annual precipitation in Iran is between 200 mm. and 1800 mm. compared to 1800 mm. for the dry zone in Sri Lanka (see Background paper). In Yazd we visited a Zoroastrian temple containing an eternal flame in a glass enclosure, fed by firewood. The temple serves a small minority of Zoroastrians, estimated at around 2%, in the largely Islamic population today. Likewise there is a synagogue serving a similar small minority of the Jewish population. A non-religious water temple in Yazd has a small structure above the entrance that leads to a steep flight of stone steps leading to the qanat deep underground. The inside of this structure is beautifully finished with ornamental tiles that reminded me of the following extract from Ripley s Believe it or Not: The Mosaic Patterns found in medieval mosques across the Islamic world are so complex that the mathematics to describe them wasn t understood until the 1980 s! The Fields medal winning mathematician Sir Michael Atiyah, former President of Pugwash, ( ), who was also President of the Royal Society ( ), and Master of Trinity ( ) must be aware of this. In India in June 2007 I attended a meeting organized by the Indian Council on Water and Culture, ICWC, in Hampi, capital of the ancient Vijayanagara empire that had flourished in the late middle ages, under both Hindus and Moslems. Apart from the famous ancient temples, a feature of the ancient capital was the elephant stables, still in perfect condition, but unoccupied! The waters of the Tungabadhra river had been harnessed to provide the needs of the flourishing capital city for domestic consumption and for irrigated agriculture. A feature of these hydraulic systems is the large stone built storage tanks sometimes called baths, not unlike those in our ancient capital city Anuradhapura. An intricate hydraulic system is known to have fed them from the river. Provision was also available to dewater the structures for maintenance. Participation in the Hampi conference introduced me to the Indian Council on Water and Culture, ICWC. Subsequently some Indian scientists, members of the ICWC, made valuable contributions in the regional Pugwash Workshop. Later, I was invited to the Annual General Meeting of ICWC in Lonar near Aurangabad, and had the opportunity to visit the ancient rock caves of Ellora and Ajantha nearby, and learn more about their ancient civilizations from the Indian Pugwashites. The Kalaweva Jayaganga ecosystem The rather strenuous field visit gave participants exposure to lessons to be learned from our ancient hydraulic civilization, and contrasted these with some mistakes and blunders committed on modern irrigation and multi-purpose projects. The first field visit on November 23, day 3 of the workshop was to the magnificent ancient Kalaweva Balaluweva twin reservoir. We had two close up views, first of the Kalaweva spill originally constructed in dressed stone masonry in the 5 th century, which was encased in reinforced concrete after cataclysmic floods in December 1957, and next the ancient right bank sluice restored in British times. Udula Bandara Awasadahami, who gave an invited address at the inaugural plenary session on November 22, described the Kalaweva Jayaganga channel leading from this sluice to the Anuradhapura city tanks visited on day 3. 12

43 This 54 ½ mile long channel follows a falling contour, beginning in the Kala oya basin with a single embankment on the left side, and then, after crossing into the Malwatu oya basin, with a single embankment on the right side. R L Brohier has stated that the fall in channel bed level in the first seventeen miles of the channel, in the Kala oya basin, is only six inches to the mile, or approximately a bed gradient of one in ten thousand. Since this is well below the theoretical minimum gradient for non-silting channel flow, it had been an intriguing mystery to hydraulic engineers until an explanation was given recently, that in fact this section of the channel functions as a reservoir identified as the ancient Parakrama Talaka, the third of the three Seas of Parakrama. Meanwhile however, when the Accelerated Mahaweli project was begun after 1977, the curves on the Jayaganga were straightened by cutting through, to create a steeper hydraulic gradient in the channel. This was a tragic example of hydraulic engineering diametrically opposite to the ecosystems perspective, as shown in Table 1. Udula Bandara Awsadahami described this tragedy in the course of his lecture at the Workshop. A comparable tragedy had occurred in the 1940s in ancient Parakrama Sagara, the second of the three seas of Parakrama. (See Kalaweva photos) Time did not permit a visit to eastern Rajarata, sites of ancient Prakrama Sagara and proposed Moragahakande, when workshop participants spent two nights in Sigiriya not too far away, and visited the famed rock fortress described by Arthur C Clarke as the eighth wonder of the world. But Architect Shereen Amendra presented a hypothesis that the rock carving called the Sakwala Chakraya at Isurumuniya Ranmasu uyana in Anuradhapura, which Dr Kavan Ratnatunge called a celestial map, was in fact a landscape architect s long term plan for construction of Sigiriya many centuries later. She describes this in her contribution to these Proceedings. This incident illustrates the rich inter-action between and among delegates during the field visits on this Workshop. Walawe ganga basin Ancient Dispersed Small-scale system vs. Modern Centralized Large-scale system - Development of Underdevelopment: Incorrect location of Uda Walawe reservoir and preferred site at Ukgal Kaltota (Source, Mendis, 1968) Figure 5 13

44 Destruction of the Commons in Southern Sri Lanka and the Development of Underdevelopment The modern Uda Walawe reservoir in the southern area of Sri Lanka was passed on the way to the Pelwatte project on day 5 of the Workshop, and again on the way back to Colombo on day 6. The manifest incorrect location of this gigantic new reservoir in the middle basin of the Walawe ganga (perennial river) was seen and discussed by Workshop participants, referring specially to chapter 16, Epilogue, by Professor C B Dissanayake in the Dhanapala felicitation volume. The only reason for this incorrect location was the third stage in the incorrect 4 stage hypothesis for the evolution and development of the ancient irrigation systems in Sri Lanka as shown in Fig. 4. As stated in Chapters 14, 15, and 16 in the Dhanapala volume efforts were made to bring to the attention of high level decision makers that the Uda Walawe reservoir selected from the map titled the Water Resources Development Plan, 1959, was built in the wrong location. (Figure 5). Thereafter when construction of Lunuganvehera weva in the nearby Kirindi oya basin was proposed, it was argued that an alternative location at Huratgamuva should be studied (Figure 6), but this plea was simply ignored. Today all sorts of efforts are being made to consolidate the mistake that is the location of Lunuganvehera weva the second great reservoir in the southern area, rather than plan to relocate it at Huratgamuva. One such effort is a proposed diversion of Uma oya, a tributary of Mahaweli ganga, to augment Lunuganvehera. An alternative proposal to relocate Lunuganvehera at the upstream Huratgamuva site has been submitted, but there has not been any official response to this at the time of this writing. Hydraulic Engineering vs. Ecosystems perspectives Hydraulic engineering Ecosystems perspective perspective (Hard technology/ (Soft technology/ Transferred knowledge) Traditional knowledge) 1. Water inanimate, active animate, passive 2. Small tank inefficient stage in micro-irrigation ecosystem evolution and development essential part of total complex of irrigation systems to be of human-made ecosystems replaced by large reservoir 3. Large efficient system in combination macro-irrigation ecosystem reservoir with channel distribution with micro-irrigation ecosystems irrigation system in its command area 4. Diversion built to augment a large earliest stage in irrigated Channel reservoir - last stage in agriculture irrigated agriculture 5. Vetiya abandoned small tank deflection structure - micro water and soil conservation ecosystem 6. Downstream must be cleared of all designed as a series of micro development vegetation to lay out channel water and soil conservation areas distribution irrigation systems ecosystems 7. Forest areas limited to catchment areas not only in catchment area interspersed with fields in development areas for better nutrient flows Table 1 14

45 Kirindi oya basin Lunuganvehera reservoir and Alternative Huratgamuva site Figure 6 On November 26, day 6 of the workshop, participants saw the modern Uda Walawe reservoir in the late evening, and passed near the Lunuganvehera reservoir just after sundown. Both these gigantic reservoirs, in the southern area, wrongly sited too far down in their respective river basins, were the subject of discussion in chapters 14 and 15 in the Jayantha Dhanapala felicitation volume. Chapter 14, titled Science, Technology and Confl ict in Sri Lanka, is described as An Essay respectfully dedicated to the Memory of Joseph Rotblat, and Chapter 15 is titled Conflict over water as an Obstacle to Peace, and subtitled Public Representations on the National Question: A Submission to the Ministry of Constitutional Affairs (Sri Lanka). An Environmental Impact Assessment study with a difference in Southern Sri Lanka A non-perennial river Malala oya, ( dead stream ) lies between Walawe ganga (perennial) and Kirindi oya (non-perennial) river basins. A proposal was made by an Irrigation engineer, the late P A G Paranamana to restore an ancient river diversion to Augment Malala oya basin from Mau ara. An Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) study was done on the proposal under the aegis of the Director Prof. C B Dissanayake, at the Institute of Fundamental Studies, with myself as Team Leader, described in a newspaper review as An EIA study with a difference. (Wickremanayake, 1994). However, that EIA study was not accepted by the Irrigation department and another EIA study was done. Significantly, the description of the project was changed to Diversion of Mau ara to Malala oya basin. This was a dramatic, if perhaps unintended statement of the change from an ecosystems perspective to a hydraulic engineering approach to the project. (see Table 1) A feature of the EIA study that was rejected was the Archaeological Impact Assessment done by a small group led by a very experienced archaeologist the late Martha Prickett Fernando. Her work was mentioned in my book Eppawla, Destruction of Cultural Heritage in the name of Development (Mendis, 2000), the first in a trilogy of books on the Eppawala phosphate project published by Sri Lanka Pugwash. On November 24, day 4 of the workshop, participants passed Eppawala on their way from Kalaweva to Anuradhapura, but time did not permit a visit to the site itself. 15

46 The significance of all this is the following extract from the Supreme Court judgment in the Eppawala Fundamental Rights case which is now much cited in the field of environmental law: If I might adopt the words of Martha Prickett Fernando in her comments on another proposed project - Augmentation of Malala oya basin from Mau ara Unless development activities in areas like this project are accompanied by proper EIA studies and [proposals for] mitigation of the [adverse impacts on] archaeological resources that will be damaged, vast numbers of sites - in fact, much of Sri Lanka s unrenewable cultural heritage and the raw data for all future studies on ancient Sri Lanka - will be destroyed without record, and accurate understanding of life in ancient Sri Lanka will remain forever wrapped in myth and hypothesis. Mendis, 2000, p. 126 Science and Civilization in Sri Lanka Origins of the hydraulic engineering approach used in planning irrigation projects like Moragahakande, which leads to environmental disaster, have been traced to a four stage hypothesis for their evolution and development over the years (Figure 4), in Volume 4, Part 3 of Joseph Needham s Science and Civilization in China (p. 368). An alternative seven stage irrigation ecosystems hypothesis (Figure 5), later to be called a water and soil conservation ecosystems hypothesis, was accepted by Dr Joseph Needham, the savant with whom I worked in the Needham Research Institute, Cambridge in the 1980 s who generously wrote: My treatment of the subject can be improved upon and I am depending on you to do it. Joseph Needham was keen to see a Science and Civilization in Sri Lanka study project started when I returned to Sri Lanka after the third of three short visits to work under him at the NRI, as a British Council scholar. This never happened although two attempts to launch such a project were made, by others, one in the Institute of Fundamental Studies, Kandy, the other in the National Science Foundation, Colombo. At the present time, it may be announced that the long awaited project will definitely take off in the Institute of Fundamental Studies. It is intended to try to also involve Sri Lanka Pugwash in the project, by encouraging young scientists in this activity to become young Pugwashites while Jayantha Dhanapala is President ( ). This is appropriate as Jayantha Dhanapala himself made special mention of this in his Welcome Address at the inauguration of the Workshop, published in these Proceedings. A start will be made when the Rotblat birth centenary, on November 4, 2008, will be celebrated at a meeting organized by Sri Lanka Pugwash former Chairman Prof. C B Dissanayake and the present Chairman Prof. Arjuna Aluvihare, at the Institute of Physics, University of Peradeniya. Jayantha Dhanapala will give a lecture on Why Nuclear Disarmament Matters for Sri Lanka, and a short film on the life of Sir Joseph Rotblat sent to us by Sandra Ionno Butcher, Director of the Pugwash History project will be shown. The Southern Area Plan that never was, and an Indian equivalent In the 1960s, Engineer M S M de Silva, the founding General Manager of Ceylon Development Engineering Co. Ltd. the leading civil engineering contractor in the country, and Sub-contractors for civil works in Uda Walawe, was interested in a proposal called the Three Basins project prepared by foreign consultants, which envisaged construction of some large reservoirs in the basins of the Kalu ganga, Gin ganga and Nilwala ganga in the southwest wet zone of Sri Lanka. Above a certain elevation a single gigantic reservoir combining the waters of all three rivers, was called the Jasmin Complex. Another single separate reservoir was envisaged on the Kukule ganga a major tributary of the Kalu ganga. Eng. M S M de Silva envisaged the possibility of diversion of water from both the Kukule reservoir and the Jasmin complex to the southeastern region, by means of an Upper Transbasin Diversion canal and a Lower Transbasin Diversion canal, which was called the Southern Area Plan. Later this was described as a hydraulic engineering perspective project, following the definitions given previously. This has been described in detail in the Jayantha Dhanapala volume. (For example, see pages ) 16

47 Figure 7 At the present time, the diversion of Uma oya to augment Lunuganvehera with generation of hydropower has been announced. It is really an opportunity to relocate this reservoir at the upper Huratgamuva site (Fig. 6). A precedent exists in the Allai scheme near Seruvila where the ancient Allai tank was fed by a diversion from the Verugal aru (river) by means of the Kallar inlet channel, when I worked in this scheme in 1957 / 58. (Mendis, 2008). The depth of water in the tank was reduced in stages and the peripheral land area brought under cultivation in the early 1960s. A new headworks was built at Verugal anicut called Mavilaru reservoir. (Mendis, 2006). This suggestion has been conveyed to government, and the reaction of decision makers who advice politicians is awaited at the present time. A project similar to the Southern Area Plan in Sri Lanka but for the whole of India, was brought to my attention during my visit to Aurangabad in July Given the enormous difference in scale between Sri Lanka and India, simple comparisons are invidious, but the Indian proposal merits mention at least in outline in this Pugwash volume. A hydraulics engineer named Pol has conceptualised a plan for the utilization of the water and land resources of the whole of India incorporating existing river basin projects. His detailed study in fourteen bulky volumes had been submitted to the President of India, Abdul Kalam, who had asked for a report from the technobureaucracy. The new President of India, Shrimathi Pratibha Patil is expected to pursue the inquiry to a conclusion. As I understood it, the snow melt from the Himalayan mountain range will be a source of water in addition to the annual rainfall which varies from less than 200 millimetres per year in some arid regions to more than 20,000 millimetres in Cherupunjee in northeastern India said to be the wettest place on earth. Pugwash scientists who are concerned about the role of India as an emerging global superpower or at the least as a regional super-power, should take an interest in this subject. Acknowledgements As mentioned previously, Sri Lanka Pugwash has had generous supporters from the time it was started, and this Workshop was made possible by some of them, all personal friends of Jayantha Dhanapala and myself. They are Nahil Wijesuriya, Pesi Pestonjee, Ariyaseela Wickremanayake, and Selvam Canagaretna. Brief personal vignettes are given in a chapter in these Proceedings. Vythilingam Tharumaratnam who supported the 1982 Symposium on Tropical Agriculture was also present at the opening Plenary Session. 17

48 ANNEX Obituary, American Scientist - January/February 2004 Garrett James Hardin (Dallas 1915 Santa Barbara 2003) Vaclav Smil In the world fond of simple associations, Garrett Hardin will be remembered above all as the man who made millions familiar with a concept known as the tragedy of the commons. He wrote an article with that title for Science in 1968, when the first wave of environmental consciousness was swelling. That short essay became one of the most famous (and among the most cited and reprinted) pieces of ecological or, as Hardin would have preferred, bioethical writing. Contrary to the usual perception, this concept was not Hardin s invention. Such grand generalizations almost always have important precedents. Hence it is doubtful that even Aristotle, who pointed out long ago that what is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it, was the first to reach this conclusion. Hardin does, however, deserve credit for recognizing the magnitude and the inevitability of this tragedy: It s not a deviancy or madness but rather perfectly rational behavior that leads to the long-term ruin of the commons, a word that evokes communal agricultural lands but also applies to ecosystems, rivers, oceans, organisms or mineral resources. That is, actions that benefit the individual (meaning single persons, households, villages, companies or nations) in the short term often end up hurting the collective. Hardin s greatest service was presenting this notion in the form of a captivating parable about an overgrazed pasture and expressing it in precise, resonant language that left no room for appealing the initial verdict. He wrote: Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. (Today s editors would, of course, have tried to force Hardin to change men to people or some other politically correct choice probably to no avail.) He realized that this ruinous dynamic operates in any number of cases involving environmental pollution and the degradation of ecosystems. These instances include three of the leading concerns of our generation: extensive and drastic commercial overfishing of the oceans, continuing deforestation of the humid tropics and rising emissions of greenhouse gases, which may cause serious global warming during the latter half of this century. Hardin was a man of many causes, yet several of his major writings were variations on the theme of the ruined commons. This is true about another of his widely read and reprinted essays, Living on a Lifeboat, published in BioScience in There he used another parable to argue that immigration of the poor to affluent countries hurts those already living there, just as taking too many drowning people into a lifeboat risks sinking everybody. If the connection between these two essays wasn t apparent enough, it became so in 1995, when he published a book with the title The Immigration Dilemma: Avoiding the Tragedy of the Commons. Clearly, Hardin was concerned about the number of people the United States could support. So it should not come as a complete surprise to learn that he was a founding member of Planned Parenthood and one of the nation s most influential advocates of population control and abortion on demand the issue he said occupied most of his time between 1963 and 1973, the year that the Supreme Court made its landmark decision in Roe v. Wade. (It might come as a surprise, however, to learn that Hardin and his wife had four children.) But Hardin was more than a policy advocate: He was also an intellectual pioneer. Both his earliest bioethical writings and his last books, written during the 1990s, are widely seen as important stepping-stones to the newly created field of ecological economics. This discipline tries (perhaps quixotically) to reform the tradition of ignoring nature in economics, which normally shares with ecology little more than the descriptive Greek root in its name. 18

49 It is thus not an easy task to understand this man. For those who want to explore Hardin through just a single volume of his writings, I would recommend Living Within Limits: Ecology, Economics and Population Taboos, published in All of the great causes, targets and taboos that have been at the core of modern environmental and ecological debates and that Hardin defended, attacked and confronted during his long life are here: limits to growth, overpopulation, cowboy economics, demographic transition, nuclear energy, carrying capacity, human rights, globalization, Spaceship Earth, economic growth, altruism, birth control, energy consumption, immigration, and the irreconcilability of ecology and traditional economics. There are, not surprisingly, extended quotes from Aristotle, the Marquis de Condorcet, Thomas Malthus, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Kenneth Boulding, Benjamin Franklin and Charles Darwin, but also, revealingly, Hardin includes bits from Galileo, Sir Arthur Eddington, William Stanley Jevons, Otto Frisch, Thomas Huxley and C. P. Snow. The book is full of Hardin s terse, politically incorrect one-liners, which he often used as headlines of chapter sections In Praise of Discrimination, Compassion Breeds Taboo, A Suicidal Right (meaning the right to have children) and arguments that can almost instantly reverse a reader s feeling from approbation to shock. To argue for population control is one thing, but it s quite another to write that we need to reexamine the assumption that a low rate of infant mortality serves as a valid measure of the state of a civilization. How, after all, could any advanced society not do all it could to preserve the lives of newborns? And what would Hardin s alternative be, anyway? Would he have some state bureaucrat decide which birth defect is economical to fix and which one should spell an immediate death sentence? Hardin was well aware of how difficult it was for most of his fellow citizens to approve of his drastic prescriptions. Still, he pushed his argument mercilessly, writing that mortality death can be easily tallied, but morbidity pain and suffering is much harder to measure. Yet morbidity may be the more important measure of happiness. How much of this focus on anguish comes from the experience of a man whose physical life was constrained by the polio he contracted at the age of four, which weakened his right leg and made it 5 centimeters shorter than his left one. Decades later, polio s delayed effects weakened the muscles in his left leg enough that he was confined to a wheelchair, and the fear of losing strength in his arms led him to talk openly about looking for Dr. Kevorkian. Moral Outrage And Outrageousness Even when I disagreed with him, I always admired Hardin s moral fervor a quality in such short supply in modern, avowedly value-neutral science and welcomed his infusion of ethics into science and public decision-making. And I particularly liked the way he did it: delivered with style, in an unapologetic, forthright, true agent provocateur fashion, but one built on firm beliefs and on wide-ranging scientific knowledge. He stressed true literacy (by which he meant the correct use of terms, and abhorrence of phrases that might even slightly resemble the currently rampant political correctness) and numeracy (a skill that is in even shorter supply). This is exactly what I preach to my students and emphasize in my writings. His anguish about the state of the global environment could be mine. And I could readily agree with a number of his arguments advanced in favor of birth control and legalized abortion, but I was never comfortable with Hardin s militant stance on these topics. What is one to do, for example, upon reading in Hardin s open 1997 letter to the American Civil Liberties Union that a medical abortion, particularly in the early stages, costs only a fraction as much as a medically supported childbirth not to mention the costs of education and other social services to the child for 18 years. So: when a woman elects to have a child, she is committing the community to something like $100,000 in expenses for the bearing and rearing of that child. Is it wise to extend individual rights that far? Here he tops even the draconian family planners of China. As a former demographer, I am not afraid, as Hardin was, that we will ever 19

50 get to 50 billion people. (Most current forecasts put the likely maximum even below 10 billion.) And I see excessive consumption as a much greater threat to the integrity of the biosphere than a temporarily large, but eventually self-regulating, global population. And being myself a lucky double immigrant (first from Europe to the United States, then from there to Canada), I could never go along with his harsh and categorical condemnation of moving from a poorer to a richer place. I emigrated from what was then the westernmost outpost of the Soviet empire for political and intellectual reasons, but that motivation would not have made any difference to Hardin s basic argument: Whereas ours may be a relatively frugal household, there is no doubt that since 1969 my family has certainly consumed more living on this continent (helping to sink the Hardinian lifeboat that much faster) than we would have by staying in the impoverished Communist paradise. But should we, and millions of others who made that journey before or after us, then see our coming to live in the New World as a fundamentally immoral act? And would Hardin s judgment be the same had he grew up in a Stalinist country or in the Haitian countryside? Given my background, I d probably be the last ecologist on Earth to defend Hardin s stance on immigration. Nor can I muster any enthusiasm for Hardin s two other great causes, legalized euthanasia and assisted suicide: I just cannot dismiss the many concerns these policies would inevitably raise at least not as easily as he did, by saying that every ethical decision puts you on the slippery slope. But I am always delighted to repeat Hardin s definition that ecology is the overall science of which economics is a minor specialty. And I wholeheartedly endorse his longstanding conviction that ethics must guide us whenever we face difficult choices and must be built on scientific foundations. Such a dichotomy of reactions to Hardin should not be surprising. As a radical thinker and, fundamentally, a combative moralizer fond of categorical pronouncements, Hardin did not make things easy for his readers. So it s possible to mix enthusiastic approval of some of his unconventional judgments with qualified acceptance of other conclusions and with outright rejection of some of his favorite views. Only one thing was impossible: to remain indifferent in the face of his impassioned arguments. Of course, Hardin also attracted many devoted admirers, whose virtual gathering place is the Web site of The Garrett Hardin Society ( ardinsociety.org), which contains much about his life and work. There, for example, one learns that Hardin had a rather settled academic career. He came to the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1946 (his Stanford Ph.D. was granted in 1941), becoming a professor of human ecology. He stayed in Santa Barbara after his nominal retirement in 1978, remaining active in many ways (lecturing, writing, giving interviews) for another two decades. This geographic stability was quite atypical for that generation of America s peregrinating professors and was in a great contrast to his bold intellectual forays. But, true to himself, in death he was a resolute radical: He and his wife, Jane, belonged to the Hemlock Society, and on September 14, shortly after their 62nd wedding anniversary, they committed a double suicide at their Santa Barbara home. The great moralizer lived and acted as best as he could in accord with his favorite saying of the Buddha: I teach only two things: the cause of human sorrow and the way to become free of it. 20

51 PROLOGUE International Commons: Sharing of International Resources* Abdus Salam (Pakistan) Nobel Laureate (1979) Introduction In 1945 Europe was devastated. Soon after, the United States took a remarkable initiative with the launching of the Marshall Plan to finance European recovery. Some $32 billion were generously provided, amounting, in the beginning, to a contribution of around 2.79 per cent of the Gross National Product of the USA. A magnificent act of magnanimity, it was not pure altruism, because the USA knew that by building up Europe, it was contributing to the future prosperity of the United States itself, through trade and commerce. It is unfashionable nowadays to speak in these terms, but one may have called this act Keynesianism at its best, inspired by the earlier successes of the New Deal in the United States. One of the results of this - all too rare - act of economic wisdom was that during the next decades - the sixties and the seventies - after Western Europe was back on its feet, the prosperity of all countries - including the donor country -increased to levels unmatched in world history before. The Marshall plan led to similar ideas for US and European aid to be extended to the developing countries. Here, of course, the needs were greater. Perhaps the sheer magnitude of the development tasks meant that the donors felt shy of doing as much as they had done for Western Europe. The aid packages were more meagre, and there was one other limitation. Those were the days of the hottest phases of the cold war. The aid packages extended to the developing countries were not purely economic aid. The cold war had imposed a selectivity; the most generous economic help went hand in hand with military aid. The donors also wanted the sums alloted to help Western interests, including Western exports. * Paper presented at Pugwash conference No. 33 in Venice, Italy,

52 As mentioned earlier, the small quanta of aid funds were inadequate for the needs. Instead of the 2.79 per cent of the GNP of the Marshall Funds, this time the funds (contributed by OECD countries) never went beyond 0.5 per cent, falling to around 0.4 per cent by the 1970s. Even though the Pearson Commission set up in 1969, recommended that the aid quantum be fixed at 0.7 per cent of the GNP of donor countries - a recommendation later endorsed by the Brandt Commission - this target has never been met except by a very few of the donors. Thus, the US share has fallen to less than 0.2 per cent, with a fall also in the shares of the UK, France, FRG, Japan and others. Furthermore, the Eastern bloc never joined the aid consortia; their aid (0.14 per cent of GDP) - is disbursed bilaterally. The OPEC countries started in the early 1970s with 1.18 per cent of their GDP, went up to nearly 3 per cent in 1975 and then declined (with a total of 7.7 billion dollars) to 1.4 per cent of GDP in The precise aid percentages are not as important as the way in which the conceptual basis of such transfer of resources is presented. It is my belief, that unless an idea has a sound, generally accepted conceptual currency behind it, it does not win adherence. Transfer of Resources to the Developing Countries As emphasised earlier, in the case of the US help to Europe, Keynesian theories which inspired the New Deal, may have been at the back of the Marshall Plan. Involved in this is, firstly, the idea that in order that societies should be economically well-off, one needs a large base of economic, activity. Secondly, the securing of this large base needs in its turn the prosperity of all sections of the society. Thus, prosperity for all, an interdependence and a perceived mutuality of interests of all sections of the society, is the key idea, with the Marshall Plan extending the scope of the society covered, from the USA alone, to embrace also the continent of Western Europe. The Plan based itself on the view that the prosperity of the USA would increase if Europe became prosperous, and able to exchange goods and services with the USA. What is needed today is the extension of these ideas to include the developing countries. In the words of Willy Brandt 1 : The mutuality of interests can he spelled out clearly in the areas of energy, commodities and trade, food and agriculture, monetary solutions, infl ation control... and ground and space communications. The depletion of renewable and non-renewable resources, throughout the planet, the ecological and environmental problems, the exploitation of the oceans, not to forget the unbridled arms race, which both drains resources and threatens mankind - all of these also create problems which affect peace and will grow more serious in the absence of a global vision.... Whoever wants a bigger slice of an international economic cake cannot seriously want it to become smaller... Most industrialised countries, even during the biggest boom in human history, have not tried hard enough to get near the minimum aid target to which most of them had solemnly agreed. That record is not only disappointing but also reminds us that, had the target been met, several developing countries would now be importing more goods and services, thus mitigating economic diffi culties in the North. To highlight the economic interdependence, particularly in the context of producing job opportunities in the developed countries, Brandt continues: Perhaps one can illustrate part of the problem from the development of some of the present industrialised countries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A long and assiduous learning process was necessary until it was generally accepted that higher wages for workers increased purchasing power suffi ciently to move the economy as a whole. Industrialised countries now need to be interested in the expansion of markets in the developing world. This will decisively affect job opportunities in the 1980s and 1990s and the prospect of employment. This sentiment was echoed also by J. Tinbergen 2 : 22

53 The second element of a new world employment policy consists of an increase in international income transfers to Third World countries in order to increase employment in these countries. The resulting increase in welfare and purchasing power in these countries will lead to higher imports from the industrialised countries. This then will be an important stimulus to higher employment in the industrialised countries too. The same statement comes from Masaki Nakajima: In the past, of course, we had the Keynesian approach to demand development. That, unfortunately, was geared to the development of a single economy. Today, in order to solve a massive problem like worldwide unemployment, I think we have to expand the Keynesian approach so it can be applied on a global scale. One possible effective area would be toward a solution of North-South problems. One may look upon aid as a compensation for the decline in commodity prices. Year after year we have seen that the weakness - economic as well as political - of the developing countries has meant that the commodity prices have not kept up with the increase in prices of industrial goods. As Michael Manley, the Ex-Prime Minister of Jamaica, once explained: In the 1950s, ten tons of sugar brought a Jamaican farmer a Ford tractor. In the 1970s, the same tractor costs 25 tons of sugar. Why? Is it that the Jamaican peasant is subsidising, by a factor of 100 per cent the social security and welfare of Ford plant workers? Not only have the commodity prices not kept up with industrial prices, they have also seen such ups and downs that for a developing country there is no possibility of any rational planning of its economic future. These vagaries of price cycles are attributed to the vagaries of stock exchanges. Speaking plainly, is this not a type of organized brigandage, which the rich societies have permitted their stock-market speculators to indulge in? As is well known, this economic weakness of the developing countries has led them to the brink of bankruptcy. The facts in respect of the economic situation of the developing world are stark. The non-oil producing developing countries have suffered a deterioration in their export earnings of some. 100 billion dollars annually between 1980 and At least 50 billion dollars of this are attributable to lower commodity prices. The pleas of the developing countries to have some consideration given to the commodity prices have consistently fallen on deaf ears. On the testimony of Helmut Schmidt 3 the FRG put forward a proposal for stabilising developing countries exports of raw materials for international discussion as early as 1978, but this proposal was not taken up at the agenda of any international conference. It is time, he says, to raise the proposal again. In the meanwhile the developing countries may be forgiven if they consider aid as part compensation for this decline of commodity prices. One may look upon aid as part of the compensation for the 19th century exploitation of the riches of the developing countries - a transfer of resources from the ex-colonies, ex-empires which enriched some of the European countries and gave them economic prosperity. One may also point to the disparity of distribution of world resources and the instability it creates. There is, at present, a tremendous disparity (Table 1) between the rich and the poor in the ultimate criteria of prosperity - the reserves of arable land, forest, coal and iron. Some among those who plough the exhausted soils of Asia and Africa may not for long be able to avert their hungry gaze from the virgin soils of some fortunate and empty corners of this globe. It is hard for them to comprehend that there can exist parts of the world where 15 to 20 per cent of agricultural land has to be banked and the farmers paid not to cultivate it, in order that world prices of grain can be kept up. It is hard for them to believe that open spaces still exist in Canada, Australia, Siberia, and elsewhere, and that material rewards must be paid to those willing to pioneer their colonisation. There is one lesson from history we must not forget: a world as polarised as ours is unstable; it cannot endure this way forever. 23

54 Table 1 - The Disparity in Natural Resources (per capita) Asia North USSR Europe Oceania World America Agricultural area (hectares) Accessible forest area Coal reserves (tonnes) Oil reserves (tonnes) Iron orereserves (tonnes) (Estimates made by the United Nations in 1950 and quoted in World Population and Production, by W.S. Waytinsky and E.S. Waytinsky). It was perhaps in recognition of this disparity and the instability which it breeds that Lyndon Johnson expressed himself thus: Many of our most urgent problems do not spring from the cold war or even from the ambitions of adversaries. They are the ominous obstacles to man s effort to build a great world society, a place where every man can fi nd a life free from hunger and disease. Those who live in the emerging community of nations will ignore the problems of their neighbours at the risk of their own prosperity... There is no simple solution to these problems. In the past there would have been no solution at all. Today, the constantly unfolding conquests of science give man the power over his world and nature which brings the prospect of success within the purview of hope. Lyndon Johnson had the courage, pursuing this line of thinking, to allocate the funds which he saved from the defence budget of the United States to his programmes against poverty in that country. One wishes there were more men like him who could declare that a similar consequence follow global disarmament, and that cuts in military expenditure will more funds for global development. Transfer of Resources In 1969, the Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling, speaking at the Nobel Symposium held in Stockholm, on the Place of Value in a World of Facts, made a plea for international taxation whereby the world distribution of wealth among the nations of the world would be adjusted by levying a tax the nations with a higher GNP and providing the funds to those in the developing countries. Pauling spoke of the transfer of resources of the order of $200 billion per year, about 8 per cent of the world s, then, total income which he thought was the right figure for an international income tax. I remember listening to Pauling and thinking to myself: this is a totally Utopian proposal. No one took it very seriously at the meeting. Pauling thought it was possible to formulate a fundamental principle of morality, independent of revelation, superstition, dogma and creed and acceptable by all human beings in a scientific, rational way by analysing the facts presented by the evidence of our senses. He believed that a major fact of our lives was that there is so much suffering in the world, much of it unnecessary and avoidable. To minimise this suffering we must provide every person not only with adequate food and shelter but also with education. To produce the funds required, Pauling identified militarism as one major causes of human suffering. At that time militarism cost the world over $250 billion per year; it costs three times that much today. This amount of wealth wasted on military conflicts each year is greater than the total annual personal income per year of two-thirds of mankind. An elimination of these conflicts would enable these funds to be spent on minimizing the suffering from deprivation of the majority of mankind. Pauling suggested that scientists and scholars should begin to formulate a practical schedule of progress towards the goal of such transfers. Only the intellectual scientists of the 24

55 world could analyse this problem in a sufficiently thorough way; they should take political actions as individuals, as science advisers, as educators, and by applying pressure on governments and voters. Since that time there was a formulation of what is called the New International Economic Order which was adopted in 1974 by the 6th Special Session of the UN General Assembly. Unfortunately, just after these proclamations were made, came the increase in oil prices and rise of the monetary economics. Few people today remember the work which was done on the international economic order. But, to my knowledge, not much thinking went into emphasising Pauling s ideas of world taxation. I have now come to believe that Pauling s idea was one of the most important to emerge in the last decade. It seems a great pity that it was not given a proper economic formulation by the economists of the world either from the rich or the poor nations, and that the concept of world international taxation has not become common currency to replace aid commonly thought of as charity dependent on the vagaries of national governments. One of the few who have discussed this issue in recent times is again Willy Brandt who said in 1980: It is our conviction that we will have to face more seriously the need for a transfer of funds... with a certain degree of automaticity and predictability disconnected from the uncertainties of national budgets and their underlying constraints. What is at stake are various possible forms of international levies. Why should it be unrealistic to entertain the idea of imposing a suitable form of taxation on a sliding scale according to countries ability? There could be even a small levy on international trade, or a heavier tax on arms exports. Additional revenues could be raised on the international commons, such as sea-bed minerals. International Commons Brandt advanced the idea of international commons as a prelude to full fledged taxation. That certain resources of the seas should be declared as belonging to mankind as a whole is an idea which the developing countries have espoused since A convention to regularise this has now been embodied in a draft for a Law of the Sea which the UN Conference has recommended all UN states to adopt. This was at Montego Bay, after nine years of patient negotiations marked by a willingness to compromise as a necessary part of the search for a larger solution. One hundred and nineteen nations have so far found it possible to overcome their individual reservations and marginal disappointments and sign the instruments which make the Law of the Sea a new international fact of life, giving substance to a Sea Bed Authority which will be sited in Jamaica. The US government, however, has decided to stand out and vote against adoption of the recommendation. This decision was taken by the Republican administration in 1981, repudiating the skilful negotiations by the Carter administration to arrive at a compromise formula for the draft convention. After the USA had decided to renege on the Carter administration s pledges, Britain, too, has decided to stand out. Since these two nations represent a substantial slice of the world s economic power and technological capabilities, their decision to stand out against the recommendation can be a very serious wrecking manoeuvre. In this context, the remarks by Jean Kirkpatrick, the US Ambassador to the UN, on 3 March 1983, are significant. Writing in a journal on Regulation published by the American Enterprise Institute, she complains: The UN regulatory initiatives extend quite literally from the depths of the ocean to the heavens, from the Law of the Sea Convention to an Agreement Covering the Activities of State on the Moon and other Celestial Bodies. According, to her, the USA balked at signing the Law of the Sea Convention which required that mining companies and other undersea ventures be licensed by a new international authority, pay what would amount to royalties to it 25

56 and be bound by its decision on production and the like. In Mrs Kirkpatrick s view, the big push within the UN stems from a sort of class warfare, poor nations versus rich with regulation as a weapon for the redistribution of wealth. According to her, this type of thinking guides many of the participants in a UN political process: There is a good deal of vote-trading, arm twisting, demagoguery, playing to the galleries and the result is that proposed agreements which are supposed to benefi t all nations often turn out to be, above all, instruments for global redistribution of wealth and a new global paternalism. In a world body of 157 nations, the USA and the capitalist West are an outnumbered automatic minority. The UN agencies then are the scene of a struggle that we seem doomed to lose. The international bureaucracy functions as the new class to which power is to be transferred. Global socialism is expected and, from the point of view of many, is the desired result. As her remarks clearly show, there is an urgent task for us, particularly the intellectuals from developing countries, to invest the idea of international commons with a theoretical basis so that it comes to be accepted by the populations of the developed countries. Applications of Science and Technology One way to make these ideas more acceptable may be to declare that these commons will be used only for global tasks. Among these urgent global tasks are the application of science and technology to global problems. If for example, these International commons were used for building up research and development capabilities, now sadly neglected, in the sphere of energy and the environmont, there may be less opposition than there has been. To take the case of environmental tasks, everyone speaks of the degradation of the biosphere, of the disappearing rain forests and the imminent disappearance of large numbers of animal and plant species. The Report Year 2000 commissioned by President Carter states that in the next 17 years quarter of a million plant and animal species will disappear because developing countries will be forced to cut their forest wealth in order to make up for scarce fuel and to grow more food. One may ask in this context if it is not the concern of the environmental groups in the developed countries also to help to preserve this global heritage? Should they not come to the rescue of the developing countries? Should this type of assistance not be a first charge on the international commons? As a scientist, I would like the international commons used for research on global scientific problems. This was one of the suggestions at the Vienna Conference on Science and Technology in The global problems suggested were research on: diseases of the developing countries; greening of deserts; weather modification, particularly for developing countries; alternative energy; productivity of marginal soils; earthquake predictions, and the like. I should mention Masaki Nakajima s Dream for Mankind. The following is his list of global super-infrastructure projects which may constitute elements of a Global New Deal. Outline of Projects for a Global New Deal 1. Greening of deserts (North African nations and Arab states) Greening of the deserts in the Sinai and the Arabian peninsula. 2. Collection station for solar heat Erect a large-scale installation for the collection of solar energy in a remote part of the world. Total investment in land, pipelines, and accessory equipment would reach $20 to $50 trillion. Its total annual output would be equivalent to 200 billion barrels of oil. 26

57 3. Electric power generation using sea currents There are 12 promising areas along undeveloped ocean shores extending from the equator to the temperate zones. Maximum generating potential of one area, 35 million kw. Total for 12 areas about 200 million kw. 4. Himalayan hydro-electric project (India, China, Bangladesh) Damming of the Sanpo River on the upper reaches of the Brahmaputra frontier area between China and the Indian province of Assam to make it flow into India through a tunnel across the Himalayas. Potential generating capacity 50 million kw maximum, 37 million kw on average. Annual generating capacity 240 billion to 330 billion kwh. 5. African central lake (Central African nations) Control the flow of the Congo River by building a dam to create a vast lake in Congo and Chad regions of Central Africa to improve natural conditions the area. The implementation by the richer nations of the superprojects would lead to stimulation of constructive demand in manufacturing industries, as well as technological incentives, in lieu of arms production. Hopefully, this would be accompanied by an increase in GNP and employment opportunity both in developed and developing countries. According to Nakajima Now is the time for mankind to exert a bold, new and brave, long-range vision, a vision which transcends narrow short-term national interests... As the prophet-king Solomon said in the Bible: Where there is no vision mankind perishes It is the grand vision behind these projects which is so commendatory and it is this global vision which alone will solve our problems of the future. Conclusions I would like to see the ideas of world taxation brought into the sphere of fundamental economic thinking. As a prelude to this, I would like to see the ideas of international commons and the sharing of global resources (for example, the riches of the seas and of the Antarctic) taken up vigorously on a theoretical, as well as at a political level - for example, at the Summit Conference. Personally, I would like to see these commons expended on scientific research on global problems in the first instance. I would like to see much greater emphasis given to global programmes like International Geophysical or Biospherical Programmes which, at the moment, organisations like ICSU undertake on a meagre budget with contributions from the not too affluent UN bodies like UNESCO. As an example of joint scientific projects, there are the programmes of collaborative research for European nations like the fusion research programme and laboratory at Culham in the UK or the European Molecular Biology programme and laboratory at Heidelberg. On the other hand, there are very few global laboratories for global problems research. These should be the first charge on the international commons. References 1. Willy Brandt, North-South: A Programme for Survival Report of the Independent Commission on International Development Issues, (London: Pan Books, 1980). 2. J. Tinbergen et al., A new world employment plan, Development and Peace, 2, (Spring 1981) pp Helmut Schmidt, The Economist, 26 February Willy Brandt, op. cit. 27

58 World Watch Institute 2008, State of the World, 25 th anniversary edition Innovations for a Sustainable Economy Box 10 1 Property: A Social Construct Property is not a metaphysical absolute. It is an instrument that societies design to advance particular ends. There are many different kinds corporate, marital, municipal, partnership, cooperative, and so forth all of which are defined socially for different purposes. Today, two categories of property dominate the public debate: public and private. This follows from an ideological spectrum that offers the public and private sectors as the only options from which to choose. Yet a third kind of property common property is neither public nor private in the usual sense. Historically it has served well for organizing the use of natural resources of many kinds and for defining the rights and responsibilities of people regarding these. In England, much agricultural land was held in common until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In practice this was similar to community gardens today. Individuals had their own plots, but the underlying ownership was in common. The concept permeated the early thinking about property generally, including what today are called the public and private realms. In the early U.S. colonies, private woodlands typically were regarded as commons for purposes of subsistence, such as hunting, fishing, and even cutting wood. The woodland commons sustained slaves during their bondage. To resubordinate them after emancipation, the southern planters closed the commons and thereby shut off a key part of their livelihoods. Residues of the earlier thinking exist today in regards to wildlife and more broadly in the legal doctrine of the public trust. Ancient Roman law declared that some things are common by their very nature primarily air, sky, wildlife, and navigable waters. Government did not own these and therefore could not privatize them, even if legislators wanted to. Much like trustees of an estate, governments have a legal obligation to maintain the asset for the benefit of the public at large. Today the public trust prohibits governments from turning over to private parties the coastlines and navigable waters (and perhaps other things as well) that they have a responsibility to protect for future generations. Common property is encoded for the long haul. Sources for Box 10 1 from the following: E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (New York: The New Press, 1993); Eric Kerridge, The Common Fields of England (New York: Manchester University Press, 1992); Liam Clare, Enclosing the Commons (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004); William B. Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England, (Williamstown, MA: Corner House Publishers, 1978; orig published 1890); Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp ; Mark Dowie, The Fate of the Commons: Privatization v. the Public Trust, Orion, July/August

59 Caesar Voute PREAMBLE Learning from Ancient Hydraulic Civilizations - Eppawala: Heart of the Ancient Cultural Landscape of the Kalaweva Jayaganga Ecosystem It is already long known that human societies very often have a profound impact on the natural environment. The reverse is also true, natural phenomena and natural processes may considerably influence the development of human societies in terms of religion, culture, economy and political organisation. More often than not water plays a prominent role in the interaction between Man and Environment, both as a life-giving element and as a harmful or even destructive element. Human civilization and human survival are unthinkable without an adequate supply of water of a good quality, which is one of our most valuable natural resources in every-day life, without which animal husbandry, agriculture, and in modern times, industry are impossible. Fish and other aquatic life are another important resource for human societies, equally depending upon the presence of marine and fresh water. To this should be added the use of rivers, lakes and coastal seas as water ways for travel and transport by rafts, canoes and other primitive boats. No wonder, therefore, that water figures also in many religious concepts and ceremonies, not only in association with life -the source from which life emanates - and death - the ravaging floods punishing Man for his evil deeds - but also as a purifying element. The element water thus reflects both sides of nature, that of benevolent and productive nature and that of malevolent and destructive dark nature. The development of human civilization and human societies is impossible without a systematic prospecting and exploitation of renewable and non-renewable natural resources, including plant and animal species, as well as hydrological and mineral resources. Since the dawn of history Man must have developed, for this purpose, a sound reasoning based on the careful and objective observation of natural phenomena and on logical criteria, which permitted him to survive as a hunter and as a collector of vegetable materials such as edible roots and fruits, concentrating much of his activities in the neighbourhood of springs, rivers and other water bodies. It was during the Neolithic period, about 6000 BC or according to more recent studies most probably even several millenia earlier, that Man discovered, in the semi-arid regions of the Near and Middle East, that agriculture and animal husbandry would ameliorate his Emeritus Professor Dr. Caesar Voute 29

60 way of life and that artificial irrigation would greatly increase production 1. Watering fields became a common practice in many parts of the world, as is testified by the extensive irrigation works constructed by ancient civilizations in South America, on the Arabian peninsula, on the Indian subcontinent, in Sri Lank it, in the Southeast Asian archipelago and elsewhere. These hydraulic works included canals and lined ditches, dams, sluices and water distribution and water partitioning systems, small as well as large storage basins, and also wells for the exploitation of ground-water. In some desert and semi-desert areas even extensive underground tunnels - known in the Near and Middle East and in North Africa under the name of 2 qanat or foggara - were dug just below the level of the groundwater table to collect and exploit the valuah1e water. A few years ago George Ter-Stepanian discussing the role of Man as a new and powerful geological agent emerging with the start of agriculture and animal husbandry during the Neolithic, proposed to separate the Technogene from the Quaternary as the beginning of the Quinary or Fifth Main Period of the Earth s History. He also proposed to combine the Holocene with the Technogene 3. George Ter-Stepanian is correct: the advent of Man the Maker at the dawn of history did change indeed the course of the evolution of the Earth fundamentally. For the first time a biological species was capable of surveying his environment consciously, monitoring and altering it, and manipulating natural processes. In the process of doing so, Man left everywhere his footprints in the form of deforestation, destruction of the natural vegetation cover, non-sustainable overexploitation of water and other natural resources, increased erosion and reduced slope stability, degradation of soils, waterlogging and salinisation of soils, loss of soil fertility, loss of biodiversity, and in the course of the centuries also an ever accelerating accumulation of waste and increasing pollution of air, water and soils. Unfortunately, Man s mastery of the environment is even today, in our world of High Tech, Informatics and the Post- Industrial Society, still mostly limited to his destructive forces, a matter which constitutes the core issue of the present book. It is for good cause that as a follow-up to the 1992 Rio de Janeiro World Environmental Conference the Earth Summit has commissioned the preparation of an Earth Charter, to be submitted in due course for approval and endorsement to the United Nations General Assembly 4. And even worse, the new trends of economic globalization and of unbridled liberalisation of international trade, combined with applications of the newest information, exploitation and production technologies, singularly aggravate the situation 5. More than ever, the survival of the living planet, and with it also the survival of mankind are endangered. And Man appears less and less capable of combining and integrating at national and at international levels in a desirable and sustainable balance world-wide free trade and free investment policies with care for the quality of life, including the environment, human rights and labour norms. Man the Thinker and Writer emerged only much later than the early farmers, miners and producers of stone and metal tools and weapons, but, nevertheless at least more than 5000 years ago. Scientific - that is logical - reasoning as such is also very old, but it used to be incorporated in the past and in various cultures mostly in philosophical thinking, often shunning the very idea of practical applications of the theories evolved. The religious concepts of Man the Thinker and Writer and his interpretation of various beneficial and harmful natural events and natural processes, recorded in vast numbers of written documents in many languages on stone, metal plates, clay tablets, papyrus and other materials, may sometimes appear unfamiliar to us. Other features of these ancient records, just as some of the ancient techniques and their underlying aims and objectives in use since the Neolithic, are astonishingly modern 6. In the ancient Indian Vedas and Upanishads and in the works of the classical ancient Chinese writers 7 and thinkers one can already find many elements which have their equivalents in modern so-called Western science. The same is also the case with the Mahavamsa, the ancient historical chronicle of Sri Lanka, which records from the time of King Devanampiya Tissa, B.C. a sermon preached by the Arahat (a person who has attained a very high state of Enlightenment) Mahinda, 30

61 son of the great Buddhist emperor Asoka of India. This sermon, which is often referred to in the ancient chronicles and in equally ancient royal edicts, contains in the context of Buddhist religious concepts and practices the principles of environmental conservation and of environmental law. It is in this broad context of the history of civilization and of the impact of Man on the environment that we have to value the highly efficient Kalaweva-Jayaganga water management system in Sri Lanka s ancient Rajarata kingdom, as one of the outstanding examples of the ancient contributions of Asia to world-wide water and soil management science and technology. 8 After more than 15 centuries it is still functioning and very much in use, and as such worthwhile to be carefully protected and preserved for future generations. Much of our present concepts of modern science and technology, economy and management, which nowadays find their adepts everywhere and which are considered to be the world standards, are too much Europe centered - even the US science and technology - without taking sufficiently into consideration the development and achievements of important human civilisations elsewhere during different and often much earlier historical periods. It will suffice to refer to a very few examples from the Asian continent. One of the oldest hydraulic engineering systems applying a mechanical water lifting device from brick-lined wells was in use more than 3,500 years ago at the site of a proto-historical town in the Indus valley in Pakistan, now known as Mohenjo Daro 9 (or Moenjodaro). The site is included on the UNESCO World Heritage List and is the object of a major multi-annual international campaign for its preservation and restoration including the creation of a large archaeological park, co-sponsored by UNESCO. There existed at this site once a large town which maintained extensive trade relations as far as Mesopotamia. 10 The so-called Indus Valley civilization is a very characteristic one, which shows some marked and modern materialistic elements, like mass-production of earthenware for export, the use o standardized weights and measures in trade, and the use of cylindrical seals to identify ownership of goods traded. A few of these seals and of their markings were also found at some of the ancient trading sites in Mesopotamia. 11 The town has a very regular pattern of relatively wide streets bordered by high buildings constructed of an excellent quality baked bricks. Drinking and domestic water supply was from brick-lined wells. There existed an extensive drainage system for sewage and waste water. In a higher part of the ancient town are found the ruins of what appears to have been a temple, with next to it a large square basin, which could have been a bath for religious purification. At this particular place a large and deep brick-lined well is found with a very peculiar oval shape, which archaeologists long had great difficulties to explain. However, there is nothing mysterious about this oval well if one travels with an observing eye through the rural area surrounding Mohenjo Daro. The whole region is studded with numerous oval wells of the same shape and dimensions as the ancient Oval Well near the religious bath in the ruins. All these modern wells are equipped with simple old-fashioned mechanical water lifting devices of the Persian Wheel type, operated with a single or double span of oxen as the source of power. The conclusion is almost inevitable: the more than three and a half millenia old Oval Well in proto-historical Mohenjo Daro, having the same shape and dimensions as modern water wells in the same area, which moreover had to serve a large water supply for a religious bath, most probably was equipped with a similar simple mechanical water lifting device. Important and very extensive canals and lined ditches, dams, sluices and water distribution systems existed already during the second and first millenium B.C. in Mesopotamia. They were also constructed in combination with storage basins in ancient India, for example in the third century B.C. at the time of the great Buddhist Emperor Asoka. Large storage basins and water reservoirs for irrigation were also constructed during the first millenium A.D. by the ancient Khmer Kings in today s Cambodia. 31

62 Different in design, lay-out and construction, and also in aims and objectives are the ingenuous and highly sophisticated Javanese and Balinese flooded and terraced rice fields with their communicating embankments, ditches and small spillways, the so-called sawahs, in which the rice is cultivated covered by a pre-determined depth of water. They are even constructed on often steep slopes with a maximum of water and soil conservation, and they are still functioning optimally today, ensuring very rich rice crops. Unfortunately, ancient hydraulic and hydrological techniques sometimes also had very adverse results. Many archaeologists assume that they eventually caused the weakening and vanishing of the Sumerian, Akkadian and Babylonian civilizations in Mesopotamia during respectively the second and first Milleniums B.C. In this and region irrigation through diversion channels from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers with their high sediment load resulted in many places in an accumulation of silt in the irrigation channels. The rising bottoms of the channels necessitated the construction of dikes along the canals which thus came to be raised above the surface of the irrigated agricultural fields with associated seepage losses towards those lower laying fields. The resulting lack of drainage in an and region with very high evaporation losses must have resulted in massive soil salinisation and waterlogging greatly reducing the productivity of the agriculture. The fertility was only restored through a gradual natural leaching of the soils during long decades leaving the former agricultural lands lying fallow. 12 When the author took part in the 1950s as a geological consultant in the planning of modern irrigation and flood control works in the wide Euphrates valley in Iraq in close cooperation with Dutch firms of consulting engineers, common practice was to take adequate care for designing appropriate drainage systems in order to prevent waterlogging and the salinisation of soils to occur again. In our time exactly the same phenomena of soil salinisation and waterlogging due to the same lack of drainage also occurred on an equally massive scale in the Indus valley and in other areas in modern Pakistan. The reasons were in part leakage from poorly constructed irrigation channels and ditches, and in part over-abundant irrigation in an effort to achieve maximal agricultural production. Due to the flatness of the landscape and the very low gradient towards the sea, in this case the only effective remedy has been the drilling of an expensive system of deep tube wells with submersible pumps, to lower the water table and to evacuate the saline drainage water through special channels towards the coast. The design of these new drainage works and the related surveys and studies were carried out in the 1960 s with the help of international hydrological experts and of major British and American firms of consulting engineers. The effects of these waterlogging and salinisation processes were also everywhere obvious in the surroundings of the proto-historic site of Mohenjo Daro, the ruins of which are endangered by the corrosive action of the salts on the ancient bricks. In view of the considerable international experience with the harmful effects of bad land and water management practices leading to soil erosion, waterlogging and soil salinisation, such as in Mesopotamia in the 1950 s and in India and Pakistan in the 1960 s, it might be astonishing to observe that similar errors are being repeated again in Australia in the 1990 s less than 35 years afterward. Motivated by the economic globalization and the liberalisation of international trade within the framework of the WTO it appeared attractive and highly profitable to increase agricultural outputs as much as possible in anticipation of an expected improved market access in Europe and in other regions of the World. In order to obtain a maximal production and high profits the Australians have been clearing native vegetation followed by extensive irrigation in large areas of the Murray-Darling Basin. However, the results are not only counterproductive but even disastrous, rendering big areas of Australian agricultural land entirely unproductive because of soil erosion, water logging and soil salinisation. 32

63 This is in a strong contrast with the situation at Eppawala in Sri Lanka. 13 Eppawala is situated in a relatively dry part of Sri Lanka called the Dry zone, with irregular seasonal precipitation, sometimes in the form of heavy rain storms during the northeast monsoon season. Under such conditions the land and the soils are sensitive to negative effects of poor water and soil management practices. There is no better proof of the wisdom of the ancient farmer communities and of the soundness of the old irrigation system, based on wise water and soil conservation techniques, that the sys tern has remained sustainable during more than two thousand years ensuring all that time an optimal use of land, water and soil resources notwithstanding poor maintenance in later centuries Some of the substantial economic surplus generated by these systems was used in the construction of the ancient Buddhist stupas, and other structures in the ancient cities, of which Anuradhapura near Eppawala, and Polonnaruwa, were once the capitals of ancient Sri Lanka. 14 The ancient works have been investigated, analysed, described and documented by a number of scholars. D.L.O Mendis has summarised their findings very adequately, adding many personal observations. Therefore, it will be sufficient for the purpose of this chapter to mention briefly some elements of the system which conserves excess precipitation from the northeast monsoon rain season. It also conserves the top soil which otherwise would have been eroded from the slopes by rapid surface runoff. In addition, the system permits the storage of water in surface reservoirs of various sizes and in the soil itself, by diversion of surface runoff in all parts of the dry zone by means of small earth embankment. D.L.O. Mendis uses here the very appropriate term water and soil conservation ecosystem. The overall system consists of a combs nation of interconnected rain-fed tanks, small village tanks often arranged as a chain or cascade of consecutive tanks feeding each the tanks situated farther downstream, intermediate reservoirs, large storage reservoirs, dams and weirs in rivers and large diversion channels, in several cases interconnecting large river systems. The original creation of the Kalaweva-Jayaganga system, in the ancient Rajarata or king s country, in Sri Lanka, which has taken place during about 15 centuries and in successive phases, must have been very labour intensive. Under present-day conditions the initial implementation of such a scheme - however sound and desirable by itself - might therefore become very expensive and the necessary capital investment might be less attractive from a purely economic point of view. 15 However, the maintenance of the system, once it is in existence, need not be expensive, especially if the local villagers and farmer communities are motivated to provide most of the labour on a voluntary base. This by itself would be sufficient reason for Sri Lanka to give the highest priority to the regular maintenance and - where necessary - the rehabilitation of sections of the system which have fallen into disuse because of lack of maintenance, instead of investing in large, expensive and ambitious reservoir dams. Moreover, irrigation schemes and multipurpose schemes inspired by western hydraulic principles, based on designs involving large reservoir dams are not only very capital intensive. Very often they are less effective with regard to a proper water and soil conservation, creating in addition new problems. 16 In comparison to the well-proven water and soil conservation techniques in the Rajarata system, the examples of the partial failure of major irrigation systems in Pakistan and in Australia, based on modern hydraulic engineering concepts and techniques, are also ample proof that these concepts and techniques - developed in the industrialized West - are not necessarily the best adapted to local climatological, landscape and soil conditions in other countries. Rather than copying blueprints of such schemes inspired by modern Western science and technology, the responsible Planners and engineers should use an irrigation system like the Kalaweva-Jayaganga irrigation, water and soil conservation ecosystem as a research and training ground to learn from concepts and techniques which have proven their value over a period of many centuries. In this sense the preservation of the ancient experience exceeds its importance 33

64 for Sri Lanka. The related transfer of experience and technology from Sri Lanka to other regions represents also an important international interest, meriting international support. The Eppawala region is not only an outstanding component of the Sri Lanka cultural heritage. It constitutes also one of the important phases of land use planning, water and soil management, as they developed in Asia in the course of several millenia. As such Eppawala merits also its rightful place in Mankind s world-wide cultural heritage. Unfortunately, the ancient Rajarata water and soil conservation ecosystems are today threatened in more than one way. The oldest and still persisting threat is that of lack of maintenance and of overdue repair works, due in part to a poor understanding of its functioning by modern engineers and politicians. As a consequence, the government is not undertaking the necessary action to improve the situation by stimulating the villagers depending on the system for their agricultural and domestic water supply to maintain it properly. Nor is any priority assigned to do the necessary repair and rehabilitation works for the parts of the system which have fallen into disuse due to neglect. On the contrary, the existing systems are threatened time and again by the submitting of proposals and the preparation of projects to replace at least part of the ancient water and soil conservation ecosystems by so-called modern water storage and supply systems based on the construction of large reservoir dams with associated water distribution canals. These proposals and projects are inspired by recent hydraulic engineering concepts as practiced in the West. Moreover, no thorough analysis has been made of the economic consequences of the plans by comparing the capitalized costs of maintenance and repair of the existing ancient systems with the considerable capital lay-out required for the construction of the project or projects now envisioned. Furthermore, the planners also fail to assess the various potential negative side effects (it these new projects, notwithstanding the fact that many disappointing experiences with similar reservoir dams have already been recorded elsewhere. The third and most immediate threat, which would also be most destructive in its consequences is that of the planned large-scale open-cast strip mining of an important deposit of phosphate rocks (apatite) in Eppawala, in the central part of the water and soil conservation ecosystem. These phosphate rocks, consisting of apatite, were discovered in 1971 and have been mined since that time in small quantities using labour intensive artisanal methods and techniques for use on the local market in Sri Lanka. The micro-economic creation effects of these small-scale mining operations have been the of new job opportunities for local villagers of which much of the profits has gone to the local inhabitants. Since a few years back, a controversial and much debated proposal has been under consideration to grant a concession to an American and a Japanese corporation to exploit the deposit to exhaustion using advanced technical means in an approximately 30 years period and to process the phosphate for export for the international market place. The macro-economic effects of this new project would be that the government would benefit from the payment of concession rights and taxes by a foreign company which would expect to make sufient profits on the required investments for the large-scale mining operations. However, at the micro-economic level the consequences would be loss of job opportunities and of modest profits the local inhabitants. Furthermore the project would involve the displacement of a number of villagers and the permanent destruction of a central part of the Kalaweva-Jayaganga water and soil conservation ecosystem. Instead of protecting and rehabilitating the unique Kalaweva-Jayaganga cultural landscape, the decision to sacrifice it to economic short-term profits to be obtained by massive and unsustainable phosphate mining would be worse than another example of short-sightedness based on a desire to reap a fast buck within the network of the current processes of economic globalization and national trade and investment liberalisation in accordance with the WTO approach. As a matter of fact it would be another very serious symptom of Man the Maker 34

65 being in reality Man the Destructor of Nature and of Civilization. Destroying a landscape and an ancient cultural heritage it would amply demonstrate that Man the Maker is indeed a new and powerful geological agent, representing Dark Nature and being incapable of caring for the quality of life including environment, human rights and labour norms to borrow some terms from George Ter-Stepanian, Prof. Drs. R.F.M. Lubbers and Antony R. Berger refered to earlier in this chapter. 17 Footnotes and References 1) During the last days of January 2000 the media reported the finding at Almere in the Netherlands Northeast Polder - a reclaimed part of the former Zuiderzee inland sea - a graveyard and the remains of three villages dating from at least 5300 B.C. and possibly older. They represent the first small tribes of farmers engaged in agriculture, who moved into this area coming from southeastern Europe, where in turn agriculture was introduced at a much earlier date from the Near and Middle East. 2) A khanat (the name in the Near and Middle East) or Toggara (the name in the North African desert) can reach a length of several kilometres. In order to evacuate the soil during the digging of the near horizontal tunnel at or just below groundwater level vertical shafts are dug at intervals connecting the tunnel with the surface. Thus the khanat or foggara appears in the landscape and on aerial photographs as a very characteristic line of wells, each surrounded by an accumulation of the soil excavated from the underground tunnel. See f.i. C. Voilte, 1993, First geological map an interesting contribution to applied geology, Journal of Environmental Geology, vol. 22, 1993, pp The technique was developed in the Near and Middle East and spread later to the northern border zone of the Sahara desert in North Africa. 3) George Ter-Stepanian, 1983, Did the Quinary start?, Abstracts, XI Congress, International Union for Quaternary Research, Moscow, 1982, p. 260; and 1988, Geological phenomena and processes in the Technogene, Problems of Geomechanics, Academy of Sciences of the Armenian SSR, Vol. 10, pp ) The Earth Charter, commissioned in 1992 by the Earth Summit, is being prepared by the Earth Council based in Costa Rica, chaired by Maurice Strong. The actual drafting of the Earth Charter is done by an Earth Charter drafting team, Head Prof. Stephen Rockefeller, in close cooperation and consultation with many international as well as non-governmental organisations. Several early drafts have already been circulated for review and comments. The aim and objective of the Earth Charter is to establish generally accepted rules and regulations concerning human actions to be taken to protect environment and to prevent other human actions which damage or threaten the environment. If and when approved and endorsed by the UN General Assembly the Earth Charter should form the base for relevant international agreements and conventions and be translated into relevant international legislation. It should also facilitate the drafting of appropriate national laws, rules and regulations concerning the protection and management of the environment. 5) See f.i. the words of warning spoken at an address in The Hague on 3 February 2000 for the Erasmus Liga -Netherlands Association for the Club of Rome - by Prof. Drs. R.F.M. Lubbers, former Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Minister of State, member of the Executive Committee of the Club of Rome, President of the Board of Trustees of the World Wide Fund for Nature WWF, Professor in Globalisation at the Roman Catholic University Brabant in Tilburg, the Netherlands, and Visiting Professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government of the Harvard University in Cambridge (USA). 6) See f.i. C. Voute, 1993, First geological map an interesting contribution to applied geology, Journal of Environmental Geology, vol. 22, 1993, pp ) See f.i. Antony R. Berger, 1999, Dark Nature in Classic Chinese Thought, Centre for Studies in Religion and Society, University of Victoria, Canada). 8) D.L.O. Mendis, 1999, EPPAWALA - Destruction of Cultural Heritage in the name of Development, pp. xxviiixxx, quoting Vice-President Christopher Weeramantry of the International Court of Justice and the famous futurologist Arthur C. Clarke. 9) See f.i. C.C.Th. de Beaufort, Harold J. Plenderleith and Caesar Voute, 1964, Preservation of the Monument of Mohenjo Daro - Pakistan. Report prepared for UNESCO under the Programme of Participation in the Activities of Member States for the Government of Pakistan; see also an article on the Mohenjo Daro project by the same authors in the UNESCO Courier, ) C.C.Th. de Beaufort, Harold J. Plenderleith and Caesar Voilte, 1964, loc. cit.; see also Caesar Voute, 1972, Discussion on Water Problems and Development of the Past by Raymond L. Nace, Water Resources Bulletin, American Water Resources Association AWRA, Vol. 8, No. 4, pp. 835; and C. Voute, 1993, First geological map an interesting contribution to applied geology, Journal of Environmental Geology, vol. 22, 1993, pp

66 11) C.C.Th. de Beaufort, Harold J. Plenderleith and Caesar Voute, 1964, loc. cit. 12) See f.i. World-Wide Fund for Nature WWF International, September 1999, Documentation File on Sustainable Trade for a Living Planet - Reforming the World Trade Organisation. 13) D.L.O. Mendis, 1999, EPPAWALA - Destruction of Cultural Heritage in the name of Development, loc. cit, in particular pages 28-48, and extensive bibliography 14) D.L.O. Mendis, 1999, see ref. note 13 15) D.L.O. Mendis, 1999, EPPAWALA - Destruction of Cultural Heritage in the name of Development, loc. cit, in particular pages 28-48, , , and extensive bibliography. 16) D.L.O. Mendis, 1999, EPPAWALA - Destruction of Cultural Heritage in the name of Development, loc. cit, in particular pages and extensive bibliography. 17) See references, notes 2, 3 and 5 Prof. Caesar Voute who was born in Indonesia has served as Associate Professor in Hydrogeology, Leiden State University, Professor in General and Applied Geology, International Institute for Aerospace Survey and Earth Sciences ITC at Delft and Enschede, UNESCO Consultant for the preservation of the ancient Philae Temple in the Nile Valley, Egypt, and for the preservation of the proto-historical Mohenjo Daro site in the Indus Valley Pakistan. He was UNESCO/UNDP Coordinator for the Borobudur Stupa Restoration Project in Central Java, Indonesia, and has been a member of the Netherlands National UNESCO Commission. He was also Secretary of the Netherlands Pugwash Group. He is an Honorary Member, Association of Hydrologists of India AHI, Honorary Correspondent Aero-Space Research Centre of Uruguay CIDA, and Honorary Adviser Bulgarian Aero-Space Agency BASH, Honorary Member European Association of Remote Sensing Laboratories EARSel. 36

67 PREFACE This Preface describes three contrasting achievements in creating sustainable water and soil conservation ecosystems, two in the state of Maharashtra, India, and one in Sri Lanka. One of the Maharashtra achievements the Jain project 1 is based on private business enterprise, while the other Ralegan Siddhi 2 is based on community organization. Each has reclaimed some part of what used to be the Commons in some distant past, that is now described as wasteland in the vast Deccan plateau. These two different forms of organization should not be seen as being competitive. Rather they should both be recognized as forms of organization suited to the same context, illustrating the fact that there is more than one alternative solution to the social problem of development. They are complementary approaches, typical of the complex mosaic of the largest democracy in the modern world, India. In a philosophical sense they bring to mind a statement by one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world today, Bill Gates, when he developed his Microsoft windows software, following the invention of the graphic mode by Apple Macintosh. Gates said: It takes maturity to cooperate where there is competition 3. The Sri Lanka project Reaching for the Sun, has features of both individual enterprise like the Jain project, as well as community organization like the Ralegan Siddhi project. It is a demonstration of the feasibility of Dendro power, an alternative energy technology, appropriate for Sri Lanka where large extents of abandoned tea lands are available today. It is a project that combines characteristics of both individual enterprise and community participation, and it restores waste land, making a contribution however small, to combat climate change. All three projects are replicable in regions of potentially fertile soil but little available water, so characteristic of regions where conventional modern irrigation practices are seldom successful. They illustrate two features of these Proceedings of the Pugwash Workshop on Learning from Ancient Hydraulic Civilizations to Combat Climate Change. These are the concept of the Commons that was introduced in a paper by Aiichiro Mogi 4 of Japan, and the water and soil conservation ecosystems or irrigation ecosystems approach that is the enduring characteristic of the ancient hydraulic civilization in Sri Lanka. 1 During a visit in July 2008, for the Annual General Meeting of the Indian Council on Water and Culture in July 2008 in Lonar, Maharashtra, I was able to visit Aurangabad and its vicinity (including Ajantha and Ellora caves). I met Shri Bhavarlal Jain (Bhau) at his Agri Park of Jain Hills (JH) and Food Park in Jain Valley (JV) with Pugwashite Professor R S Morwanchikar and a friend. Bhau kindly approved publication of the Preface from a brochure about his project. 2 I had met two scientists visiting Sri Lanka back in 1994, Ganesh and Vasudha Pangare who had done a study of one of the better known community based water and soil conservation projects in Maharashtra, Ralegan Siddhi, organized by a local citizen Shri Annansaheb Hazare. It was considered appropriate to also use both the Preface and the Conclusions from their study in this Preface. 3 Bill Gates, The Road Ahead Aiichiro Mogi, The Commons. Page

68 Bhavarlal Jain, lovingly called Bhau, who hails from a farmer family, chose to revert from trading and business to his ancestral farms during The Shirsoli hill ranges have been traditionally shown in the Maharashtra Gazetteer to be situated at an altitude of approximately 200 to 300 m (650 to 950 feet) with rainfall ranging from 650 to 750 mm (26-30 inches). The basaltic hard rock found there is formed from volcanic lava fl ows. Bhau envisaged converting such a land into cultivable land and so began the chapter of its transformation into what is now recognised as the Jain Hills and Jain Valley, or Jain Agri Park and Jain Food Park respectively. 38

69 A Telling Tale A visionary s vision virtualized Transformation of Rain-fed Wasteland through Watershed Development in Arid Zone A Replicative Model PREFACE There are certain facilities created within the farmlands covered in what is generally described as Agri Park of Jain Hills (JH) and Food Park in Jain Valley (JV). These facilities, among others, pertain to Research & Development of basic farm resources, viz, land, water and human. The Corporation conducts farm research and carries out development, imparts training for the benefit of its associates. It does the same for other stakeholders including agricultural students, researchers, scientists, government officers, farmers both from India and abroad. The campus also serves as a demonstration farm for various experiments and trials in respect of different crops and crucial subjects like waste-land reclamation, watershed planning and development. The centre also promotes modern irrigation methods, organic farming, use of bio-planting mediums and materials as important tools for enhancing productivity and improving cost-benefit ratio. It is indeed a demonstration of the commitment to transform rain-fed dry wasteland into horticulture, agro-forestry and irrigated agriculture. And that too only with the help of integrated rain-water harvesting and watershed measures. The complete gamut of this research and development is conducted under the banner Jain Hi-Tech Agri Institute, JHAI. It encompasses a full-fledged training institute, Jain Gurukul, with state-of-the-art teaching, training and extension aids and accommodation facilities for farmers and opinion makers. This live demonstration attracted enormous attention and created pressure to document and share Bhau s experiences in the form of a book which can reach across the country. Hence, this humble attempt. These farmlands form part of Shirsoli hilly area in the Northwest of Ajanta Mountain Ranges. The region is part of Deccan Plateau rocky terrain formed by basaltic lava flows. This region has annual average rainfall of 650 mm, temperatures ranging between 5 to 46 C and low humidity. Under these unfavourable geophysical conditions, experts had opined that ground water availability, if any, would be scarce and thoroughly undependable. Not heeding their advice, a dreamer undertook development of the entire area covering 207 ha (512 acres) of such a waste-land as a challenge. He had another compelling reason to do so. He knew that agriculture is the mainstay of the region and that there can be nothing more precious than consideration of water because agriculture without water means very little. He continued the work unabated with commitment and faith in the ultimate success of rain-water harvesting and soil conservation techniques. And through this model he has exemplified that one can establish sustainable agriculture, generate high level of local employment and make substantial addition to GDP. We believe that the results of experiments call for sharing and passing on the message to the people at large. The water and soil conservation measures were planned sequentially starting from ridge and proceeding toward valley. A step-by-step approach and experiments began. Field trenches, bench terraces and other appropriate structures were erected to harvest the rain-water right where it falls. The run-off resulting from high intensity of the rain was stored at the foot-hills in storage and percolation tanks which were sealed by technically sound cut-off trenches, COTS. This not only enhanced storage of rain-water but also ensured recharging of the ground aquifers. The water thus stored was eventually reclaimed through a network of percolation dug wells as well as bore wells. The well water was then used only through close piping and modern irrigation techniques, such as drip irrigation, where the water-use efficiency is as high as 95%. These measures ushered a miracle. At the commencement of the venture in early 1989, we could hardly manage to obtain about litres ( cu.m.) water in a given day from 39

70 an old, abandoned, dilapidated dug well. The various rain-water harvesting and soil conservation engineering structures created and maintained during past 8 years (between ) now ensure, even in drought years, minimum draft of average 15 lakh litres per day (1500 cu.m./day). Indeed, during the past four years, the draft has averaged to 19 lakh litres/day (1900 cu.m./day). It has been observed that during normal rainfall year, the draft averaged 25 lakh litres/day (2500 cu.m./day). We have modified the general concept of watershed and divided it for the sake of clarity and due emphasis which ought to be given to different aspects encompassed by this concept. We have added few features which can be described as forward integration of conventional watershed concept. The components presently covered by our integrated watershed approach are as follows: Land and Soil Conservation Measures, Soil Improvement and Amendment Measures, 6 Rain-Water Harvesting Structures, Water Recovery Structures, Artificial Recharging and Soil Moisture Improvement Measures, Higher Water-Use Efficiency through MIS, Agro-Forestry and Ecology, and Sustained Employment Generation and Self-Development. Vision, modern technology, on-site experiences; trials and scientific experiments as well as economic considerations have worked hand-in-hand in Jain Watershed. Our endeavour is to enlighten, guide and demonstrate to the farmers as well as other institutional land holders that one can reclaim and green the waste-land with the help of rain-water harvesting combined with drip technology. Water budgeting, costing and water balance sheet have been worked out for our Jain Watershed to serve as a doable model. We, however, do not claim that this is the only or the most perfect model of watershed development or water and soil conservation. Nor do we wish to maintain that the whole development was pre-planned and/or systematically executed without an y fault, shortcomings, setbacks, or is cost-effective in the short-run. It is, however, true that with faith in the concept of watershed, its consequence and hard work, we ha v e realised the cherished dream, and the society at large stands to benefit, without an iota of doubt, out of such experiments. The eventful achievement of just about eight years of intense effort does present a feat acclaimed by many as unique and exemplary. This is a continuing saga of success, a living tribute to the leadership of a highly committed visionary and also to the equally motivated thousands of individuals who have ceaselessly toiled to create what is now described by many as Paradise on Earth. The moving spirit behind this telling tale is no one but a foresighted dreamer, the Chairman of the Corporation, Bhavarlal Jain, lovingly called Bhau. What has been created has become a pilgrimage centre which inspires over 12,000 farmers from every nook and corner of the country who visit this facility annually. The ensuing pages leaf a short history of this acclaimed experiment and is only a part of work being done by JHAI. `One who solves the problem of water is worth two Nobel Prizes, one for peace and another for science John F. Kennedy 40

71 Studies in Ecology and Sustainable Development Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage From Poverty to Plenty: The Story of Ralegan Siddhi by Ganesh 1 and Vasudha Pangere 2 Preface During the last decade, rural development issues have gained prominence in our country. Many forms of interventions have been tried and tested in order to develop the rural areas. While most of the solutions offered, such as increased efficiency of food production, irrigation, provision of alternative areas for human settlement, livestock reduction, and so forth, are necessary, they do not aim at the conservation and optimal use of natural resources. Economic development, after all, ultimately depends upon the available resources. It follows that if natural resources are depleted without providing for their replenishment, the developmental process cannot be sustained for long. The concept of sustainable development, therefore, encourages forms of growth that meet current basic human needs, while preserving the resources for the needs of future generations. Economic development is linked to environmental conservation. The impact of expanding human numbers and activities is accelerating the destruction of natural resources. Immediacy of human needs, limited investment options, and the delays involved in reaping greater gains of investment have a detrimental impact on land and biological resources. The short term need to produce an adequate living for today s population, by using intensive methods of agricultural production, reduces the carrying capacity of natural resources like land and water. International development agencies have at various times struggled to understand and define the concept of sustainable development, particularly for the agrarian economy of the developing countries. Emphasis has been laid on directing developmental strategies towards meeting basic needs first, encouraging local self-reliance and self-sufficiency, and keeping human development activity within the constraints of local ecosystems. As the World Commission on Environment and Development put it, Sustainable development requires meeting the basic needs of all and extending to all the opportunity to fulfill their aspirations for a better life. Ideally, sustainable development would aim to keep resource depletion, environmental degradation, cultural disruption and social instability to a minimum, making possible a more equitable distribution of resources between the wealthy and the poor. This would be the only meaningful approach to the problems of the Third World with its confluence of extreme poverty, rapid population growth and relatively abundant natural resources. Thus, sustainable development implies a change in all aspects of life. It depends upon the willingness of the people to change their perceptions of the socio-economic and environmental conditions around them, and the receptiveness of each individual to alter their present use of natural resources. 1 Ganesh Pangare is a water management expert currently Technical Director, World Water Institute, Pune, India. His main area of work during the past fifteen years has been in people - centered water interventions. He is also actively involved with policy reforms at the national and international level 2 Vasudha Pangare is executive director of the World Water Institute in Pune, India. She also heads Oikos Consultants and is a member of the steering committee of the Gender and Water Alliance, which is an associated program of the Global Water Partnership. 41

72 In an agricultural economy such as ours, sustainable development needs to begin in the rural areas, as the majority of the population of the country survives on products of the land, i.e. soil, water, vegetation and animals. With a rapidly increasing population these natural resources are being brought under tremendous pressure in order to meet growing needs. If care is not taken, our natural resources will soon be depleted beyond replenishment. What we need is a highly productive system for growing all forms of biomass, from food grains to grasses and trees, which will be at the same time ecologically sound and sustainable, and not technical systems that give bumper crop yields now and discount the future. Resources like land are finite and must be judiciously utilised. We must restore degraded land, cultivate wastelands and ensure that agricultural and forest land are not put to other uses. Only then is it possible to achieve a degree of economic and environmental equilibrium. But first we would need to change ourselves, for only if we alter our thinking and basic values can we hope to improve the quality of our lives. Development fundamentally refers to human beings and should be a human experience which fulfils an individual s mental, emotional and physical potential, not just in terms of capital accumulation, capital growth and economic growth. Development should make individuals selfreliant and self-confident. It should provide a sense of fulfillment to the individual who is affected by the process of change. What we saw at RS was an example of rural development that encompassed the components of sustainability. It was development that aimed at conservation and made use of innovative ways of preserving natural resources. Anna Hazare, in his own way, has evolved a philosophy that aims at sustainable development. Whatever may be the source of his inspiration and the basis of his philosophy (mostly from the teachings of Swami Vivekananda and partly from Gandhi) he has essentially developed a model for sound human and environmental management. He has shown that people can alter their lives, discipline themselves into the appropriate use of resources and demonstrated that the people can work together for the development of the village as a whole and not just for their own economic betterment. Anna s philosophy and formula are very simply put in his own word s which are almost as famous as he is : If every village puts into practice the four bandis (bans), nasbandi (sterilisation), nashabandi (prohibition), kuranbandi (ban on grazing), and kurhadbandi (ban on tree felling), the nation will progress very fast. In addition to these bans Anna advocates the necessity of conserving every drop of rain : Pani adva-pani jirva (trap the water where it falls). Anna says, If we can stop every drop of water from running off, there will be no drought in any village in our country. This then is the very basis of sustainable rural development; for water conservation and the four bans imply community participation and involvement in the development process. That, in essence, is what sustainable development is all about. 42

73 From Poverty to Plenty: The Story of Ralegan Siddhi by Ganesh and Vasudha Pangare Analysis and Conclusion The success story of RS has been interpreted in many ways. It has been upheld as a model for many forms of change or development, according to the perception or interest of the researcher. Some have emphasised the economic changes, others the aspect of watershed development, and still others the social and moral changes. RS is flexible to many points of view. Is it necessary to study RS as a success story, or should one only study the processes taking place to find out what we can learn from them in our search for practical sustainable development? In any case, it is definitely too early to say whether or not RS is a success story. As the chairman of the education society briefly and truthfully summed up: Progress is very slow. We have succeeded only to the extent of 75 percent. The success will be 100 percent only when the farmers dependence on rainfall is completely gone. On the face of it, the story of RS seems to be the story of Anna Hazare. In a way this is true. Does this then mean that every village needs an Anna Hazare? For the success of any developmental process, constructive leadership is very crucial. This leadership can be external or internal, but in the long run, it is the internal leadership that is more important to sustain the process. Anna Hazare returned to the village after a long absence. So in a sense he was stepping in from outside. But he also belonged to the village. It was perhaps easier for the people to accept his leadership knowing he was one of them. In fact, some of the villagers consider him to be the reincarnation of Sant Yadav Baba who took samadhi in the village and who is worshipped by them. Anna definitely has charismatic power as well, but this is not an essential factor in providing leadership for the development process. A closer look at the role played by Anna shows that his charismatic power is only an additional qualification as such, and not the main reason for the success of his leadership. He is a good leader because he has won the faith and trust of the villagers by demonstrating that he is working for the good of the village and not for selfish reasons. Anna managed successfully to involve the entire village in decision making and in the implementation of the various projects he undertook. He made use of the gram sabha to introduce his ideas and invite the participation of the villagers. He makes the final decision theirs so that the villagers feel responsible for the project. They also appreciate that the development projects are for the common cause of their village. By eliciting such support, Anna created social forces like the tarun mandal which helped him to abolish alcoholism, dowry, and the caste system. Through the same strategy he implemented the ban on grazing, and brought about social acceptance of the use of public toilets for biogas. Anna Hazare has shown that results can be achieved through informal structures. Even though the administration of the projects is systematic and through the formation of co-operative societies, the power and administrative structure is not formal. Participation from the people is purely at an informal level. Though social forces do play an important part, they are not imposed through a formal power structure. The societies and co-operatives are registered organisations. However, nominations to the committees are based on voluntary participation. RS has shown us that participatory sustainable development is possible. The process is not easy, as it demands a commitment from all those who are affected by it. In its initial stages, it also demands certain sacrifices from those involved. But when the people themselves understand the implications of the processes taking place, they are willing to pay the price. An important observation is that these villagers are able to understand the implications of the development project without the aid of formal education. Anna Hazare himself has studied only up 43

74 to the seventh standard. Perhaps his army training helped, but most of the people we interviewed had hardly completed primary school. Yet these villagers are capable of organising themselves in order to implement the projects and handle all financial matters related to them. Anna used the concept of shramdan to get the people to work together for the benefit of the village. It is an interesting and unique method of bringing about people s participation in the development process. It is difficult for any village community to move towards constructive change and development in total isolation, without some degree of aid or support. Organisations and institutions that are able to provide the necessary financial and other inputs (scientific, technical assistance, etc.) have necessarily to be relied upon. What Anna has done is to use the government schemes that have been formulated for rural development. All the changes that he has brought about development schemes are implemented honestly and systematically would prosper, maybe not to the extent of RS where Anna s leadership has added a new dimension to the developmental process. As the chairman of the education society said, When any scheme is being implemented in a particular area, a government official is appointed to monitor it. If he does his job well there is no reason why the scheme should fail. On one hand, people look to the government to solve all their problems. Yet on the other hand, people have lost faith in the government schemes because of the bureaucratic procedures and the corruption that is involved. That is why the percolation tank in RS failed. Proper care had not been taken by the government while lining the tank. The villagers did nothing (and were unaware that they could do something) until Anna involved them in the repair work through shramdan. In this way they realised that they could bring pressure upon the government officials to do their work properly. The presence of the villagers ensured that the tank was repaired properly. RS has become the showpiece of the government as all the schemes implemented there have been successful. It has become a demonstration ground where new schemes are introduced. However, the credit does not go to the government but to Anna for taking the initiative to find out about the various schemes available. It was only after he proved that he could implement the schemes successfully, that the government took interest. The experiences narrated by Anna, of the indifference and lack of interest of the government officials when he approached them initially for assistance and information, show that it is very important that knowledge of these schemes should percolate down to the villagers themselves. This would make the villagers understand the schemes and demand proper services from the government officials. It is important to note that in the development of RS economic support has been sought mainly from government funds or from bank loans. No aid or loan from national and foreign agencies is encouraged. Since loans have to be repaid, greater commitment is ensured from the people thus increasing the rate of success of the project. It has been observed that aid from aid agencies tends to make people dependent on the agency and sometimes even lethargic in maintaining the output of the projects. Also withdrawal of aid could result in total collapse of the entire infrastructure. This implies that the agency should ensure that the project becomes independent before withdrawing its support. This is a process that needs to begin from the very first day that the aid is given. RS has shown that development can be purely village based, improving the lives of the villagers in terms of their specific needs. By improving agriculture and giving them an efficient means of irrigation, the lives of the people have changed. However, such a change would be superficial without the supportive social changes. Social change in a way, is dependent upon economic development. When the liquor den owners were given alternative sources of income, they were willing to close down their business. This had moral and social implications as well. 44

75 Watershed development alone also would not have been effective, if the social fabric had remained unchanged. In fact it would have been difficult, if not impossible to implement a watershed development programme without the involvement of the people, which in turn necessitated a change in their earlier attitudes, and it was because the villagers came together by breaking down artificial economic barriers that it was possible to have a watershed development and improve agriculture. All the methods used for these purposes involved participation of the people. It was this that gave the development of RS an element of sustainability. People participated because they believed in the development process and changed their lifestyles to suit this process. Thus changes in the different spheres of life took place simultaneously, even though one process of change may have led to another. At RS an effort has been made to distribute resources in a more or less equitable manner among the villagers. In this way the economic and social upliftment of the village is ensured, rather than only certain sections benefitting, which is usually the case. This again enhances the sustainable aspect of the development Due to Anna s emphasis on the value system, his moralistic attitude has often been criticized. In a village like RS, however, it was necessary. It seems quite clear that no form of development can be sustained without change in attitudes which, after all are part of an individual s entire value system. The results of the economic development of RS will be clearer in another five years after the loans have been repaid. By that time, the success of the watershed development projects will also be more evident. As for the overall development of the village, Anna himself says that this will be in the second or third generation from now. As he explained to us, he will not be around to teach the future. Future generations will be taught by their parents who are presently Anna s students. The true success of RS will be seen when they become parents and impart their values to their own children. Conclusion To conclude, it seems fairly obvious that for a developmental process to succeed, and remain viable on a long-term basis it is necessary a) for the people to want to change; b) that they participate in the entire process, from the initial stages; c) that they participate in the decision making, and make the process their own They should a) be willing to maintain the change at different levels, at different stages of growth; b) keep conflicts between themselves to minimum c) have common objectives. To make all this possible, effective leadership is very important, as it is the leader who sets off the development process through his initiative and has the ability to recognise the common needs of the people. It is necessary for the leader to be committed and demonstrate that commitment and involvement is necessary to make the project succeed. He needs to ensure participation and help people to alter their individual value systems. Needless to say, the leader should appeal to a majority of the people, so that social forces that will ensure continuation of the process can be created. Lastly, the question of whether RS is replicable, will always remain unsolved to a degree. The answer will lie in similar efforts that have been made in other areas. Until then RS will continue to beckon researchers, journalists, farmers, and tourists, and present an example of what can be done. 45

76 Anna Hazare, the philosopher, activist and social reformer of Ralegan Siddhi GM : A tool for population control? by: Jagannath Chatterjee According to the UK Soil Association: All non-gm farmers in North America are finding it very hard or impossible to grow GM-free crops. Seeds have become almost completely contaminated with GM organisms (GMOs), good non-gm varieties have become hard to buy, and there is a high risk of crop contamination. The U.K. Government s official adviser on GM, the Agriculture and Environment Biotechnology Commission (AEBC), has said it would be difficult and in some places impossible to guarantee that any British food was GM-free if commercial growing of GM crops went ahead. In North America, farmers can no longer be certain the seed they plant does not contain GM genes. GM food scientists can increase the vitamin content of food, so there is no reason why they cannot reduce it in order to increase malnutrition, disease, and death on a large scale. For example, more than $100 million has been spent over 10 years to produce transgenic rice at the Institute of Plant Sciences in Zurich. The Zurich team introduced three genes taken from daffodils and bacteria into a rice strain to produce a yellow rice with high levels of beta-carotene, which is converted to Vitamin A within the body. As well as altering vitamin content, over 300 open-field trials of `pharma crops have taken place around the world since In California, for example, GM rice containing human genes has been grown for drug production. Pharmaceutical wheat, corn, and barley are also being developed in the U.S., France and Canada. A biotech company called Prodigene has been working on growing edible vaccines in corn and in November 2000 began trials on an edible AIDS vaccine. By introducing drugs into food, GM technology has huge population control potential. There is an unpleasant whiff of arrogance in the whole (vaccine-autism) debate, Horton says. Can the public not be trusted with a controversial hypothesis? The view that the public cannot interpret uncertainty indicates an old-fashioned paternalism at work. The public is entitled to know as much as possible. 46

77 A refreshing new dimension in agriculture - Reaching for the Sun by Vidya-Jyothi, Deshamanya, Ray Wijewardene 1 Energy from the sun radiates down; is collected photo-synthetically by the foliage and transmitted via the branches throughout the tree as biomass, and as fertility to feed the soil organisms... and thence re-cycled back to the surrounding vegetation. If not utilised, the biomass ends - after several billions of years, fossilized - as coal and oil for exploitation by future generations. Hence, the source of all the coal and oil presently being extracted around the world. Ancient wisdom. Those of us with the privilege of a pirivena grounding to our education in Sri Lanka will recall being taught the four elements of life in Ahpo, Thayjo, A tree whose hungry mouth is pressed Against the Earths wide open breast (Joyce Kilmer.. TREES) Vahyo, Patavi The Pali word Patavi represented the solid or earth state, While Thayjo represented the state of heat, of energy, or fire,.. Ahpo represented the liquid state or water, while Vahyo represented air or the gaseous state. We learned the example of the solid ( patavi ) cold lump of ice which, when heat ( thayjo )is added, turns into the liquid state, ( ahpo ) and with further heat turns into the vapour or gaseous state ( vahyo ) All these states or elements being reversible as heat is reduced The vapour reverting to liquid and in turn to the solid state as heat (or energy) diminishes. Central to them all being heat, energy, fire, ( thayjo ) the Sun itself. How very right the ancient Egyptians were in their worship of the Sun-God RA as the giver of all life How very right the Zoroastrians are in their worship of the Sun and Fire as fundamental to existence.. 2 It is only comparatively recently within the past few decades - that a greater appreciation has been realised of more fundamental differences between tropical agriculture (with year round sunshine) and temperate agriculture (with year round sunshine) and temperate agriculture (undertaken under seasonal or summer sunshine) which may last for only a few months each year. The growing of rice a temperate crop came to us from southern China, - through India and, as a seasonal 4-month crop, - has yet adapted well to the water-saturated valleys (or yaya ) between the rain-fed uplands of the tropical haena (chena) The adaptation being mainly in the use of water largely for control of weeds (hence the accustomed use of some 20 tonnes of water to grow just one kilogram of rice!). 1 D.Sc. (h.c.) Universities of Moratuwa and Sabaragamuwa. Formerly, Chancellor of Moratuwa University, and former principalscientist of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture. (see page 54) 2 The compiler D L O Mendis had visited the Zoroastrian temple in Yazd during the conference organized by the International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage in Teheran in May 2007, where an eternal flame is kept burning for the Sun God. That conference followed by the one organized by the Indian Commission on Water and Culture in Hampi, India, in June 2007, were the original inspiration for the Pugwash workshop in Sri Lanka in November 2007 on the theme Learning from ancient hydraulic civilizations to combat climate change. 47

78 THE SUN IN RICE CULTURE - Vel govithan It is only recently, again, that the importance of sunshine is becoming fully appreciated in the growing of rice, and specially during the (about) 20 day period prior to harvest when the vital starches move, through photo-synthesis, from the leaves and into the grain. An essential sunshineintensity requirement is the availability of at least cals./sq.cm/day (15-17 MJ./sq.m./ day) during this grain-filling-period (eg. In Jan./Feb.) to ensure a yield of at least 6 to 7 tonnes per hectare. Failure to achieve this level of sunshine invariably results in reduced yields to 4 and 5 tonnes per hectare. The wisdom in the ancient farmers choice of the NWP (North-Western Province) and NCP and also the Eastern Provinces for rice-production can well be appreciated, and specially when the timely needs of water (supplementing rainfall) are provided to the crop undergoing drought through the wisdom of the water-conserving tank system, during the preceding growing period of excess rainfall. THE SUN IN COCONUT CULTURE. Haen govithan In modern coconut farming the lines of palms claim the highest canopy, with alternate avenues (alliyas) reserved, one for plucking/collection/ transport of the harvest (gaman-alliya), and the other (saru-alliya) for growing complementary (fertility-recycling) crops. Gliricida (yielding NPK) forms the second canopy (also used for fuelwood,) and Titonia (NK) form the third canopy. Fourth, the leguminous creeping ground-cover protects the soil against erosion (a very major cause of fertility lost in the tropics) and helps feed the myriads of soil organisms which then recycle the nutrients into plant-available form to support the entire system. These alternate nitrogen fixing (NF) and non-nf crops complement each symbiotically in a mutually and biologically balanced system. Coconut, is our primary crop in the intermediate zone (as the agro-climatic-region between the wet and the dry zones is described). The coconut-palm has adapted well to the NWP with two periods of rainfall (April-May-June) and (Sept.,-Oct.,- Nov.,) during a year of sunshine, as befits the needs of a perennial crop, with intensities of over 16 MJ./sq.m/day. The sunshine being essential for the photo-synthesis that moves the starches in the leaves and into the nuts being formed at their axils (where they join the palm). It will be observed that the temperate crop (rice) was in particular need of sunshine during the several weeks of grain-filling prior to harvest, while the perennial crop needed that sunshine throughout the year that it took for the starches to flow into the nuts from the leaves. Any period of dim sunshine (through haze ) invariably results in a reduction of crop in the following year. This has been well observed during the last few years (2006, 2007) and will sadly again be observed in the year ahead when heavy haze cover (sans rain) in the first half of 2008, has blocked the sunshine from reaching the leaves. 48

79 Estimation of Solar Radiation for Sri Lanka (1991) by Prof. T. D. M. A.Samuel of Peradeniya University. This map illustrates the pattern of solar radiation falling over Sri Lanka. The lack of sunshine in the central hills (blank white) explains the scrub and patna vegetation of that region, and clearly demonstrates the wisdom of the early rice and food-crop agriculturists in selecting the NWP, the NCP, and the NE-provinces for farming complemented by water conserved in the tanks. The coconut-triangle of the NWP is also well positioned for that crop, and especially when linked to the rainfall and soils of the region. CLIMATE CHANGE ( Global Dimming ) Earlier endeavours to co-relate the fluctuation of coconut yields with the rainfall over the preceding year, have only been partially correct as periods of rainfall are usually associated with hazy cloud-cover. In these past few years of the mid-late seventies however, excessive haze-cover (i.e.sunlight-diminishing haze) has occurred without corresponding rains. The resulting reduction in coconut crops these past years can thus only partially been attributable to climatechange. In fact, the climate-change we have thus experienced can more be attributed to changes caused by our own pollution of the atmosphere, where micro-particulates released into the air by partial combustion of imported petroleum fuels have formed nuclei upon which moisture in our normally humid airs have coalesced. This has resulted in an (umbrella-like) cover of haze which acted as barrier to passage of the suns rays to the foliage beneath. Britain s London experienced such haze - which developed into pea-soup fog - through pollution of the atmosphere in the 1930s and 40s, from particulates released by partially burned coal fires released by thousands of domestic fire-places throughout this vast city. The mist and fog spread through much of the surrounding counties, and was only relieved through the introduction of gas-fired-heating. Likewise, the fogs of Los-Angeles, created by their dense automobile population, and which rise to altitudes of a few thousands of feet; trapped within the surrounding valley by the low wind speeds in that area of the State of California. Special new laws in the region now severely restrict the emissions from i.c. (internal-combustion) engined vehicles and encourage the move towards the electric motor A trend which is wisely being followed by other States, too.. Similar observations have frequently been made by pilots flying over Colombo, over the past many decades, and was earlier jocularly referred to as Never-on-a-Sunday when reduced week-end traffic experienced in the city provided some relief to the gradually spreading umbrella of haze (usually between 800 to 1800 feet agl.) They then passed through this layer of haze into clearer. Cloud-split skies above. Sadly this haze barrier to sunshine has gradually spread over this country corresponding to the spread of population and increase of motorised traffic. Such (imported) pollution can only increase with the coming of the coal-fired generating stations around the country. Perhaps an inevitable price to pay for the pattern of progress we have been pleased to adopt. 49

80 When this developing situation was described before meetings of prominent agricultural scientists some decades ago, the attitude of the scientists earlier was one of ridicule but more recently has been considered worthy of fresh review, as similar reports about the yield-effects of reduced sunshine have been reported from neighbouring countries in the East and specially from lush Indonesia where increased burning (clearing?) of forests has left a pall of smoke hanging over the cities, too. SO WHAT DO WE DO? In earlier decades it was thought there was little we might do with regard to a lack of sunshine. The problem could not be resolved by heavier inputs of fertilisers or chemicals to correct so fundamental a problem caused by nature, indicating an inherent resistance to blaming ourselves for our predicament. It was, however, realised that certain plants (known as C-4 ) contained an inherent characteristic to be more efficient in photo-synthesis plants such as Maize (corn), Sorghum, Sugar-cane, Bamboo, which could photo-synthetically convert a greater quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere into biomass. Sadly for us, Rice, Wheat, Coconut and other common crops do not possess this facility, and are described as C-3 for their ability only to convert a lesser quantity of available CO 2 into carbon. G.M.*? While the words Genetic-Modification often result in raised-eyebrows for the manipulations of G.M.-scientists to the detriment of a country s health as well as to their farming, some GM crop-seeds have also been manipulated to ensure they do not grow to the pattern of the first generation (F-1). They ( terminator-seed ) thus preclude the farmer from customarily using a small part of his harvest as seed for the next crop. He is then dependent upon the seed-merchant for supply (usually at, now, very high cost) of his requirement of seed for the following crop. The words terminator-bred are thus appropriately used to describe such a manipulation of genetically-modified seed, which process is well protected and enforced under patent law urged particularly from the U.S. In fact most of the larger, better-known, multi-nationals have moved and re-grouped from the marketing of agro-chemicals such as fertilisers and insecticides and herbicides, now to the very much more profitable breeding and marketing of seed, with questionable benefit to the countries and their farmers - into which they have moved with massive corresponding (misguided) government and legal support. Already, the rice seed is known to be under genetic modification to C-4 characteristics, and the process is being strongly guarded by the internationally recognised research institutes from acquisition and exploitation by such avaricious multi-nationals. That rice can thus be manipulated to C-4 configuration is now well known. And appropriate decisions need to be taken towards directing research effort also to breeding such characteristic into the coconut. But this may take several decades under the more difficult conditions pertaining to the breeding of perennial crops. May?...Yes, may, unless a fortuitous break-through can be achieved through dedication and direction. In the meanwhile, improvements in certain recent cultural practises suggest fresh directions by which the photo-synthetic capabilities inherent in the growing of this traditional crop (coconut) may be enhanced. Until such research can be undertaken, very serious cognizance needs to be taken NOW, to substantially reduce the aerial (and agricultural) pollution which we have incautiously imported with increasing addiction to fossil fuelled vehicular transportation. The Railways authorities have wisely planned ahead towards the greater economy and reduced pollution of electric-motivation. As also throughout the world around us. * see page 46 50

81 Chena and the Kandyan-Forest-Garden The importance of photo-synthesis in agriculture has recently gone through fresh appreciation, not only for the commercial (or food) crops being grown, but also for the well-being of the myriad of soil-organisms (earth-worms etc.) which feed on the decaying vegetation as it drops to the earth-floor. These convert and re-cycle (through their digestive systems) the substantial and wide-ranging minerals present in the quartzes and sands of the soil, and into plant-available-form as nutrition for the crops being cultivated onand-above the soil. This was the basis of natural farming, as practised world-wide. It was also termed organic-farming or green-manuring, a system which thus cultured the micro-flora and micro-fauna in the soil to consume and re-cycle this nutrition to feed the cultivated crops. Processes of composting were also devised and especially in the colder environments of the temperate countries, - to support and maintain the warmth required by these organisms. The art of composting thus evolved to help accelerate the activity of these micro-organisms by giving them more favourable conditions in which to breathe, live and multiply. In Sri-Lanka the traditional practise of the Kandyan Forest Garden has recently undergone fresh appreciation for the wisdom and science behind its concept. A concept both for the symbiotic harnessing (for food, fertility, fuel and forage) of the different-heighted canopies of the forest vegetation under year-round tropical sunshine; as well as for the re-cycling of vegetative nutrition falling from these canopies to enrich the soils below. Not only did it serve the culture of the various spice-plants grown commercially in the region, but also the fruit trees Jak, Breadfruit, and a variety of legumes upon which the population depended for their diet. These to supplement the rice grown in the vela or levelled-paddies of the valleys below these haenas (or undulating-rain-fed-uplands ). Sadly, this was not understood by the tea planters from the west who were more used to the open-field system of farming practised in the western and temperate regions from which they came. Haena (or chena) cultivation was ridiculed as wasteful, because of their inability to understand the subtle rotational and multi-function system thus evolved A revised system (now also termed Alley-cropping and SALT sloping-agricultural-land-technology) is gaining fresh appreciation for its unique adaptability; and particularly to the characteristics of the humidtropical regions, the world over Asia, Africa and the central-americas. Once criticised as a destructive slash-and-burn system, the correct practise of haen-govithan or chena-cultivation is now known to have been far better for the land than the introduced practise of cutting, burning and then digging up the naked and erosion-prone soils for mono-crops, such as coffee and tea. When asking for a particular villager in the forested regions one will invariably receive the reply Neh mahatthaya, kelay eliya karande gihillah He is away giving light to the land Earlier we might have translated this to mean He has gone to clear the forest with implication of slash-and-burn. His intention, however, was only to prune the upper growth, so as to let sunlight through to the crops he had sown into the fertile and now weed-free (through shade) soils below. The growing of the rubber-plant (Hevea), however, has proven the nearest to the natural forest and does not involve the pernicious and erosion prone practise of clean-weeding as practised on farms of the temperate western regions A practise which even in the temperate regions is now rapidly being replaced by no-till farming which encourages minimal disturbance of the 51

82 soil and the development of the natural organisms within the soil, animal, bacterial, protozoal, fungal, etc.. Chemical farming evolved as an endeavour, commercially, to by-pass these natural processes by applying the required chemicals direct to the crop being cultured, - hopefully in plant available form! Invariably the practise has resulted in destroying a vast proportion of the soil-organisms, and causing tremendous pollution of the sub-soil water resources leading to the surrounding tanks, irrigation schemes and domestic wells. Natural Farming of Coconut A systematic reversion to natural farming is now being researched in a modern approach to the growing of coconut which re-introduces the wisdom behind both the Kandyan Forest Garden as well as in the more sustainable features of the Haena system. This is achieved through the companion or complementary growing of fertility-restoring crops, with the coconut-palm. thus enabling a re-cycling of the sun s energy as intercepted at varying levels of canopy over the soil. each contributing and complementing towards the well being of the total system. In the coconut approach, the alliya s or avenues between adjacent lines of coconut palm, alternate between the gaman-alliya (for the logistic needs of the coconut-farming process. the plucking, collecting and transport of the harvested coconuts) and the saru-alliya (contributing towards the sustained fertility needs of the system). Husks, if not dry-decorticated are buried between the palms to perform the dual-function of conserving (sponging) valuable moisture and recycling the palm s valuable needs of potassium and magnesium contained in the kohu-bath of coir-pith. When replanting is due, these from a fertile bed for the young seedling which then grows (reaches) towards the better sun-light of the gaman-alliya A serendipitous feature has also been observed of the abundant (and sustained) availability of fuel-wood through the system, whereby (in the instance of the coconut) one of the saru-alliya crops, Gliricida, also provides a continuous supply (perhaps every seven to nine months) of fuelwood for the hearth, or to conveniently located gasificiation-centres for conversion into thermal (processing) heat and/or electricity. The latter either for immediate domestic or rural-industrial use or for contributing to the grid. Other saru crops such as Titonia, also contribute valuable potassium as well as nitrogen, thus precluding the need for imported, and increasingly expensive, chemical fertilizers. Harvesting, and sunshine The harvesting of cultured crops has invariably been undertaken during periods of the brightest sunshine; shortly after the brief-period (just a few weeks,) of grain-filling and photo-synthetic movement of the starches from the leaves into the pods. It is, nowadays, inadequately appreciated that the longer summer-holidays enjoyed in the west, were invariably timed to enable the children to return home from school to help their parents harvesting the crops ( bringing in the sheaves. ) Throughout the world, the harvesting of crops has invariably proven the most labour-intensive of all farming operations. And not the ploughing and cultivation periods as had erroneously been thought (. by this writer, too, in the past!) The labour-and-time-critical period of harvesting has invariably proven the expensive bottle-neck For example in the plucking of tea, the tapping of rubber, the plucking of coconuts etc. and the harvesting (cutting, gathering, conveying, threshing, winnowing, drying and bagging) of rice, all to be conducted during the brief periods of sunshine between monsoon rains.. Conventional mechanisation of harvesting has usually been towards mechanising all these individual operations into one gigantic and complex machine, and carried on wheels through the standing crop. Sadly this complex machine lies idle through most of the year between bursts of feverish (night and day) activity in the summer. 52

83 It was the early Incas in Peru and other parts of South America who systematically, and through generations, selectively bred (a form of GM) with single-minded dedication and endeavour, their staple crop, the Maize (or corn) crop, from being open-panicled (much like sorghum) to the closed panicle of the cob, which was then very much easier to harvest. The earliest known endeavour to harvest grain has been drawn from Pliny s description, and comprised a cart pushed by animals into the crop which was then beaten by the farmer, and into the cart. Early Australian settlers endeavoured to relieve the many and varied loads of conventional harvesting with the invention of the stripper harvester constructed on similar lines. Recent efforts to develop a similar stripper harvester for rice have necessitated the selective (or genetic) breeding of the rice-plant to heights convenient for such harvesting. Tea Again, it is little known that the tea bush (a temperate crop adopted from China and Japan) is, in the tropics, grown throughout the year, with year-round (muted) sunshine). It is therefore selectively-harvested approximately every five days. The tea-bush in Japan, however, is mainly dormant during the winter months, and grows mainly in the sunnier spring and summer months. It is therefore harvested only two or three times a year. The bush, however, is cleverly pruned at the start of spring, so that the whole plucking-table yields a level two-leaves-and-a-bud right across the table, for harvesting in one-sweep (whether manually or mechanically). This precludes need for the far more labour-intensive operation of selective-plucking, and considerable reduction in harvesting costs. The lesson for us here, is that mechanisation does not simply mean the mechanic-ing of a manual operation, but first the systematic multi-disciplinary study of the real problem and its associated operations, and then the achievement of the fundamental objective In this instance the culture and harvesting of the tea crop ( from crop to cup ) with minimal recourse to intervening (and usually costly) external stages, procedures and inputs. In 1964 I (the writer) was presenting The Landmaster Saga before an agri-business class at the Harvard Business School. The well illustrated lecture was very enthusiastically received by a class of mature business-men attending the Advanced Management Programme. As visiting lecturer and course director, we had the world famous engineering designer Professor Buckminister Fuller, who then rose and asked me, Did your tractor mechanise tropical agriculture, or did it just mechanise the buffalo? I was floored The class eagerly awaited my response. I could give none that was appropriate. The next morning the subject was taken up again with the question: What was the farmer really trying to achieve when ploughing his field? And he quoted from Robert Browning. A man s reach must exceed his grasp, or what s a heaven for? And thence commenced a new phase in my life. Reaching for the Sun. 53

84 Deshamanya Vidya-Jyothi Dr Ray Wijewardena Chancellor, University of Moratuwa from October 2002 At 78, Vidya-Jyothi Philip Rayvatha Wijewardene is yet full of vim and vigour. His accomplishments in the sphere of engineering are almost unparalleled among his countrymen. He is an old boy of St Thomas College, Mout Lavinia (Sri Lanka) and a Cambridge University (UK) graduate in three engineering disciplines- Aviation Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Agricultural Engineering. He has also fortified his erudition with a Master s degree in Business Administration from the prestigious Harvard Business School. He was conferred the title of Vidya- Jyothi in 1988 and an Honorary Fellowship of Silsoe College, University of Cranfield (UK) in 1994 and a honorary degree of Doctor of Science from the University of Moratuwa in 1994 in recognition of his contributions to Science and Technology. After returning to Sri Lanka, he took an active interest in issues related to farming practices; having physically stepped into the paddy fields of the Kalawewa area. He looked critically and scientifically at the farming practices prevaling at that time. Among his foremost engineering marvels is the world s first two wheeled tractor- the Landmaster two wheeled tractor, which he pioneered in Nottingham in During the Nineteen Sixties and early Nineteen Seventies over 300,000 units were sold in 27 countries including Sri Lanka, United Kingdom, Australia, Philippines, Malaysia and Japan. A man of many parts, he was placed fourth in Yachting at the Mexico Olympics in 1968, and won a Silver Medal at the Asian Games in Bangkok. The innovative thinking of Dr Wijewardena continued and his services were much in demand both in Sri Lanka and abroad. He was appointed Head of Agricultural Engineering at the Agricultural Engineering Research and Development Institute in Malaysia, a Research Institute set up by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations. He served in this post during the years 1972 and From 1974 to 1980, he served as Head of the Agricultural Engineering and Research Division of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture based in Nigeria. Back in Sri Lanka in the Nineteen Eighties and early Nineteen Nineties, he served in the Tea Research Board as Chairman, and also as a member, Mahaweli Authority, Coconut Development Authority, Coconut Research Board, Presidential Task Force on Science and Technology, and Arthur C. Clarke Centre for Modern Technologies. He has been the author of several publications on Conservation Farming including Management of Weed and Fertility yielding Maximisation of Agricultural Productivity based on his innovative and revolutionary concepts and philosophies on farming methods appropriate to the tropical setting. He may be described as a Scientist and Agricultural Engineer whose vision is focussed several decades into the future, penetrating the superficial symptoms, to the roots of problems perceived in the present. His other hobbies include designing and making aircraft at home and flying them!! He has contributed with practical skills and innovative thinking to Air Transportation appropriate to humid tropical countries such as Sri Lanka, invoking fixed wing, power driven and auto driven rotor aircraft. 54

85 FOREWORD An Indian rejoinder to a world-wide issue * by M. S. Swaminathan It is hoped that at the Rome Conference on world food security, Indian representatives will serve as a bright affirming flame in the midst of the sea of despair we see around us. A high-level conference on World Food Security has been convened by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) in Rome from June 3 to 5, The conference is in response to the growing global food emergency arising partly from the steep escalation in the price of fossil fuels and partly from weather aberrations. The conference will consider both the pressing problems of today and the emerging problems arising from climate change and diversion of prime farmland for the production of bio-energy. It has become a trend in such conferences for heads of governments/ states from Africa and other developing countries to participate in large numbers. In contrast, the industrialised countries tend to be represented either by their ambassadors in Rome or senior officials. It has also become customary in such large international political gatherings for developing countries to blame both rich countries and the WTO for not responding to their needs adequately and at the right time. The industrialised countries, in turn, stress that developing countries normally neglect their farmers and also exhibit a deficit in governance and surplus in corruption. At the end of the meeting, a few small gestures of immediate assistance will be forthcoming along with volumes of advice, but the long-term problems will remain under the carpet. The entire exercise, involving considerable expenditure, ultimately becomes a forum for photo opportunity and media cynicism. The poor nations and the poor in all nations will suffer most from the inaction associated with such a blame game. As the immediate past president of the Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, I wish to quote what Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein said in a Manifesto issued on 5 April 1955: We appeal as human beings, to human beings. Remember your humanity and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise, if you can not, there lies before you the risk of universal death. Professor Dr. M.S. Swaminathan * Daily Mirror, Sri Lanka, June 3, 2008 (Professor M.S. Swaminathan is Member of Parliament (Rajya Sabha) India, and former Chairman, National Commission on Farmers.) 55

86 This immortal appeal is the guiding principle behind the Pugwash movement for a nuclearperil free world. An even greater peril confronting us today is the spectre of widespread hunger and the consequent food riots. Unless the right to food becomes a fundamental human right and gets enforced legally and socially, the hungry will have to eat only promises and platitudes. Threats to human security Compounding the problems arising from poverty and unemployment are the new threats to human security arising from the rising cost of petroleum products and the consequent diversion of land and crops for fuel and feed production. The answer to these questions lies in improving the productivity and profitability of major farming systems in an environmentally sustainable manner. In most developing countries affected by high food prices, agriculture is the main source of rural livelihoods. They should hence initiate steps to take advantage of the vast untapped production reservoir existing with the technologies on the shelf, and thereby build a sustainable food security system based on home grown food. For example, in Africa, Asia and Latin America, the average yield of food crops like sorghum, maize, millets and grain legumes is less than 50 per cent of what can be achieved. Most of the farms in the developing countries of Asia are small in size, often less than two hectares. The smaller the farm the greater is the need for marketable surplus in order to get some cash income. The agriculture of industrialised nations is energy intensive, while most of the traditional agricultural practices in developing countries are knowledge intensive. Therefore, developing nations should not take to the path of energy intensive agronomic practices but should refine the traditional methods of soil health enhancement and pest management and blend them with modern technology. Also, developing nations should fully harness their vast animal wealth. India for example, has over 20 per cent of the world s cattle, buffalo, sheep and goat populations. It will therefore be prudent to promote crop-livestock integrated farming systems, rather than monoculture of the same crop and variety. In other words, the global energy and food crises have opened up uncommon opportunities for developing nations to promote conservation farming and sustainable rural livelihoods. This will help them to achieve an evergreen revolution leading to the improvement of productivity in perpetuity without associated ecological harm. Population rich, but land hungry countries like India, China and Bangladesh, have no option except to produce more per units of land and water under conditions of diminishing per capita arable land and irrigation water availability, and expanding biotic and a-biotic stresses. While participation in large high-profile international conferences may be important politically, charity begins at home and we must first attend to our own hungry who constitute the bulk of the hungry in Asia. Our immediate tasks are first to enable the over 4 crore of farmers relieved from the debt trap as a result of loan waivers to restart their agriculture in an effective manner and, secondly, to assist all farmers in the country to derive maximum benefit from the normal southwest monsoon which has arrived in Kerala. A good weather code will involve attention to all links in the production, consumption and commerce chain. The necessary inputs, particularly seeds of appropriate varieties and the nutrients essential for balanced fertilization, should be available at the right time and place and at affordable prices. Drought and flood codes In addition to a good weather code, drought and flood codes should also be kept ready. The drought code will involve the popularisation of crop life-saving techniques and the cultivation of low water-requiring but high-value crops like pulses and oilseeds. 56

87 Tuber crops will also do well even if planted somewhat late. The flood code should have strategies ready for post-flood farming activities. Seeds and planting material of alternative crops should be built up. After floods, the aquifer will contain adequate water and it is important that the post-flood season becomes a remunerative cropping season. Contingency plans for the flood prone plains of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Assam involving alternative cropping strategies should be prepared forthwith. With a population of over 1.1 billion, India s agricultural strategy should aim to keep the Central and State governments in a commanding position with reference to the management of food distribution systems such as PDS, ICDS, and school noon meal programme. In the ultimate analysis, assured and remunerative marketing will hold the key to stimulate and sustain farmers interest in producing for the market. Climate change may result in adverse changes in temperature, precipitation and sea level. Dependence only on wheat and rice will enhance vulnerability to climatic factors. Therefore, there should be revitalisation of the earlier food traditions of rural and tribal families, who in the past depended for their daily bread on a wide range of millets, grain legumes, tubers and vegetables. The PDS should include, wherever appropriate, ragi and a wide range of nutritious cereals, inappropriately referred to as coarse cereals, and tubers. India has the technological and economic capability to demonstrate how farming systems can be adjusted to different weather patterns. It is hoped that at the Rome Conference, Indian representatives will serve as a bright affirming flame in the midst of the sea of despair we see around us. In this hour of grave energy and food crises, we should revert to the advice of Russell and Einstein and remember our humanity and forget everything else. The call for Food for All which will be made by world leaders in Rome on June 3, 2008 will not then remain a populist slogan. 57

88 CLIMATE CHANGE Island Newspaper, Saturday, September 8, 2007 Developing countries win big concessions on global warming Riot police, protesters scuffle at APEC SYDNEY, Australia (AP) - Developing countries won a big concession from Australia and the United States on global warming, an official said Friday, as scuffles broke out between riot police and protesters near a hotel hosting delegates to the annual Pacific Rim meeting. The surge came from among about 1,000 people who had gathered for a rally at a city park, and appeared to have been triggered by a sudden downpour. Police pushed and shoved anyone who came near the hotel, corralling them behind a shoulder-to-shoulder wall of police. The demonstrations at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum came as a weekend deadline loomed to reach a unified position among the 21 leaders on tackling climate change, the top item on the meeting s agenda. At preliminary meetings for the summit, poorer countries led by China succeeded in getting any APEC statement in climate change to recognize the United Nations as the main forum to debate the problem, said Salman Al-Farisi, one of Indonesia s experts at the climate meetings. They agreed to put that in the declaration that leaders are expected to adopt at their weekend summit, Al-Farisi told The Associated Press. A bigger sticking point whether the statement should include targets for dealing with greenhouse gases remained unresolved, he said. Australia, with U.S. backing, is seeking a climate change statement that includes targets. Specifics of the Australian proposal were sketchy but officials said they included goals to reduce energy intensity the amount of energy needed to produce economic growth. The approach is an attempt to skirt a contentious part of the U.N.-backed Kyoto Protocol, which set targets for industrialized nations to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases but largely exempted developing ones. The U.S. and Australia, which have refused to ratify Kyoto, want APEC leaders to embrace a new approach to climate change that would require China one of the world s biggest polluters and other developing countries to commit to greenhouse gas reduction targets. But developing nations are against binding targets imposed by others. A fourth round of talks among APEC officials was due to be held on the topic later Friday, ahead of the leaders meeting Saturday and Sunday. They were rushing to finish the statement before President Bush leaves the summit early, after Saturday s session. If the experts fail to reach agreement on the wording of a statement, the issue will be handed to the leaders, who must hammer out some sort of consensus or risk embarrassing Australian Prime Minister John Howard, who put global warming at the top of the meeting s agenda. With global trade talks at a critical juncture, the leaders also planned to pledge their commitment to move along the so-called Doha round of trade negotiations, according to a draft of their final statement to be released at the end of their weekend summit. The World Trade Organization talks, bogged down for two years amid bickering between rich and poor nations over slashing barriers on farm and industrial trade, resumed this week in Geneva. The draft said the APEC leaders would issue a separate statement on the trade talks setting out the urgent need for progress and pledging our commitment to work with renewed energy to deliver an ambitious and balanced result. 58

89 INTRODUCTION Address before the Public Plenary Session of the 42nd Pugwash Conference Berlin 1 Sunday, 13 September 1992 The World at the Crossroads Towards a Sustainable, Livable, and Equitable World Philip B. Smith (Netherlands) Background The Pugwash Study Group on a Sustainable, Livable, and Equitable World was constituted during the 41st Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, which took place in Beijing from 17 to 22 September There are so many studies and projects going on at the present time in this general category that we feel the obligation to justify setting up one more. This public plenary is concerned with the subject of equitable economics. Because, as will become clearer in my talk, we have attempted to produce a holistic picture, we do not like to split off one aspect of the whole. Yet because economics plays a central role in almost all of the facets of this whole, I feel that the draft results of our work fit quite naturally into this session. I should not forget to mention that although I will try to summarize the opinions expressed in our Yellow Book, I alone am responsible for what I say. That the world is in a deep crisis can hardly have escaped the notice of even most obdurate. The deaths of untold sufferers of starvation in Somalia, the never-ending, hopeless hunger of at least twenty percent of the world s population, the continuing destruction of the ozone layer by the practically unabated production and use of CFCs in the affluent industrialized nations, and the refusal, worldwide, to effectively reduce the burning of fossil fuels, are a few of the symptoms. There is little time left to change our ways; we hear that frequently. In the recent publication, Beyond the Limits (Meadows, 1992) it is indicated, I wouldn t say shown because of the questionable validity of any large-scale aggregated mathematical modeling, that unless we mend our ways very soon, our grandchildren, or in any case our great-grandchildren will experience a total collapse of the life-support systems on our planet. Originally our group thought to vividly portray the consequences of that collapse, in the hope of triggering effective action by those who must be held responsible for keeping the rudder tied to a disaster course. But it is beyond human capabilities to construct such scenarios. What it means when hundreds of millions are dying of starvation or from the epidemics which will break out when the present excellent international system of health control breaks down, while the powerful and affluent build higher and higher walls to isolate themselves from the world they live in, is beyond our power to convey. What we can do is to show that mankind stands at a never before confronted CROSSROADS. Our first task must be to arrest and reverse those trends which most immediately threaten human survival and well-being, at the same time studying and reflecting on the complex inter-relations between environmental change, cultural beliefs, and political and economic forces. The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro (July 1992) has shown that it is possible for political leaders to pay lip service to the need to transcend national boundaries and to consider environmental preservation as a primary goal of policy, but in practice little has changed. It is possible of course that concrete actions may ensue from some of the fine 59

90 sentiments expressed, but we cannot depend upon it. In our draft report we try to chart a course for the future which would bring life on earth, mankind included, into a safe haven. I hope it is now clear why we call ourselves the CROSSROADS Study Group. General objects of the study The word forever is the key to our definition of sustainability. That means that, except in a definitely delimited period of transition, only recyclable use may be made of non-renewable resources, and no production process, be it of goods or food, may degrade, however slowly, presently renewable resources (soil, forests, air, water) to a non-renewable state. Once this is decided upon, the time horizon becomes irrelevant, i.e. essentially infinite, and the space horizon encompasses the whole planet. In the title of our project we use the words sustainable, livable, and equitable as if they were independent subjects, but we would not have begun this study if we were not convinced that moving to a sustainable future will also mean moving to a more humanistic viewpoint, in which it is recognized that the wholeness of humanity is being violated as long as all three adjectives are not applicable to our world. Eliminating poverty and improving equity will become essential to long-term survival, and womanly values and roles will be critical in achieving these objectives. Social values of human fulfillment will have to play a greater role in providing satisfaction than traditional economic values of acquiring more and more goods. Power structures will have to be pluralistic and based on local institutions and communities, and balanced with global institutions that integrate and reflect global environmental and other issues on a planetary scale and communicate and coordinate relevant action with communities. On the technological side, transition questions must be posed as to the resources required to shift our production and distribution systems to a sustainable basis. Clearly, the need is to move towards renewable sources of energy and away from fossil fuels. Remaining fossil fuels need to be used at least in part to permit the transition to a sustainable society. The energy cost of doing this has all too frequently been neglected. The time to initiate such transitions must be determined by backcasting (i.e., working back from an assumed final state to the present) from exhaustion scenarios. The constraints which appear when this is done show that it is not really correct to say that our time horizon is infinite. We are most definitely constrained, certainly as far as the most threatening forms of macro-pollution hazards, energy supply, bio-diversity, and soil fertility, to mention the principal constraints, are concerned, to take the correct turn at the crossroads with sufficient lead time to make the transition to a sustainable state possible. This lead time will have to be calculated in terms of known technical and political parameters, rather than when economic indicators or social pressures may signal that a change is needed. Experience has shown that such signals are likely to be too late for many of the phenomena we are concerned with. More difficult to quantify is the time left to us to complete, or at least make substantial pro g ress on the social, i.e. behavioural transitions that will be required. Yet this type of transition is crucial to bring about public acceptance of the necessary measures. In the part of our study related to the power politics of sustainability, the difference between forced and willing compliance to the necessary measures plays an important role. A holistic approach The final goal of this project is to present a total picture of the world as it will have to be if it is to become sustainable. Much valuable material has been published on various aspects, technical as well as social, and a great deal more is on the way. We have made grateful use of this material. As examples, in the field of energy, the work of Goldenberg c.s. (1988) and Holdren c.s. (1990) were good starting points, and in the field of societal problems the work of Milbraith (1989) has provided part of the background. Our Common Future of the World Commission on Environment and Development (the Brundtland Report, 1987), although it did leave many difficult questions unanswered, and did little to quantify solutions to problems, pointed the way that we will be attempting to operationalize. 60

91 Our holistic view is derived from humanist concerns about the quality of life and the equity of access to resources. The extent of poverty in the world today over a billion people living in absolute poverty and as many more on the margins of it -- and the inequality of the distribution of income are morally offensive and totally inconsistent with any picture of a sustainable future. While it is admitted that the actions of the poor often contribute to environmental degradation, this is often the result of the destruction, through modernization forced upon developing countries by so-called aid programs, of traditional modes of societal and labour organization. The bulk of damage to the environment has occurred as a result of the accumulation of wealth by the currently affluent societies, whose consumption of a disproportionate share of the world s resources has increased greatly in the last decades, both in absolute terms and relative to the consumption of the poor. It continues to increase today. Our methodology is to, to the best of our ability, treat problems together with their interrelations, especially the interrelations between bio-physical and societal problems. We hold that pollution (including ozone layer depletion), energy shortage and global warming, lack of fresh water, loss of soil fertility, extinction of species, to mention a few in the first category, cannot sensibly be treated without simultaneously discussing problems in the second, such as the politico-economic structures which reduce whole peoples to abject misery. Nor can the latter be discussed separately from the cultural and behavioural reason why such structures exist and endure. One example may serve to illustrate the futility of one-dimensional approaches or policies. The waves of economic refugees, causing xenophobic reactions in some rich countries in Europe so serious that the very basis of their democratic structure may be threatened, are just a foreboding of nightmares to come unless we are capable of realizing that treating problems in isolation by, in this example, clamping down on illegal immigrants is, in the long run, fruitless. The reasons why there are economic refugees must be addressed, which means confronting the whole cartload of problems mentioned above. These words, by the way, were written quite some time before the very threatening recent outbursts in Germany, which underline them emphatically, ex post facto. We have attempted in our workshop in May, and in our draft report to paint as complete a picture as possible, but it would be over-pretentious to claim that we have satisfactorily described all of the problem areas and the interactions between them, and much less that we have been able to operationalize all of the transitions which will have to be made to achieve sustainability, livability and equity. Our document, although containing many cogent elements, is not a closelyknit fabric, but rather a patchwork quilt. Yet there are common threads which run through most the chapters, tying them together. The Economic Thread All scientific investigations and theories bear the stamp of the culture which spawns them. Nowhere is this truer than in the field of economics. Conceived, in principle, as a study of the production and consumption of goods (more exactly scarce goods, in the sense that there is a limited supply), it is in practice simply a formalization of greed. Since the laws of economics portray the accumulation of wealth as being in the interest of the whole, the stigma on greedy behaviour is removed. It is basically concerned with the question of how those who are already rich, especially through their control of capital and land, can increase their wealth still further 1. By expressing all values in monetary terms, i.e. leaving out of the books all that cannot be assigned a monetary value, economics denies any reality to the values which give meaning to the existence of human beings. If it were just an intellectual exercise, there could be no objection to it. But economic theory and practice justify structures and behaviour incompatible to those needed for sustainability and equity. It also justifies the idea that endless growth is a normal, even a necessary, characteristic of society. Besides being patently ridiculous from an elementary mathematical 1 Formulation of Prince Claus of the Netherlands. 61

92 point of view, the idea of endless quantitative growth is the antithesis of sustainability. Finally, by denying value to the myriad forms of life of the ecosphere, which in the last analysis make human life possible, it promotes a mentality which is antithetical to life itself. Being so strongly opposed to present economic theory, one might expect that the least we could do would be to formulate an alternative theory. But economics is not an abstract theory which could just be replaced by another, better, one, so it is not a matter of simply railing against economists and altering theory. A rather well-known economist, Keynes, wrote that 2...the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Economics is the formal embodiment of the social and political power structures which rule the world today, and its replacement, if it ever occurs, will follow, not precede, the dismantling of these structures. The Male/Female Thread The distinction between male and female behaviour, used here as stereotypes to label specific groupings of attitudes, recurs frequently in our draft report. During the evolutionary process, natural selection acted on individuals to maximise reproductive success. This has tended to result in men being larger and more aggressive than women. These behavioural differences of genetic origin between the sexes are, however, probably small compared to those differnces arising from the gender-power relations in society, and the upshot of the cultural amplification of sex differences is a grossly unjust division of power and availability of resources between men on the one hand and woman and those whom woman care for, the children, on the other. This asymmetry is excellently described by the following quotation of Lourdes Benerfa and Martha Roldan. 3 Gender may be defi ned as a network of beliefs, personality, traits, attitudes, feelings, values, behaviour, and activities differentiating men and women through a process of social construction that has a number of distinctive features. It is historical; it takes place within different macro and micro spheres such as the state, the labour market, schools, the media, the family-household, and interpersonal relations; it involves the ranking of traits and activities so that those associated with men are normally given greater value. Ranking, and therefore the formation of hierarchies, in most societies is an intrinsic component of gender construction. The outcome-and the means of this construction is the asymmetrical and structured (institutionally defi ned) access to resources generating male privilege and domination and female subordination. Completely apart from its moral unacceptability, the relevance to our project of the dominance of what are here as stereotype labelled male values form an effective barrier against the attitudes of compassion, sharing, and reciprocity, towards and with others, and with all of our world which are, simply stated, a condition sine qua non for a sustainable world. The Technology Thread A weakness of the dominant culture of our times is to reduce human problems to technical problems, i.e the belief that human problems can be solved by technological means. This belief in the technological fix is, today, a very effective blockade against confronting the real dilemmas which we face. It provide policy makers with countless excuses to not confront the problems which must be faced if we are to achieve sustainability, not to mention equity. The impressive 2 John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, (1936). 3 Lourdes Benerfa and Martha Roldan, Cross roads of Class and Gender, pp. I I & 12. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London,

93 achievements of science and technology have raised them to status of a godhead in the minds of many. In fact, however, very few problems are basically technological in origin. To seek a technological fix is an escape mechanism, avoiding difficult value-loaded differences of opinion. This has, through the relentless hammering into the public mind of the omnipotence of science and technology, achieved a high degree of social acceptability. It is also an article of faith with many scientists and technologists. These remarks must not be taken as indicating an anti-technological or anti-scientific leaning in our approach. It should be clear that technological advance has great potential for helping human beings. But if technology is to help us achieve sustainability it will have to be technology with a human face (see Smith, 1991) and not technology as a substitute for serious thinking about human problems. Energy is one of the fields in which belief in the technological fix is dominant. It may surprise non technical people, but there are orders of magnitude (one or more powers of ten) between the outcomes of different analyses of the energy supply needed to provide humanity with a livable and sustainable future. There are great differences of opinion and these are grounded in the value systems of the analyst, not in facts and figures. The technically trained people involved in preparing our document do not believe in the technological fix, but they do believe that technology is an invaluable aid in solving problems if they are, in the first instance, seen as human problems demanding a human approach. We do not doubt that technology will continue to offer new ways of solving problems with lower use of resources, as it has in the past. But past experience also shows that technology will not discover a universal silver bullet. It may introduce as many problems as it solves. (CFCs were once hailed as the ultimate beneficial techno-fix with no harmful side effects.) Technology will have to be fully employed to ease the transitions that will be necessary. It will have to be directed by our politics and social decisions to address and solve the right problems. But it is not the whole solution, it is a tool. The Socio-Political Thread The vast changes in societal structures that will be necessary to achieve an equitable and sustainable world will not be achieved without meeting determined resistance. It is essential to recognize that many stand to lose privileges which they have long had, and certainly not only because they are bad people. We must therefore confront the necessity of compensation, not in the first instance because it is morally right to do so, but primarily because it is expedient. A realistic appraisal of the chances of winning a power-political battle belongs to our holistic view, as much as do the discussions of concrete changes that will have to take place. Resistance to laudable measures can be partly defused by policies of compensation. The resistance that remains will then be based on the factual issue of whether or not the measure really is good for the whole community. Politics and other forms of activism should take into account the present characteristics of the world society. These range from individual sovereignty, via grassroot movements, NGO s, governmental bureaucracies, and INGO s to global structures. The global dimension of local issues should be taken into account, as well as the local dimension of global issues. In many parts of our report the resulting power relations are discussed from both abstract and concrete points of view. The Population Thread The factor population is either centrally explicit, or underlying the main thrust of the discourse in several parts of our report. Population is an emotive issue and is often conceived as a problem solely in terms of the growth in the population in the developing world. Whilst it is true that over 90 percent of the world s population growth will occur in developing countries, the issue of population also needs to be considered in relation to resource use and waste production. In 63

94 these respects the effective populations of the developed countries are many times that of their numerical populations,in fact greater by far than all the rest of world put together. Many, perhaps most, analysts attempt to split the problem into - two supposedly unrelated parts: environmental destruction in the affluent societies and population growth in the poor countries. We reject this division not only because it runs against the grain of a holisitic approach, but because the problems are demonstrably related in many ways. In the first place because the richness of the one comes about through the poverty of the other, continuing the dominance achieved centuries ago. This dominance has set the scene for the help syndrome in other periods of history known as the white man s burden. In its turn, this idea that the rich should help the poor provides a perfect mental insulation preventing the rich from perceiving that the poverty of the poor is due to the richness of the rich. This mechanism is obviously as operative among the rich in the poor countries as it is among the rich in the rich countries, and is equally applicable to the attitude of the latter rich to the poor in their own countries as in the rest of the world. It has formed the basis of aid programs since the days in which children in the rich countries were encouraged to eat their spinach because of the plight of the starving Chinese children (the logic has always escaped me) right down to the programs of help dictated by IMF and World Bank - in essence a talking down to the colonies and ex-colonies. In another paper to this conference, by D L O Mendis, a classical example is given of irrigation projects in Sri Lanka, where with willing collaboration of westernized experts from the country itself, disastrous and fearfully expensive projects were undertaken. It should also be borne in mind that although the justification of such projects is always that we, the well-educated and understanding rich with our counterparts in the third world, know better, the projects always just happen, by chance, to provide large profits to certain interested persons. In the case of population the dialectic is sharp. It would be dishonest to say that we are not experiencing disagreement in our group. By some this dichotomy is described as being the contrast between a single-factor analysis (i.e. the population) and a holistic approach. Others feel that this is not a faithful description of the differences in opinion. Certainly not all would agree with a quote from Chapter 3, that there are many reasons to break open neo-malthusian discourse into a social analysis of environmental change, for the simple reason that the accusation of simpleminded neo-mathusianism is not applicable. I use the word dialectic in the Hegelian sense. We are confronting this divergence with good hopes that the thesis and anti-thesis can be resolved into a harmonious solution. Role of Pugwash The role of Pugwash in helping address these concerns is critical. Achieving an environmentally sustainable future is as critical to the security of humanity as achieving a nuclear free world. The threat of environmental catastrophe is as large as that of a nuclear conflagration, it just occurs in slower motion. In fact, it appears that what is now referred to as ecocide may have been a major contributing factor in the weakening of the former Soviet-Union. Ecological sustainability requires the focus of as wide a segment of the scientific community as possible, both to address the scientific requirements of facilitating the transformation and to help mobilize opinion in support of the necessity of making such a transition. Political will is the first order for initiating the transition. But the transtition must be shaped by informed scientific opinion and by substantial progress on technological innovations that will make conservation of natural resources easier and more attractive. Low cost substitutes and renewable alternatives need to be developed for scarce resources; energy and resource use per unit of output need to be reduced and monitoring and control mechanisms need to be developed to ensure that sustainability can be achieved. Pugwash has assembled formidable skills in many closely related fields as a result of its work on disarmament. We only know the broad outlines of most of the problems, more and better science will have to help refine the problems to be solved 64

95 and assist in their solutions. Broad achievements on the science and technology front will greatly facilitate the political and popular will for making the necessary changes. Pugwash has become a forum with excellent contacts at a scientific level between the first, the second (or what is left of it), and third world scientific communities. Strengthening these links and building on them will be critical to success in moving toward a more sustainable world. While it is clear that the greatest changes will have to occur in the first world, and in particular amon g its most affluent inhabitants, many of the changes will have to take place in the third world. These changes cannot be imposed from outside. The current dialogue between North and South seems to be communicating less and less. Bridges will have to be built between North and South so that knowledge, traditional and innovative, can be applied to find solutions. Pugwash can play a central role in strengthening such links in the common cause of assuring that human beings continue to survive on the planet in peace and harmony and without widespread poverty. The present unsustainability has been partly caused by science, but also by the lack of it. This dialectic responsibility forces us to political commitment. Summing up The tragedy of this document is that those preparing it are not utopians, but very hard-nosed. There is no back door to escape through any more. As Eugene Rabinowich said in one of the last Pugwash conferences he attended before his death: The only viable solutions are radical solutions. We have not recoiled from making it clear that pure technological scenarios have little use. In order for human civilization to have a chance of ever reaching sustainability, a variety of interrelated goals must be achieved. And only if the societal and cultural chan g es take place is there any use hoping that the bio-physical limitations will be respected and the necessary developments will be effectuated. In our draft document many goals and strategies to arrive at them are dissected or proposed. We hope to improve upon them on the basis of the hopefully vivid and serious discussions at this, the 42nd Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs. Is it a hopeless task? As a Dutchman I can t resist quoting William the Silent, Prince of Orange, One need not be assured of success in order to try, nor to make progress towards one s goal in order to persevere. Thank you. References: The World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future, Oxford: Oxford University Press, (The Brundtland Report). Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, Healing the Planet, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1991 Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, The Population Explosion, New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., Jose Goldenberg, et al., Energy for a Sustainable World, New York: John Wiley and Sons, John P. Holdren, Energy in Transition, The Scientific American, September 1990, pp Donella H. Meadows, et al., Beyond the Limits, London: Earthscan Publications Limited, Lester W. Milbraith, Envisioning a Sustainable Society, New York: Suny Press, Albany, Philip B. Smith, Technology with a Human Face, paper presented at the INES workshop in Balatonfdred,

96 Pugwash meeting no. 330: Pugwash Regional Workshop Learning from Ancient Hydraulic Civilizations to Combat Climate change hosted by Sri Lanka Pugwash, November 2007 Colombo, Sri Lanka Workshop Actual Program* DAY 1 - Wednesday, November 21 Foreign participants arrived, and were met at the airport and brought to the Galle Face hotel in Colombo, the oldest 5 star hotel east of Suez.. DAY 2 - Thursday, November am pm Inaugural Plenary session open to the public, in the Victoria Masonic Temple hall, within short walking distance from the Galle Face hotel. Highlights of session: Welcome Address by Jayantha Dhanapala President of Pugwash Keynote speech and Launch of Jayantha Dhanapala felicitation volume by Chief Guest Hon. Professor Tissa Vitarana, Minister of Science and Technology. Message from H.E. President Mahinda Rajapakse read by Professor Wimal Epasinghe, Adviser on Scientific Affairs to H.E. the President. Presentation of copies of felicitation volume by Jayantha Dhanapala President of Pugwash, , to foreign and local delegates and Workshop Supporters, introduced by Secretary/Convenor Sri Lanka Pugwash D L O Mendis. Invited addresses by Udula Bandara Awsadahami on the Ancient Water and Soil Conservation ecosystems of Sri Lanka, and by Shereen Amendra on the Mahathupa of Anuradhapura, An Insight. Vote of Thanks by Professor Arjuna Aluvihare, Chairman, Sri Lanka Pugwash Group pm 2.00 pm Lunch in hotel pm 7.00 pm First closed Workshop session, for participants in hotel pm Tea interval 7.00 pm Cultural show at hotel 8.30 pm Dinner, and night at Galle Face hotel, Colombo *Illustrated on pages

97 DAY 3 - Friday, November am pm Second closed Workshop session in hotel pm 2.00 pm Lunch in hotel pm Check out of hotel and leave for Sigiriya by coach. From Colombo to Sigiriya via Warakapola, Kurunegala and Dambulla, approx. 6 hours. Dinner at Dambulla. After dinner, drive to Sigiriya, approx. one hour. Night at Sigiriya DAY 4 - Saturday, November 24 Morning, after breakfast leave for Kalaweva, passing through Namal uyana ancient iron wood sanctuary on the way. Udula Bandara Awsadahami leads discussion on Kalaweva Balaluweva twin reservoirs, and Kalaweva Jayaganga Water and Soil Conservation Ecosystem, on Kalaweva tank bund near the ancient right bank sluice. Drive to Anuradhapura passing Dry Zone Research Station, Maha Illuppalama on the way, where the 1982 Sri Lanka Pugwash Symposium on Tropical Agriculture field visit took place. Professor Roger Revelle was the Pugwash representative on that occasion. Agricultural scientist the late Ernest Abeyratne (whose ashes were spread on the waters of Kalaweva some years ago), was remembered for his pioneering research here. We also passed Eppawala where the proposed phosphate rock sell out to a multinational corporation was stopped by a Supreme Court ruling, and Pugwash had a hand in this, including a recommendation in the Working Group 6 Report at Pugwash conference No. 48 in Mexico in We also passed the Galkande Maha vihare, whose chief incumbent Ven. Mahamankadawela Piyaratna Mahathera led the protests to the Supreme Court, but we did not stop there. Lunch at Anuradhapura Afternoon: Anuradhapura, tourist round, including Ranmusu Uyana and Sakwala Chakraya, Samadhi statue, and historic Bo tree. Anuradhapura was the ancient capital city where the hydraulic civilization of Sri Lanka began and flourished from about the 4 th c. BCE till after 8 th c. CE, when the capital was moved to Polonnaruwa. Nov. 24 full moon Poya, was a day of special significance to Buddhists. The Maha Thupa, Ruwanveli seya (built in the 2 nd century BC, restored during world war II), by night on a Poya day is an unique experience as discussed by Shereen Amendra in her book The Mahathupa of Lanka, An Insight, of special interest to physicists. Shereen was on the field trip to explain her findings and answer questions about her book. The three highest brick structures in the world are in Anuradhapura; Ruwanveliseya is the third highest. The highest Jetavanarama is an UNESCO conservation project today. Director General of the Cultural Triangle project supported by UNESCO, Professor Sudarshan Seneviratne, will meet delegates in Colombo. The Foreword in the Jayantha Dhanapala volume by him titled People to People Connectiviity and Peace Interaction: Redefi ning Heritage for Confl ict Resolution, was a lecture given by him in Kathmandu on Wesak day Return to Sigiriya for the night. 67

98 DAY 5 - Sunday, November 25 Before breakfast: Climb Sigiriya rock and see frescoes and graffiti on mirror wall. Sir Arthur Clark who lives in Sri Lanka described Sigiriya, built in the 5 th century, as the eighth wonder of the ancient world. Due to poor health Sir Arthur was not present at the Inauguration of this Workshop in Colombo on Thursday November 22, but sent a Message to the Dhanapala felicitation volume. When Sir Michael Atiyah made his first foreign visit as President of Pugwash in December 1997, he too met Sir Arthur Clark at the Galle Face hotel. (Sir Arthur Clark was felicilitated on his 90th Birthday on December 17th 2007 in Colombo. He passed away in February 2008.) am: Check out and drive from Sigiriya to Kandy, Queens hotel for lunch where delegates were met by Jayantha Dhanapala, President of Pugwash. Delegates visited the Dalada Maligawa, the Temple of the Tooth, and the Archeological Museum in the Temple. Then they visited the Open Chapel at Trinity College, Kandy, Jayantha Dhanapala s old school, where they were entertained by the famous schoolboy Drum and Dance Troupe. Also saw the small Udawattakelle rain forest behind Trinity College. Dinner and night in Kandy. DAY 6 - Monday, November 26 Morning After breakfast in Kandy checked out and proceeded to Peradeniya University for a brief drive through without stopping. Saw the famous Botanical gardens in Peradeniya from the outside, and proceeded on the long drive to Kuruwita for lunch, hosted by Dr Siran Deraniyagala former Commissioner of Archaeology at his ancestral residence, itself an archaeological item. Afternoon From Kuruwita to Pelwatte, passing modern Uda Walawe reservoir, and arrived in time for dinner at Pelwatte. Night at Pelwatte guest house. DAY 7 - Tuesday, November 27 Morning in Pelwatte, sugar, distillery, and milk projects, involving rural peasants. Pelwatte project was started by a multinational corporation which used chemicals and pesticides for sugarcane cultivation for some ten years before abandoning the project after reaping tax benefits offered by government. Resultant degradation of the soil is somewhat similar to the results of chemical warfare which is of interest to Pugwash. We were told how a Sri Lanka entrepreneur Ari Wickremanayake who owns MasterDivers Ltd. has taken over the project with a practical plan to restore soil fertility over a period of time, without using any chemicals, with local people participating and benefitting from the project. (Incidentally Ari Wickremanayake is in the Guinness Book of Records for the deepest unassisted fresh water dive, in the Victoria reservoir in Kandy. After lunch, by unanimous agreement, decided to return to Colombo, arriving in about six hours for dinner in a restaurant, and night at Galle Face hotel DAY 8 - Wednesday, November 28 Morning: After breakfast, final Workshop sessions were combined with four visits, to meet Pugwashites Dr C G Weeramantry in his office; Professor Sudarshan Seneviratne in his office; Mrs S K Mendis in her office, and Dr Nirmala Benjamin at a luncheon meeting. Night at Galle Face hotel DAY 9 - Thursday, November 29 Departure, delegates checked out and were transported to airport from hotel. 68

99 Welcome Keynote Address by Jayantha Dhanapala President of Pugwash I am quite overwhelmed and deeply honoured by this gesture of Sri Lanka Pugwash in organizing a Regional Workshop and issuing a Felicitation Volume to mark my election as President of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. To be so honoured in one s own country has a special significance and I am deeply touched by this. I would like to thank Sri Lanka Pugwash for this and in particular I would like to pay tribute to its extraordinary Secretary-General, Engineer D.L.O.Mendis, for his hard work and his dedication to the cause of Pugwash. His work on Science and Civilization in Sri Lanka has been a saga of determined and sustained effort which deserves more support than it has received so far. On the 9 th of July 1955 the Russell- Einstein Manifesto signed by eleven distinguished scientists and written in the elegant English prose of Bertrand Russell was issued. It ended with the historic words Remember your humanity which continues to resonate around the world. That document forms the bedrock of the Pugwash movement which had its first meeting in the fishing village of Pugwash in Nova Scotia, Canada fifty years ago. It is an awesome honour for me to be elected the eleventh President of Pugwash succeeding such giants as Bertrand Russell, Dorothy Hodgkin, Sir Joseph Rotblat, Sir Michael Attiyah and Dr. M S Swaminathan. They are huge shoes to fill. In addressing the Pugwash Quinquennium at Bari last October I made three points as I began. They were - Good leaders are good; but good institutions are better. There is always a symbiotic relationship between individuals and institutions and while great leaders are important what they leave behind as accumulated wisdom in institutions are a more permanent and durable contribution to humanity. The Spanish poet Antonio Macado wrote Traveller there are no paths; paths are made by walking. We too are faced with new challenges and we have to find our own paths in responding to these challenges. Sir Isaac Newton once said If I have seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. Indeed we are fortunate to have the giants who went before us to show us the way. We cannot fail them as we make our own way forward. I am confident that Pugwash will flourish in the future and I call upon the scientists of the world especially the young scientists to join us and lend us your expertise in achieving our aims and objectives. Since 1947 the Chicago-based Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (which has had close links with Pugwash especially through Eugene Rabinowitz one of the eleven signatories of the Russell- Einstein Manifesto and one the 22 pioneers who was present at the first Pugwash meeting in 1957) has maintained the Doomsday Clock as a symbolic reminder of how close we are to Armageddon or nuclear catastrophe. On the 17 th January 2007 the clock was advanced by two minutes to bring it to five minutes to midnight in recognition of the perilous situation of humankind. In justifying its action the prestigious journal linked the danger of nuclear weapon use with the problem of climatic change. The latter, so cogently conveyed by scientific experts, has led to an increased demnand for nuclear energy and, consequently, to increased risks of nuclear weapon proliferation. 69

100 We reached the nadir of multilateral disarmament when not a word could be agreed upon on disarmament in the Outcome Document that emerged from the Summit at the 60 th UN General Assembly session. This came after the failure of the NPT Review Conference of 2005 to agree on a Final Document. We are also witness to increasing evidence of concrete plans to actually use nuclear weapons breaching the time-honoured taboo that has existed since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The RRW and the Bunker Buster are weapons that the Pentagon plans to use even against non-nuclear weapon states. We also have the threat of nuclear proliferation from the DPRK and now Iran. The A.Q.Khan network has also exposed the black-market in nuclear technology and nuclear materials. This is a world where WMD terrorism is a real possibility. Despite this somber picture there are signs of springtime of hope following the winter of our discontent. I refer specifically to the January 4, 2007 op-ed that appeared ion the Wall Street Journal by no means the most liberal newspaper in the USA. It was authored by George Schultz, Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn and William Perry all heavyweights in previous US Administrations. The op-ed argued strongly for a nuclear weapon free world and the abandonment of the nuclear deterrence policies of the Cold War era. It was followed by an equally strong op-ed by former President Gorbachev and still later by a speech from the UK Foreign Secretary. I am aware that behind these influential statements lies a process of discussion and negotiation that is already beginning to influence the campaign for the US Presidential elections. The vision of a nuclear weapon free world that Reagan and Gorbachev discussed in Reykjavik is being rekindled. Civil society, and especially groups like Pugwash, must help to foster this trend so that a new generation of global leaders can act on nuclear disarmament. As we speak the Inter Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which won the Nobel Peace Prize along with Al Gore is meeting in Valencia, Spain to synthesize its four reports. The reports are unambiguous and clear on climate change induced by human activity and the urgent need for corrective action. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol are only a basis for more expanded action. I hope Sri Lanka will be adequately represented at the forthcoming Bali meeting to ensure the breakthrough we need. Jarred Diamond in his book Collapse has shown us how human societies throughout the ages have shown the capacity to avert environmental change through long term planning and changes in life styles. We can take a lesson from that. The theme of this workshop is so relevant. We can draw on the ancient wisdom of hydraulic civilizations. Here in Sri Lanka you will as part of this workshop have the opportunity of seeing the amazing reservoirs, canals and other irrigation works of of ancient and medieval Sri Lanka.I was recently in Syria and saw the ancient water wheels in that country. I also saw the excellent work of ICARDA in Aleppo. So we can move forward to face the challenges of the present. We have today accepted a more holistic view of security. It consists of peace and disarmament; development and human rights. This wider perspective leads us to emphasize human security. The scientists of the world must be socially engaged. Pugwash with its scientific expertise can and must lead the way. SIPRI says that global military expenditure in 2006 was $ 1204 billion. This works out at $ 184 per man, woman and child in the world. And yet the estimate to achieve the Millenium Development Goals is $ billion. OECD subsidies run at $ 268 billion per year while over a billion human beings exist in extreme poverty. Let me conclude by quoting from the Russell-Einstein Manifesto which said We have to learn to think in a new way what steps can be taken to prevent a military contest of which the issue must be disastrous to all parties? 70

101 Inaugural Keynote Address by Hon. Tissa Vitarana Minister of Science and Technology Tissa Vitarana Minister of Science and Technology It is indeed a great honour for me to be the Chief Guest at this Pugwash Workshop and I must at the outset thank Mr. D L O Mendis and the members of the Sri Lanka Pugwash group for inviting me on this occasion. I have always been in complete sympathy with the ideals and objectives of the Pugwash movement and in particular support the demand for the total elimination of nuclear weapons from our planet. Without a time framed commitment by those who posses nuclear arms to destroy them, attempts to curtail the spread by agreements such as the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty are not likely succeed. The Pugwash Movement is part of the noble effort to ensure that the work of the scientists benefit humanity rather than do harm. It is therefore very heartening to note that Mr. Jayantha Dhanapala, a Sri Lankan, is the President of International Pugwash, and I wish him all success in this role. It is also noteworthy that another Sri Lankan Pugwashite, Prof. Mohan Munasinghe, is the Vice-Chairman of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, that has shared the Nobel Peace Prize for I note that the two presentations at this inaugural session bring out the past achievements of the scientists and technologists of ancient Sri Lanka focusing on the areas of irrigation and building construction. One has a sense of pride and wonder whenever a visit is made to Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa and other parts of our country where these structures are still in evidence. The scientists of today have this rich tradition to build on, but this must be done in a way that it meets the needs and challenges of today. There are some who think that the achievements of the past would suffice to meet present day needs. In the context of neo-liberal globalization Sri Lanka, like all developing countries, is faced with the challenges of the global market. We have to achieve economic development to emerge from poverty in the context of the intense competition of the global market. Our products and services have to compete with those from abroad, in the first instance in the local market and thereafter in foreign markets. To achieve this, modern technology, cutting edge technology where possible, has to be applied to all products and services. Use can certainly be made of past science and technology but it has to be upgraded to meet the challenges of today. Here I must make mention of the success of Siddhalepa Vedamahathmaya, who while using traditional 71

102 prescriptions, has got the benefit of the scientists at the ITI to ensure that his medicines retain their efficacy, so that he has been able to sell them in foreign markets. The scientists and technologists in Sri Lanka have a Herculean task before them. That is to ensure that modern technology is generated or adapted to meet the needs of local industry and agriculture. We cannot be content with generating new knowledge as research publications or presentations that receive peer acclaim. They must go beyond that to result in patentable processes and products that help industry to add value to our natural and agricultural resources. This requires a change of the mind set of our scientists and engineers, but in this respect I must commend the latter who are more inclined to be practical and are therefore better. The National Science Awards given by the Ministry of Science and Technology are now designed to promote this outcome. But the main responsibility is with the Government. Though the President in his election manifesto, the Mahinda Chinthanaya, targets one percent of the GDP being allocated for science and technology, at present it is only 0.13 per cent of the GDP. There is a failure to recognize that to achieve the economic development that the country needs the key role is played by scientists and technologists. The poverty gap between the few countries that are rich like USA, Britain and Japan and the many poor countries like Sri Lanka is mainly a technology gap. We must bridge this gap if we are to emerge from poverty. Countries like Korea have emerged from poverty by catching the micro-electronics and ICT wave to industrialize. We must create in Sri Lanka a suitable working and living environment to enable our scientists to deliver the goods. We must not only stop the brain drain, but also achieve a brain gain, so that we can make full use of the skills and experience of those working abroad. We have to devise methods to attract them back without prejudice to the scientists who have remained in the country. It is possible that the Pugwash movement could help us in this. Finally I would like to touch on another area of interest to the Pugwash Movement, that of conflict resolution. As the Chairman of the All Party Representatives Committee (APRC) I am happy to state that reasonable progress is being made and the initial animosities have been overcome and the discussions are now productive. The responses to my document have been constructive and I am confident that with the cooperation of the representatives of the different political parties that a final consensus document can be finalized before too long. This would be the basis of a future Constitution, and could also be used as the basis for talks with the LTTE if they do materialize. I thank you all once again for this invitation to address you and wish your deliberations all success. Tissa Vitarana Minister of Science and Technology 72

103 Notes concerning Sri Lanka Pugwash and the Inauguration ceremony D L O Mendis, Secretary / Convenor, Sri Lanka Pugwash Group 1. The Sri Lanka Pugwash Group was set up on April 29, 1981 following a news-paper announcement. The original purpose was to follow up on an offer by an expatriate Sri Lankan Engineer V Tharumaratnam, to fund an international Pugwash conference in Sri Lanka. On being informed about this offer, Professor Joseph Rotblat the founding father figure of Pugwash had visited Sri Lanka as our guest, and met local scientists in Colombo and Kandy, to satisfy himself that Sri Lanka had the capacity to organize such an international Pugwash conference. 2. Professor Rotblat was informed about the International Seminar on Scientific and Technological Co-operation among the Non-Aligned Countries that had been organized by me for the Sri Lanka Association for the Advancement of Science, called a Non-Aligned Science Summit a month before the 5 th Non-Aligned Summit Conference, August, However, a few local scientists who attended the inaugural Sri Lanka Pugwash Group meeting raised objections to the proposal on the grounds that at a time when local science and scientists were starved for funds, it was not correct to spend such a large sum of (Engineer Tharumaratnam s) money, estimated at Rs one million, on foreign scientists. (see Minutes of inaugural meeting published in the Jayantha Dhanapala felicitation volume, Annex to Chapter 13, pages ). Since this was stated without previous notice, it took the convenors of the meeting by surprise. 4. In the course of time five of the thirteen participants at the inaugural meeting became General Presidents of the Sri Lanka Association for the Advancement of Science. One of them had been introduced to Pugwash by me. At the present time, three of them have passed away, one still lives in Sri Lanka, and one lives abroad. 5. When Joseph Rotblat was informed of the objections of a few influential local scientists to the idea of holding an international Pugwash conference in Sri Lanka, the Pugwash Council withdrew their support for the international Pugwash meeting that had been allocated to Sri Lanka in However, there had been a recommendation in the 1981 international Pugwash conference as follows: Symposium on Third World Agriculture The inability to meet nutritional needs is a source of confl ict in many Third World countries. This is sometimes exacerbated by the introduction of unsuitable agriculture technologies. It was therefore suggested by some participants that there be a Pugwash Symposium on Third World Agriculture. (Jayantha Dhanapala felicitation volume, Chapter 2, page 27) 7. Therefore, those of us who were keen to have a Pugwash presence in Sri Lanka informed Pugwash Council that we would go ahead and organize a smaller Pugwash Symposium on Tropical Agriculture instead of the international conference in This was held in 1982, and was a great success, but since it was not recognized by Pugwash Council, participants did not qualify as Pugwashites. Pugwash Council sent the famous scientist Professor Roger Revelle as their representative. At the 2007 Nobel Peace prize award ceremony, award winner Al Gore paid a tribute to the late Professor Revelle as his revered teacher. 8. There were a number of foreign scientists in the 1982 Pugwash Symposium on Tropical Agriculture, and they and the local scientists benefited immeasurably by interacting with each other, especially during the field visit out of Colombo. 73

104 9. Although Sri Lanka Pugwash has maintained a low profile during the past twenty seven years, it has published many books and papers, and organized numerous public lectures on popular topics. Books include three on the Eppawala phosphate rock project, three on ancient water and soil conservation ecosystems (irrigation systems) of Sri Lanka, and several others on development issues. 10. We have followed the example of the Pugwash movement which functioned for the first seventeen years after the first meeting of scientists in the little fishing village of Pugwash, Nova Scotia, Canada, in July 1957, with only an informal Continuing Committee to manage its affairs, and without any formal constitution. 11. Being unaware of this, some local scientists sent adverse observations on the informal nature of Sri Lanka Pugwash, but this only served to strengthen the bonds of friendship with Joseph Rotblat who quickly understood the situation. 12. A few years ago the Sri Lanka Pugwash website was corrupted with pornography which Jeffrey Boutwell, Secretary General, cleaned up when informed about it. 13. Whenever a Pugwash meeting, whether an international conference, symposium or workshop, or whatever, is held, it is the responsibility of the host country to meet all local costs. In some cases, travel costs to come to the meeting would also be met, specially for delegates from poor developing countries coming to a rich country. Otherwise, funding travel costs is the responsibility of the country of the visiting delegate. All this has been strictly followed in this Workshop, thanks to generous Supporters who have met most of the costs in an itemized budget. (see pp ) 14. Each year an international Pugwash conference is held in a different country. Sri Lanka Pugwash tries to send local scientists to these conferences, and has found financial support for some to attend. Occasionally, a local scientist was invited to a foreign Pugwash meeting without reference to the Sri Lanka Pugwash group. 15. Pugwash Council publishes a quinquennial Directory, with information of Pugwashites and meetings. The total number of Sri Lanka Pugwashites is 17 of whom five have passed away and only twelve remain. Of these two live abroad. 16. With participation in this Pugwash Workshop the total number of Sri Lanka Pugwashites has increased considerably as is to be expected. 17. An important item initiated by this author is a study project on Science and Civilization in Sri Lanka, (to be located in the Institute of Fundamental Studies, Kandy), on the lines of Joseph Needham s Science and Civilization in China. It will bring together scholars, not necessarily Pugwashites, from diverse disciplines. This development will be in consonance with larger objectives of Pugwash, as envisaged by its founding fathers, like achieving a durable peace. However, in the light of some past experiences in Pugwash as documented in the Dhanapala felicitation volume (Chapter 14) we may expect some resistance to the idea. But it should not create any hindrance to the duties and responsibilities of the President, Jayantha Dhanapala, and we shall persist with it as planned. 18. In conclusion, I should explain that holding the Inaugural session in the Victoria Masonic Temple hall in Colombo, of the first Pugwash meeting recognized by the Pugwash Council, is of no special significance. Circumstances determined the location within walking distance of the Galle Face hotel where foreign delegates were housed. It was a serendipitous coincidence that the original 1955 meeting was held in the Masonic Lodge in the village of Pugwash, Nova Scotia, Canada. shown in the Pugwash logo. The following colour photos were taken by Shri Gajanan Deshpande, and Architect Shereen Amendra using their personal digital cameras. 74

105 Inauguration of Workshop at Victoria Masonic Temple on November 22, 2007 L. to R.: Professor Arjuna Aluvihare, Mr. Nahil Wijesooriya, Jayantha Dhanapala, Hon. Tissa Vitarana, Mr. Pesi Pestongee, Professor Wimal Epasinghe Jayantha Dhanapala invites Hon. Tissa Vitarana to light the traditional oil lamp Delegate from India Dr. Prathiba Deshpande lights the traditional oil lamp 75

106 Hon. Tissa Vitarana delivers his Inaugaral address Jayantha Dhanapala gives his Keynote Welcome Address D L O Mendis introduces the Supporters and Foreign delegates to receive their Felicitation Volumes from the Hon. Minister Delegate from India Shri Bhavanishankar receives his Felicitation Volume from the Chief Guest 76

107 Closed Workshop sessions on November 22-23, 2007 at the Galle Face hotel 77

108 Field visit November 23-27, to Kalaweva, Sigiriya, Anuradhapura (pp ) Kandy (p 80) and Pelwatte (p 81) Delegates walking up to Sigiriya rock Sigiriya at the Lion s paws Udula explains the working of the ancient Kalawewa R.B. sluice Delegates listen to Udula on Kalawewa bund D L O explains the Kalawewa-Jayaganga ecosystem 78 Start of Jayaganga, below R. B. sluice - ParakramaTalaka, the 3rd Sea of Parakrama (see pg. 13)

109 The Mahathupa by night Sakwala Chakraya (see pg.132) Professor Mawranshikar meditating at the Sakwala Chakraya Restoration of ancient dagoba The Samadhi Buddha statue Delegates at the Mahathupa 79

110 Delegates walking up to the Maligawa Vendors selling flowers for offering Trinity College open chapel, Kandy (Jayantha Dhanapala s secondary school) The drum and dance troupe of Trinity students coming out of the chapel Delegates and school staff watching the performance Trinity College drum and dance troupe performing outside the chapel The world famous Trinity College chapel has murals painted by an old boy, David Paynter 80

111 Ecknelligoda Walauva at Kuruwita Dr. Siran Deraniyagala with delegates at his Walauva Closed Workshop session at the Walauva View from Udawalawe reservoir bund, of the southern escarpment above ancient Ukgal Kaltota Elephants in Udawalawe wildlife park are kept out from the sugar plantation by an electric fence Pelwatta dairy stalls for milch cows At Pelwatta sugar factory with Manager Engineer Y Thilakasena 81 Guided tour of Pelwatta sugar factory by Engineer Y Thilakasena

112 Jayantha Dhanapala presents the Felicitation volume to the Mayor of Hiroshima on Hiroshima day Pugwashite Professor Mohan Munasinghe with his 2007 Nobel Peace prize awards Some delegates met Judge Dr. C G Weeramantry in his office on the last day of the workshop 82

113 Invited Address at Inaugural Plenary Session Salient features of the traditional human-made eco-agriculture landscape in Sri Lanka Udula Bandara Awsadahami The fate of the human race ultimately depends on the health of our planet, and that health depends on the preservation of biological diversity. Contrary to science fiction fantasy, there won t be a convenient new world to move to after we have destroyed this one. I believe the solutions to our current problems are all around us: in the untapped genetic storehouse of the rain forest, in the wisdom of indigenous peoples and in the rising environmental consciousness of young people. These solutions won t be easy to implement and they won t come cheap, but I m sure the effort and expense will be worthwhile. Robert Bateman From Natural worlds Penguin Books Unlike in history, today, human kind, collectively, irrespective of their level of economic and social developments exert much pressure on the earth causing its environment an irrevocable damage. As a nation we are also contributing to this blind inhumanity - the ruining of the earth - ruining the very home we live in. The occurrence of unpredictable changes in climates - world wide flooding, increased risks of health hazards, contaminated food, polluted water supplies, are a few of the noted ones that add on to the growing list of consequences which have arrived at our door steps at this day. The environment which was once thought to be hard or as having unceasing capacity to withstand the relentless blows of the human civilization has now proved itself to be fragile. As the gravity of this problem is not confined to a distinct geographical entity, but has a global spread just as a cancer sneaks in, humankind has to act fast in order to save the earth from this disaster. Time is limited compared to the urgency of attending. Therefore it demands the devotion of every individual of the society - the emergence of a new breed of culture. As a quick solution how could a new breed of human culture be made to emerge? How far will it be a reality in the diverse global cultural make up? Any proposed new offspring culture will necessarily revolutionize the present consumer patterns and behavior: peoples dwelling patterns, mode of transport, physical composition of townships and country lay outs etc., in short a total change in the standard life style and the way of thinking. To make this change a success human kind has to look for real sources of ingenuity? The major historical root cause of this crisis is the built up myth of development, its misinterpretation and the misapplication of the modern sciences and technologies in order to exploit earth s resources in the direction of fulfilling the greedy demand of the human society Udula Bandara Awsadahami 83

114 and the continual blind use of the borrowed technological applications without questioning their repercussions, and always treating the technology and the life of the ancients as obsolete. As a specific case, the so called modernists, though born and raised on the very lands of the cultures and the nations with long traditional technological backgrounds, can be seen either voluntarily moving away from their technological traditions, or made to do so, even though the technology is living and time tested and necessarily embody the sustainable solutions. The issues confronted today, in Sri Lanka, specially, in the field of conservation of water and soil are seen superficially centered round mainly the land use practices of all the sectors of the country, at large. A sound policy aimed at conservation of water and soil necessarily evolved with comprehensive insight into the problems, and drafted for implementation through proper legal arms has to be formulated very soon. In order to gain a high level of efficiency with the policy of this nature, the gravity and the nature of the problems: the scarcity and the need of water against time, source of water pollution, maltransportation of water and the technologies applied in this direction, wrong use of water and inappropriate utilization of land for agriculture, settlements, water storage and for other infrastructure provisions which threaten water, soil and life, have to be thoroughly understood. This exercise should not be, as usually, a mere treatment of hydraulic engineering applications any more. This should embody a high sensitivity to the ecological and social balance. Summary of issues addressed and the methodologies adopted are as follows. Issues: 1. Use of land in the central massif of Sri Lanka above some specific elevations above sea level, and on some terrains with steep inclinations, specially cleared for agriculture and human settlements, are extremely hazardous and a threat to natural conservation of soil and water, and promote the loss of essential soil nutrients. 2. Agro-forestry practiced by the department of forestry of the government in the hill country and on the plains are a greater danger to water and soil conservation of the region. This has been much aggravated with the use of tree species with the characteristic of excessive evapotranspiration specially on the dry zone isolated hilly ranges which traditionally served as water retention bodies specially the fractured quartzite hills covered with indigenous forest species which are evergreens with minimal evapo-transpiration character. 3. Hydropower generation in the hilly zones which dominates the consumption of water for power generation diverts the natural flow of water to suit the power generation priorities. 4. Disturbing the harvesting and use of local rain water within a basin with a high rainfall by transporting large quantities of water from the distant basins thereby creating an inbalance of the eco systems and bringing in more polluted water to the end user as a result of the long travel through the man-made water ways etc. 5. Policy of the government to irrigate the maximum possible land under the command areas without leaving land masses to maintain the diversity. 6. Speedy transport of water for long distances making the water to carry suspended matter, salts and polluted agents, creating health hazards and exposing the traditional land to salination and siltation. 7. Removal of a large number of traditional human-made water retaining structures with the long practiced traditions in conserving forest cover of the watersheds, the rich bio-diversity, water and water management, social structures and the micro environments that had existed surrounding these traditional human-made water bodies across the basins which had been in use for longer time spans in history, in some cases over 1500 years. No alternative structures have come into place. 84

115 8. Devastation of large expanse of traditional forest areas preserved and serving as catchments to the downstream contour canals and reservoirs, with the introduction of new express water ways laid from the newly built far off water storage structures. 9. Laying of infrastruture with disregard to the existing eco-systems and water bodies. 10. Ignorance of the traditional irrigation systems and their role in preserving the bio-diversity and the social cohesiveness that had prevailed. In retrospect, the damage that the so-called modern water resource engineers and the agronomists have imposed on the long sustained traditional soil and water conserving agricultural environments and observing the repercussions that have emerged out of the disturbed areas, up to the present day, the necessity arises for a global level impartial judgment on the nature of this misleading. Let s turn to the quotation below: There is always a tension between development and environmental preservation. The concept of sustainable development is the means to the resolution of this potential confl ict. Many ancient civilizations embody this concept but the one I know best is that of Sri Lanka which also happens in my view to be the most outstanding. It may be that the comparatively small area that needed to be serviced helped in making this achievement possible. Possibly other helpful factors were climates and topography. But marshalling all these factors into water and soil conservation eco-systems needed far seeing vision and dynamic planning. There may have been trial and error along the way but out of long experience grew a great achievement which is a constant reminder to the present of the wisdom of the past Dr. C.G. Weeramantry- Vice President in the International Court of Justice in Preface to Environmental Aspects of Sri Lanka s ancient irrigation system - the Separate Opinion, judgment on the 25 th April 1997 in the case concerning the Gabcikovo Nagymaros Project (Hungary/ Slovakia) A general inquisitive mind would pose the question of how could a small nation like Sri Lanka, in her past, have become most outstanding in keeping the balance between the development and environmental preservation and whether this ingenuity is still exercised on this land or has it been discarded as obsolete? General geographical Background of Sri Lanka Sri Lanka, being an island in the Indian ocean below the southern tip of India, has an unusual topography and a rich culture being influenced by the Buddhist principles rooted far back as 543 BC that has continued to this day. The Island with a land mass of 65,525 sq. kms. has a central massif with its tallest peak rising 2500 meters above sea level. 103 river basins spread radially from the central hills outward to the coastal plains (in addition to there are 94 small coastal basins ). The Island receives an average of 6 feet (1800 mm) rainfall from the two distinguished monsoons. The region in the south west quadrant which receives annual rain fall of above 2.2 meters covers only one third and the balance with a rainfall of about 2.0 meters encompasses two thirds of the country. Records of the chronicles, the remains of the colossal architectural monuments, and the huge man-made reservoirs stand 85

116 Ruwanweli Seya as the proof of the rich civilization of the country that had flourished and continued more than 18 centuries beginning from the 4 th century BC, in this region. Intricate network of reservoirs and canals which had evolved from pre-christian era up to 12 th century are still serving the functions that they were built for. In this paper, it is intended to discuss some salient features of the traditional irrigation system prevailing here in our country Sri Lanka, by presenting a few cases where these ancient water and soil conservation eco-systems which were perfectly modern in terms of sustainability - well woven with Nature - had been ruined by the technocrats of the country, who have been blindly conditioned by the education gained on the engineering hydraulics which they believe was supreme, an ultimate in technology than anything else. The modern engineers who have disturbed these human-made nature-human landscapes were totally ignorant of the subtle balance these systems had maintained with nature, and the human and social cohesiveness that are inherent in them to cluster people together. These vast landscapes with people living in the indigenous technical and social backdrop were only simple deserted playing yards for these engineers who were blind, cruel, and ignorant. This can be visualized in the instances where people threw themselves against the bulldozers which moved to cut the dams of the tanks used by them for generations. In the Kalaoya basin these innocent villagers could save only one tank out of more than 200 flattened by this cruel, unkind exercise in the recent Mahaweli project. Case-I Kala oya valley Kalaoya begins to flow down from the northern slopes of the northern-most mass of the central hills and travels a distance of about 100 miles carrying a total annual run off of 860,000 acre feet from a watershed of nearly 1000 square miles. Dotted across this basin, there had been more than 300 reservoirs, in different scales and large lengths of interconnecting canals which had evolved through a large span of time --- more than several centuries in history to form into a total water resource fabric. In this network, very significant monumental engineering feats of this country could be seen. One of them is the system comprising the Kala-Balalu twin reservoir (5 mile long earthen 86

117 embankment, with a water spread of 6500 acres) and the 54 ½ mile long canal associated with 60 numbers of small-scale reservoirs located along the canal and below it. Kala-Balalu reservoir is formed by damming Kalaoya, in its upper reaches, carving out 300 sq. miles for its watershed. Out of the Balalu and Kala, the former had been built around 40 BC and Kala came into operation about 5 centuries later, that is in 470 AD. The canal starts its trace from Kala segment of Kala-Balalu reservoir by which it is fed. From the beginning, for a length of about 17 miles, the canal was taken along a gentle slope of 1: 10,000 - rather on a contour. Within its first 8 mile run the canal deviated form the river and maintained approximately a mean parallel distance of about 4 miles between the two, forming a band of irrigated area, before it turns to cross over to the adjacent valley. The canal feeds about 60 tanks on its total traverse up to Anuradhapura (the first capital founded in 4 th country BC). The canal meandered along the upstream water edge of the small reservoirs which were lying immediately below it, almost touching the upstream waterline when the reservoirs are full. The other major characteristic of the canal was that, almost throughout its traverse, it was made to flow on the surface of the terrain, bordering the traditionally preserved thick forest belt called mookalan. Rain water that drains down this large tropical forest belt is intercepted by the canal bund built on its left bank which marked the common border with the reservoirs lying by its side. Just imagine the picturesque environment one would feel when walking on the bund of the canal. On the right hand, the water flows gently, just as in a natural stream flowing in the shade of the huge trees of the bordering forest that stands on the canal bank bending over the flowing water and spreading the branches over the bund casting cooler shadows on it. The streams that drain the bordering catchment forest could be seen flowing into the canal frequently. On the left, view of the rippling blue clear water surface of the reservoirs opens through the trunks of the tree clusters that stand on the waters edge. 87

118 Below the tanks was the green spread of the paddy fields that stretch far beyond up to the bank of the river, leaving the high ground mass where the human settlements and the green orchards could be seen. R.L. Brohier, in his celebrated work - the Ancient Irrigation Works of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) describes Jayaganga the canal system in the following often quoted words. The Jayaganga, indeed an ingenious memorial of ancient irrigation, which was undoubtedly designed to serve as a combined irrigation and water supply canal, was not entirely dependent on its feeder reservoir, Kalawawa, for the water it carried. The length of the bund between Kalawawa and Anuradhapura intercepted all the drainage from the high ground to the east which otherwise would have run to waste. Thus the Jayaganga adapted itself to a wide field of irrigation by feeding little village tanks in each subsidiary valley which lay below its bund. Not infrequently it fed a chain of village tanks down these valleys - the tank lower down receiving the overfl ow from the tank higher up on each chain. This glorious human-made eco-system that had sustained for over many centuries is no longer there now. It is now in total ruin. In early 1980s, on the decisions taken at the national level of politics the technocrats, in the field of hydrology, laid an express straight canal across this ancient system, cutting the main artery - the meandering canal, into pieces, digging the beds of the canal embraced tank clusters and bulldozing off hundreds of tanks located down in the valley. Despite the protests of the ancestral people bulldozers kept on working, in some cases, summoning the local policemen onto the sites. Out of the hundreds of tanks which were flattened to the ground, people could salvage only two tanks by throwing themselves before the moving bulldozers. Some of the aged senior villagers died of the shock of seeing their reservoir emptied out through the gaps made on the bund. The catchments of the system - traditionally preserved forest cover on the canal upstream - was slashed down for timber and firewood by the contractors with the permission granted by the state. 88

119 A vast man-made eco system, where agriculture had been an essential part of it, which was sustained entirely on its own resources, including water harvested from the local rain and stored in prime locations, was made to depend on a foreign source of water which is out of reach of the locals. The heirs to a rich water heritage have been slashed to the levels of slaves of an alien system which is governed by others. Case-11 Elahera-Kanthale Yoda-ela system Background: An irrigation system (water and soil conservation ecosystem) with a linear spread of 82 ½ miles including a man-made canal and inter-connected large reservoir system which originates from the water-rich eastern slopes of the northern mass of the central hills had evolved through a period of 11 centuries. The initial section of the system known as Alisara canal was recorded in the chronicles as a work of king Vasabha ( AD ). It carries the diverted flow of Ambanganga along the foot of the Konduruwawa range intercepting the drainage from it. The canal feeds reservoir Giritale (550 AD) and the reservoir Minneri (267 AD) after having traversed a distance of 22 ½ miles, irrigating the valley lying below the range, to its east. This initial section was extended by another 30 miles, further north of reservoir Minneri, during the 6 th century AD up to reservoir Ganthala. To the head end of the system another 28 mile long canal was joined in a subsequent era, expanding the system to a length of 82 ½ miles. Within the initial section of the canal, on the canal itself, there had been four reservoirs, at different elevations, connected with the sections of the canal with necessary lock-gate structures. These had been placed in the locations which provide necessary depth and the spread found in between the hilly range and the bund of the canal. Out the four large member reservoirs of the system three had never been breached from the day of commissioning and still serve the purpose. Because of this long continuity the traditional wisdom used in sustaining the system, that had passed down the generations could be found specially with the ancestral families of the region. Bordering the west, is the mountainous forest range which had served as the catchments of the system, traditionally preserved as in the case of Jayaganga, but relatively much larger in extent. This lush tropical forest area of hundreds of thousands of acres had been covered with a diverse mix of indigenous plant species which had played a greater role in the function of water and soil conservation of the watershed. And it was made to harbor the forest tanks which had been built to serve as water retaining structures, in order to create the pockets of water rich environments within the watershed forest, providing the wild animals which are also considered as a part of the watershed, with ample fodder and water. As a means of long term conservation strategy, laid down by the traditional system in order to preserve the watershed forest from being encroached and illutilised, specific forest expanses had been 89

120 There had been four reservoirs in the initial section of the canal connected by lockgates identified and marked out with the natural landmarks, that stood as boundaries, and had been treated with distinct worthiness or holiness. For instance, the catchments of the initial section - a relatively high mountainous region with an escarpment in the eastern border - is considered as the royal gardens of king Mahasen (267 AD), the builder of the reservoir Minneri. Beyond it, in the middle, on the northern end of reservoir Minneri was the area of the hermitages. The forest area next to it where the stream Galoya flows down to the canal, through a relatively deep valley, was believed to be the royal water gardens- nanumurella. The final forest cover grown on the quartz hilly range was believed to be as the gardens of a divine soul called Wanni Bandara.This was treated as a total sanctuary, in traditions. In 1960s, on the advise of the agro forestry experts who came down from Canada, the government cleared more than two third of this traditionally preserved catchments forest cover. The dominant indigenous tree species of the region - Drypetus Sepiara an evergreen variety which had contributed much to the conservation of ground water and protecting the lower shrub species have been identified to be removed for firewood. In its place, the broad leaved Teak plantation was introduced. The consequences were proved to be very grave but still the department of forestry of this country keeps on devastating traditional forest land and planting their favorite trees! Wewa Wewa, although, simply, identified as a water retaining structure, with its composite nature with the earthen dam laid across an up stream section of a valley, a spill, a sluice, and the catchment forest as watershed area in which excess water as well as silt trap structures are placed; stretches out, beyond its physical limits as a human made structure, into the vastness of nature, as it is so designed by the builder and so accepted and maintained by the user as a divine thing gifted by the ancestors. A mass of ethics that the villagers observed both in their ritualistic and social spheres can be identified as essential and scientific know-how which had aimed at ensuring the long and healthy sustenance of these water environments. Some of these coded principles or ethics have been wrongly interpreted as mythical by the technocrats, administraters and the politicians who had ruthlessly trampled down these age old traditions in order to superimpose their senseless designs branded as modern and developed. 90

121 These second order people who have considered themselves as the superior decision-makers of these sensible systems have driven out the traditional guardians away from their positions. And stripped the system of the association of the people who have once served as honorary guardians, ordering them to keep away from the system and to behave as users just like those who use pipe borne water in the city. Most technology aspects which had been preserved and practiced have been totally ignored by these illicit guardians who still impose their authority to engage in plundering the system in the name of development. The following are some of the few valuable aspects which had their roots both in the technological and the social spheres related with Wewa. These aspects are either totally ignored or are reluctant to be accepted as essentials by these modern day guardians of the traditional water environments. Sustainability The ancient water structures and the systems, which were built more than 1700 years ago, are still serving the purpose that they are built for. For instance, Minneriya wewa built in 270 AD, Giritale, and Kanthale tanks which were built around 600 AD are a few tanks which had remained unbreached since the day of commissioning. The authority of the present day is unaware of this very fact and hesitates to accept the factors which contribute to attain this sustainability. As a result, even up to this day, the proposals of the decision makers awfully tend to violate the principles that had secured the sustainability of the ancient traditional system. Diversity of the Technological Composition and the Lay-out. Varied types of systems have been adapted to suit the terrain, rainfall and vegetation. For instance, the traditional system that we see in Mahaveli lower plain, specially in the district of Polonnaruwa, is different from the system adapted in Malwatu oya and Kala oya basins. And what was practiced in Mau Ara basin in southern Ruhunurata is totally different. Today, it is apparent that attempts are being made to apply or to reproduce the same concept for every possible corner of the country irrespective of the fact that the prevailing conditions contrasts and demands other options or at least to look for the deviations from the supposed standard paths. This rudeness in comprehending the diversity of the traditional systems and their suitability could be one of the main reasons for the recent failures such as Lunugamvehera reservoir etc. Making the system as a part of Nature The most outstanding principle underlying the evolution of these systems is that they have been built and operated with a meticulous regard to the natural environment, as if they belong to nature. This fact of being a part of nature could be one of the reasons for the long life that these systems enjoy for more than thousands of years. 91

122 In many instance, the canals used in the ancient systems resemble natural streams, unlike the modern day distributing canals, for instance, laid in Madhuru oya reservoir. In some places these canals run at a level more than 20 feet below the immediate natural ground. These deep cut concreted canals usually kill even large elephants during the dry spells getting them trapped in the canal bed. The ancient systems mostly that used contour canals never do any harm at this scale. The argument which is always leveled against using the contour canals which are laid along the slow gradients is that it wastes water and it is inefficient in this respect. Sure, the lined straight canals which are laid against the contours may save water a lot at the expense of the lives of the giants of the wild. Can a system which deals with water which is laid on the ground be so alien to the earth? Can it survive for so long? Technological components and aspects that have been perfected in its design and application. Biso Kotuwa : A type of sluice equivalent to valve towers and valve pits that were developed in Europe. The duty of Bisokotuwa is to hold the controlling gears which regulate the outflow of water or to stop the flow totally. Development of this component had enabled the ancient tank builder to build large reservoirs where a head of water of 40 feet or more could be handled by maintaining the required water flow from the reservoir into the distributing channels. A comment of Henry Parker, a British Engineer who was involved in restoration works of the tanks of Anuradhapura, Kurunegala and Vavunia in the early part of the 1900s. Since about the middle of last century, open wells, called valve towers when they stand clear of the embankment and valve pits when they are in it have been built at numerous reservoirs in Europe. Their duty is to hold the valves, and the lifting-gear for working them, by means of which the outward fl ow of the water is regulated or totally stopped. Such also was the function of the bisokotuwa of the Sinhalese engineers: they were the first inventors of the valve- pit more than 2100 years ago. And that it must have been no easy task to control the out-fl ow of the water at reservoirs which had a depth of thirty or forty feet, as was the case at several of the larger works. Yet the similarity of the designs of the bisokotuwa at all periods proves that the engineers of the third century B.C., if not those of an earlier period, had mastered the problem so successfully that all others were satisfi ed to copy their designs. 92

123 Biso Wewa - large Kulu wewas located in the catchment of a large tank In many cases, for instance, in Kalawewa even though the bund was breached, all the sluices were recorded to be in perfect order, except the controlling gears which were usually made out of timber. Henry Parker records that a British engineer called Powell was very sad to pull down these perfect structures to build new ones. He had suggested to install controlling gears within the rectangular enclosure instead. But the English administration at the time did not want it to happen. Ridee Bandille : A system of diverting water from a perennial water stream without building a dam across the water. In Angamedilla, Elahera and Minipe this technique can be seen in application. A low groin is built in oblique to the flow of water, and a bypass channel is cut off the bank of the river or the tributary. The diversion channel is then taken from this bypass channel. Note no accumulation of silt takes place in this case in the river bed. When the water regime rises high in the floods, the river or the stream flows unabated, in the way it flows naturally. Kulu Wewa : Forest tanks, built on the catchments of the large reservoirs to intercept excess water and silt. These are sometimes termed as oolpathwew which literally means the fountain formers. Kuluwewas are not equipped with sluices only the flood escapes. More than 23 Kulu wewas can be found in the catchment of Miniriya Wewa. All of these structures are abandoned now. The functions of these structures of recharging the water table, detention of silt, retaining of excess water and creating micro level water and soil conservation ecological zones have not been identified by the authority. During the year 1998 a provincial political authority had converted a few of these structures to irrigable tanks by fixing sluices and had settled farmers under these structures. Biso Wewa: Large Kulu wewas located in the catchment of the large tanks equipped with sluices to release stored water to the main tank when required. Today, during the heavier part of the rainy season that spread within 4 months the excess water is released through the spills of the tanks sometimes as waste to flow into the sea. But if the Kuluwewas and Bisowewas had been functioning, a large part of the water that runs out of the spills could have been retained within the water shed area. 93

124 Katakuluwewas : Silt trap tanks built on a place a little above the confluence of the water carrying canals. The function is to trap silt before entering into the large reservoirs. Present day, all the water that is taken from the diversion from the perennial sources is simply released to the reservoir without making it to run through the silt trap tanks - Katakalu Wewas. A large silted up area with an extent of more than 1 ½ acres could be seen around the confluence of the Elahera canal where it is opened into Minneriya Wewa. In 1998 a grown up she Elephant got mired and died in this expanse of silt. Conservation of the catchment forest In the traditional system disturbing the catchment forest was taboo. The composition of the plants was the creepers was not allowed to be disturbed. Value of the ecological balance of the forest and its function of rain water detention seemed to have been comprehended by the ancients. At present, the catchment areas of the reservoirs which are covered with the age old conserved forest is cleared by the forest department to lay agro forestry. They generally consider it as functionless and idling. Many perennial water ways have dried out due to this destructive practice of the forest department. In Minneriya catchment, out of 90,000 acres of the tradionally marked and preserved watershed a large fraction was cleared by the government forest department during 1960s for agro-forestry to plant Eucalyptus, Teak and arcasia species. This had been a total failure even if it is looked at from the stand point of growing timber. In most of the areas the agro forestry failed and the lands once covered with lush diverse vegetation are now exposed to harsh weather devoid of any remarkable grown up tree cover. In many places teak bushes can be seen instead of trees. A large fraction of the Minneriya catchment area was cleared by the government forest department 94

125 The forest which was cleared, cut and burnt for these so-called agro forestry was with a high diversity. The residual forest patches still stand for the rich composition of the lost forest. Weera (drypetes Sepiaria) was a dominant tree species in this forest of watershed areas of the ancient systems in the regions which get rain largely from North-East Monsoon. Weera, an evergreen tree, even bears fruits during the driest periods from June to August. It has thick mass of leaves which cast a dense shadow. Among the deciduous, Weera protects the undergrowth during the drier periods As compared to the other tree species its evapotranspiration is much less. Unfortunately to a normal eye, the fluted stem of this tree and its appearance give an impression that it is useless. The same reason may have led to the decision taken by the Canadian team who visited here in 1960s who had instructed the government of Sri Lanka to remove all this unwanted tree from the forest for fire wood. Wewa as a cohesive nucleus of the community Until 1960s these age old traditions associated with wewa persisted both in the spheres of ritualistic life and in the communal life of the village. These practices solely aimed at the physical upkeep of the wewa and the society. The following are some of the rites and the social aspects connected with these traditions. Dedicating the system including Wewa or the components of it to deities or to divine souls to preside over it. Sometimes a single deity was taken as a guardian. In some cases a pantheon. In Minneriya, a pantheon of seven deities is considered as the guardians of Wewa. They have been venerated in a place called Weda Ina Maluwa located on the bund of the reservoir. Originally the statues hewn out of stones had been placed in an open pavilion built under a huge tamarind tree. But now these statues are kept out of the sight of the devotees inside a masonry structure, built during the early part of the peasant colonization scheme of Minneriya launched in In Kalawewa the catchment area is belived to be presided over by a deity called Ilandari (or Ilangadari) whose symbols are the stick and the looped rope. And the water spread of the reservoir is believed to be looked after by a deity called Namal Bandara. The man made structure such as dam, spills, sluices and the canals are believed to be guarded by a deity or a demon called Kadawara. These spirits are venerated in high esteem in the ceremony held annually, just after the main harvesting season. A place called Sanhida or Weda Ina Maluwa (Pantheon or dwelling place) was selected on the bund to do the ritualistic performances. Rituals called Mul Mangallaya, Aluth Sahal Mangallaya or Mutti nemum are performed to receive the blessings of these deities. Wewa, the water ways and the catchement forest have been considered as divine, not as a simple physical thing as the way it is treated today. All the people who live down stream used to flock to Wewa to attend these rituals performed annually. The villagers had a high regard for wewa and for the paddy fields. I would like to mention a single case which would illustrate their respect for wewa. One has to descend from the carts or elephants when travelling along the bund or crossing it. 95

126 The Loss of a Traditional Sanctuary-Maha Morakanda This is about a sheer devastation of a traditional forest garden located on a mountain range in the catchment of Kawduluwewa for the sake of agro forestry of the forest department in the year It was an age old mountain forest, covering more than 200 acres, bordering Minneriya- Kanthale Yoda ela which runs along the foot of this mountain range.the traditional villagers who lived nearby believed this as a divine forest where a divine soul called Wanni Bandara dwelt in. People used to visit this mountain forest only to pluck Mora- a variety of fruit in a grown up tree species. These trees do not bear fruits annually. Sometimes Mora season comes once in 2 or 3 years. The villagers used to collect bee honey in the same visit for gathering Mora. This journey to Morakanda resembled a religious pilgrimage. Usually they go in groups and spent the night in the mountain. In the evening just after their entry into the jungle, they made a Kannalawwa or a vow to the deity informing that they have come to his territory to pluck Mora fruit and to collect bee honey. And they promise not to harm any of the living creatures whether large or small during their stay in the mountain. This was an ideal sanctuary in its absolute sense. Wasn t it? Unfortunately, in 1960s the forest department had cleared this forest range ruthlessly, without paying the least attention to the appeals made by the traditional villagers who are the heirs to this forest sanctuary. At last, the foresters planted their favorite plant species Teak in rows on the ashes of this religious forest like a group of soldiers marching in a parade. But what you see today here after 40 years is a barren, parched and eroded expanse of land with teak bushes, instead of trees, scattered here and there. Loss of a traditional Sanctuary Maha Morakanda 96

127 The Small Tank Systems The small tanks exist in groups or cascades. The natural drainage system in a watershed is blocked in suitable locations by throwing the earthen bunds across the valley. Out of 22,000 man-made inland water bodies spread over two third of the land of the island, about 18,500 village tanks can be found of which nearly 12,000 or more are abandoned. Remaining small tanks feed an extent of 185,000 hectares which is 35% of the total irrigable area of the country. These small tanks contribute 20% to the national rice production. The landscape of the dry zone is decided by the small tanks dotted across the valleys in different forms and arrangement which is a disorder to a normal eye conditioned to pure geometric patterns. These surface water bodies maintain the ground water table closer to the The small tanks exist in groups or cascades. land surface. Absence of these spread water bodies essentially leads to the depletion of ground water changing the lush green of the landscape. In the traditional environment the village tank had served as the focus of the environment conservation and the social cohesion. Villagers who lived by these tanks had been serving as the guardians of these environments. The tree covered watersheds of the tank systems have been strictly protected by the common agreement of the people. The encroachments and cultivation of these lands were under taboo. All of these traditions focused at conservation of water and its environment have been discontinued by the decision of the colonial rule and the successive national governments to take over the administration and management of these systems into their hands by ripping off the traditional guardianship from the people- the user. 97

128 Udula Bandara Awsadahami The author is an architect by professsion. He is a descendant from a traditional family which had migrated from Matale, during the times of the Matale Rebellion against English rule during 1840 s. Bathgampattuwa, one of the few purana villages that remained under Minneriya Wewa was their first retreat. In 1920 s, after the death of his great grand father, this family had sought asylum, again in another purana village called Rotawewa, located within the same region, where the author was born. His long association with the traditional village life, linked with Wewa and the forest, has led to understanding the traditions that had long sustained these water environments. And also the disasterous consequences that these traditions had to undergo, with the advent of the so called developments which had been undertaken by the Government s departments of irrigation and the forest department, with sheer ignorance of the traditional technology and the social life which had been fostering these water environments. Udula is the author of the book titled Wewa, written in Sinhala his mother tongue published locally in the year It reveals many unique and valuable technical traditions and social aspects, practiced by the ancients, related with Wewa, that had ensured its long healthy life. He, taking Minneriya as a case study, tries to illustrate the usefulness of the age old technical traditions and applications which have been badly neglected by the present day system. He appeals to the people who live by these ancient environments to shake off their ignorance and come forward to save the Wewas from the disaster that befell on them. He firmly believes that the root cause for this disaster: the impoverishment of the ancient system is the conflict between the two parties who had been forcefully put together namely: The old tradition and the so-called Modern technical applications which often operate without any firm philosophical base. 98

129 Invited Address at Inaugural Plenary Session The Mahathupa of Lanka A unique wonder of peace and equanimity Shereen Amendra This paper was to have been presented at the Pugwash Conference No. 57 in Bari, Italy, but I was unable to attend, so I thank you for the opportunity to present this on this occasion when the present President of Pugwash Jayantha Dhanapala is being felicitated. BACKGROUND Human settlements are necessarily linked with the availability of water. In the Rajarata or King s country of the North-Central Province of Sri Lanka in the pre-christian era, lake-like bodies of water (known in Sinhala as wewa s) are no accidental feature in the landscape. Nature had been studied and cleverly engineered for sustainable use by the people forming aesthetic landscapes for comfort. King Pandukabhaya is said to have built such a lake (wewa) by damming the waters as far back as the 4 th Century B.C. The wewa provided the water for irrigating the rice paddies to support the growing population of the city. The early city of Anuradhapura is said to have been extensive with well-ordered town planning and infra-structure. Archaeologists have dated the city as far back as 8 th century B.C. Surpluses both in food and economy gave rise to monumental and permanent structures. These later included the reliquary structures known as stupas. The earliest stupa known thus far was at Mahiyangana, and with the advent of Arahant Mahinda, emissary of King Asoka of India, the building of the stupa at Mihintale, and the Thuparama at Anuradhapura followed. The Thuparama was the first stupa to be built in Anuradhapura and enshrines the collar-bone relic of Gotama Buddha. Some aspects of the construction of these stupas are also recorded in the (later) 5 th century writings. Many stupas abound all over the island of Sri Lanka of varying shapes and sizes although they are all of singular symmetrical form and often a reliquary. Some are of great antiquity and others more modern in construction. These stupas range from the recent shell concrete structure at Kalutara, through the mediaeval stupas of Polonnaruwa to the ancient structures of Magama in the Deep South. In Anuradhapura in the North Central Province, such ancient structures with their soaring pinnacles characterize the landscape. This was local architecture on a global level. Perhaps even a universal level. Much has been written through the ages on the shapes of the stupa, its evolution, symbolism and proportions. The major structures are many, some large, others smaller. Of these the 340 ft. tall Ruwanweliseya or Mahathupa stands out. Presently the third tallest brick structure Shereen Amendra 99

130 in the world and revered by all followers of the Buddha s doctrine and pride of Sri Lanka. This presently existing 2 nd Century B.C. work of architecture has been recorded copiously in writing over 2000 years ago. The building of these structures have been recorded in several writings - The Mahavamsa (or Great Chronicle of Ceylon), the Thupavamsa, and others. The Mahavamsa was written around the 5 th 6 th centuries A.D. based on even earlier records. Translations have been made into many languages and by many persons, some of whom are mentioned here. Upham s translation of parts of the Mahawamso was in George Turnour was able to access the original palm-leaf manuscripts and painstakingly translated the Pali into English around 1837 and reprinted L.C. Wijesinha s Mahavamsa published in Among other translations was Wilhelm Geiger s translation to German and Mabel Haynes-Bode s from German to English under his direction. It is this Geiger version that has been used for this research. The Thupavamsa is a mediaeval work in both Sinhala and Pali languages dealing with the design and construction of stupas with detailed description of particularly the Mahathupa. An introduction to the terminology used and the parts of a stupa is useful here. The languages of Pali, Sanskrit, Sinhala and recently English are used interchangeably in common parlance. Thupa, stupa, cetiya, chaitya, seya, dagaba, dagoba all refer to the same type of structure a tope of singular and symmetrical form. In Anuradhapura, the present city lies to the east of the declared sacred area. Back in time, the site is said to be hallowed by the Buddhas Kakusandha, Konagama, Kassappa and further by Gotama Buddha s (B.C. 587) presence on his third visit to Lanka. The site was subsequently marked by Venerable Arahant Mahinda, emissary of King Asoka, on his visit to Lanka and confirmed by King Devanampiyatissa who reigned in Lanka around B.C. The site was marked by a pillar of stone set up by the king and inscribed that it would be built in generations yet to come. The Mahathupa was ultimately built as predicted several generations later (about 147 B.C.) by King Dhuttagamani, (born as Prince Gamani Abhaya and great-great grandson of King Devanampiyatissa s brother, Mahanama). On the demise of king Gamani, the Mahathupa was completed by his brother King Saddhatissa. Many kings following, added further embellishments to the Mahathupa, until the decline of Anuradhapura as a capital. The great structure was found as a ruined tumulus and restoration was commenced in 1873 by Ven. Naranwita Sumanasara thera. Architect J.G. Smither, in his work the Architectural Remains of Anuradhapura, Ceylon meticulously notes the findings along with measured drawings, recording the physical existence of the stupas. But of the interior of the Mahathupa there is no archaeological excavation work to date and we are left to faith and conjecture. The Mahathupa or Ruwanweliseya is also known by several other names. (see box) Names of the Mahathupa Hemamali at site selection stage Swarnamali chaitya according to legend and currently popularly in use Mahathupa during time of kings Mahaseya a reverential term Ruwanweliseya the present name Ruwanmeliseya a term also in use 100

131 The main events as recorded in the Mahavamsa in relation to the Mahathupa are, The Visits of the Buddhas and selection of the site. Four generations later the finding of the materials for the building of the Thupa, The preparation of the excavated ground and ceremonial laying of the foundation and foundation stone by the King (an international event), The arrival of the relics and the building of the relic chamber, The enshrining of the Sacred Relics, The passing away of the King Dhuttagamini and faux completion of the stupa to satisfy the dying King, The actual completion of the stupa, Further additions and acts of adoration by following rulers. The stupa is very much a part of the living ethos of the people even today. The design and construction of the Mahathupa in particular records that it was to be made in a bubble shape of particular dimensions at the behest of the King guided by the Theras. The materials were found, the disposition and structure were clearly set-out and the whole projectmanaged. The stages of building as eloquently recorded in the Mahavamsa in some detail may be summarized as follows; Clearing the site and excavation The arrangement of the lower base layers Circumscribing the circle Setting out the upper layers and laying of the foundation stone in the presence of invited great arahant theras and many bhikkhus The construction of the ring foundation (pesa valalu) The relic chamber / superstructure (dhathugabbha) The completion of the domed superstructure (gharbhaya) The caturassa-caya (four-sided structure) Raising the parasol (done by later kings) (chatthra) Later additions of terraces and frontispieces (ayaka). RESEARCH Several years ago reading the ancient chronicle, I was curious that the Mahavamsa so copiously records in detail the building of the Mahathupa in particular and also about particular stanzas relating to the construction of this revered edifice. I wondered not only about it s content but also as to why it had not been questioned or analyzed over the last so many centuries. Many eminent writers highlighted some aspects but merely glossed over this particular aspect even dismissing it as fanciful. However, I was convinced that such stanzas would not be included frivolously into a historic document, but must have some meaning. It appears that the writer was very keen on leaving to posterity details which are significant. It was in the light of modern advances in science and technology that I made this startling discovery, not one, but several parts of a whole. This new outlook (my discovery) may have several far-reaching connotations and perhaps a revising of many long-held attitudes as to the history of scientific discovery. This paper presented today is more about the persons and their attitudes that brought about this mind-boggling work of architecture. By this enshrinement of the relics, they, perhaps, more than remembered their humanity, as the best adherents to the Buddha s teachings. Please permit me to set before you, in as concise a form as possible what I have already presented at many fora and as a book which led to a scientific discussion of a part of it under the auspices of the General Research Committee of the Sri Lanka Association for the Advancement of Science (SLAAS). 101

132 The first hint was in my article in June 2003 titled Pinnacles of Power the aesthetics of the top published in the journal Sri Lanka Architect, Vol. 104, No. 2. and also published in local newspapers. In February 2006, presented at the National Conference in Architecture hosted by the Sri Lanka Institute of Architects with the title Form follows Function The Mahathupa and Modern Technology Carried in the February 2006 peer-reviewed publication The Built Environment Vol 06, Issue 02, with the title The Mahathupa and Modern Technology it was further endorsed, This I felt was not sufficiently comprehensive with many aspects left out. Therefore, I published as a book Beyond the Seeing Eye: The Mahathupa of Lanka an insight in February There were many reviews of the book including a comprehensive 3 part serial by Pugwashite Mr. D.L.O. Mendis in the local newspapers. Further illustrated with computer graphics in the presentation The Mahathupa at Anuradhapura inaugurating the exhibition Architecture and Religion by the Goethe Institut German Cultural Institute, Colombo. Most recently presented for a scientific discussion with regards to a facet of the whole titled Curious Parallel between the silicon chip and the base layers of the Ruwanweliseya to a select audience where physicists were present among other scientists and professionals. Computer graphic models elucidating further research were presented. Many ancient texts such as the Abhidhanappadipika relating to sizes and methods of measurement was studied. The totality was a multi-faceted study and analysis of the construction with my interpretation of the relevant stanzas using three-dimensional computer graphics for the re-construction. To quote from the Mahavamsa, illustrated with my interpreted reconstruction with the aid of computer graphics, Round stones that he commanded his soldiers to bring hither did he cause to be broken with hammers, and then did he, having knowledge of the right and the wrong ways, command that the crushed stone, to make the ground firmer, be stamped down by great elephants whose feet were bound with leather. (Mah. XXIX 3-4) The king commanded that the clay be spread over the layer of stones and that bricks then be laid over the clay, over these a rough cement and over this cinnabar, and over this a network of iron, and over this sweet-scented marumba that was brought by the samaneras from the Himalaya. Over this did the lord of the land command them to mountain-crystal. Over the layer of mountain-crystal he had stones spread; everywhere throughout the work did the clay called butter-clay serve (as cement). With resin of the kapitha-tree, dissolved in sweetened water, the lord of chariots laid over the stones a sheet of copper eight inches thick and over this with arsenic dissolved in sesamum-oil, (he laid) a sheet of silver seven inches thick. (Mah. XXIX 7-12) When the king, glad at heart, had thus had preparation. Etc. He arranged for the laying of the foundation stone. He however, had laid bundles of clothes (1008 bundles) in the midst, It is these stanzas that aroused my curiosity, and I started out by wondering why two metals used even today as the best electrical conductors were used in its foundation at a time pre-dating our currently known use of electricity. Also the specific use of mountain-crystal. I referred to these as the base layers, the above being the lower layers and the following stanza as the upper layer. Eight vases of silver and eight (vases) of gold did he, with tireless zeal, place in midst, and in a circle around these he placed a thousand and eight new vases, and likewise (around each of these) a hundred and eight garments. Eight splendid bricks did he lay, each one apart by itself (Mah. XXIX 57-59) 102

133 This conjectural representation of the materials as recorded in the Mahawansa indicates that the materials were carefully arranged and the ingredients of a solid state semiconductor and a capacitor are possibly present. It must be made clear that although the sequence of materials which I have depicted with my knowledge as an architect is given in the above stanzas, the specific pattern is not known. Much of the materials used were procured before the building process and some are specifically recorded. My interpretations of the materials (other than Kuruvinda which is already stated) are as follows: kuruvinda - Cinnabar - Ore of mercuric sulphide(hgs) termite proof layer network of iron - conducting pathways for current? Or heat sink? Marumba - moisture absorbent? Sweet scented earth or sand for besprinkling a damp living cell mountain crystal - quartz - SiO 2 silica ordinary rock - to mask the paths (as in etching) rasodaka - sweetened water, which may be water of the young red cocoanut (note by Turnour) - isotonic liquid with free ions, high content of phosphorus (for doping to create a semiconductor) with resin of kapitha tree (dissolved in sweetened water) (more phosphorus) Mah XXIX 11 could this be rasasodhaka (borax from the ore kernite or rasorite) to be used for doping the mountain crystal resulting in p-regions? (Borax is sodium borate) Extract from Buddhadhatta Mahathera s English Pali dictionary Sheet of copper eight inches thick Arsenic dissolved in sesamum oil Sheet of silver seven inches thick Eight vases of gold and eight (vases) of silver in a circle around these. A 1008 new vases Eight splendid bricks [pavara gold] did he lay each one apart by itself. He laid on the East side. The first foundation stone.. Metal - Electrical conductor Insulator?? Or conducting interface Metal - Electrical conductor Transistor gates?? The following = 1024 significant in computer technology as 2 10 and byte multiples 1008 is divisible by 4 indicating symmetry to the two crossing axes of the cardinal points (of the magnetic compass??) (see note***)mahaseya is slightly skew (6 deg) to the other stupas aligned to solar cardinal points Data in or data out?? Transistors?? Gates??? 103

134 The upper layers were also curious and significant. I saw curious parallels between modern technology and the knowledge of properties of materials and their functions of the designers. Particularly the semi-conductor properties of silicon, silica and silicates new vases were curious. Were they similar to Leyden jars? The numbers are curious, seemingly corresponding to that used in digital applications. The pinnacle Analysing further, as to the requirement of an electrical charge, led me to the design of the pinnacle considering that in ancient times many were awed by natural occurrences and their consequence including lightning. The technology to be used was found to have been set out in another ancient text the Manjusrivasthuvidyashastra. The present pinnacle is the conical spire (koth kaeraella) or evolved version of the early pinnacle the chatravali as seen in the India on the Sanchi stupa or still earlier the single honorific umbrella, the chatthra. Reconstructing the early pinnacle according to these stanzas using 3 dimensional computer graphics, along with references to other texts and archaeological artefacts brought to light the design for lightning protection, possible harnessing of power on ancient stupas and the origin of ornamental bo leaves in plaster on stupas of today. The pinnacle while protecting the stupa from lightning, utilized or harvested the electrical charge of the clouds in a manner that the stupa was probably meant to function as a capacitor and provide the mild charge required to possibly allow the mountain crystal to function as a semiconductor. A still frame from a computer graphic animation of possible harvesting of electrical charge from the clouds as conjectured from the early form of the pinnacle of a stupa Construction Bo leaves depicted in plaster on a recent stupa Thus the required ingredients found in a solid-state electronic device are present. The quartz and silicon, the metal plates, capacitor, impurity (doping) elements, and the positive charge. The manner of activation (in/out, source/drain) of the seeming device is uncertain. Electron flow could have been induced with the doping elements. However, it is recorded (in the Chronicles), that the great earth quaked and many wonders came to pass in diverse ways on the enshrining of the Sacred relics. It is known that electro-magnetic radiation is one manner of activating electron movement in a semiconductor. Perhaps the sacred relics embody a source of powerful electro-magnetic radiation or energies we are yet to understand. The consolidation of perfectly circular stepped rings as foundation, functioning as terraces for flower offerings and a circumambulatory path, the formation of the cist-like relic chamber, with the probable raising of the brickwork to spherical form was no less a feat. Setting out on the site by describing the circle and raising the dome to perfect curvature and plumb was then the simpler 104

135 task. Quality control was exercised on the exterior finish and the artifacts and arrangement within the relic chamber described in the chronicle. Relic chamber A curious arrangement within the chamber as indicated by a statement in the chronicle appeared to be a protective device. The statement in commentaries to the Mahavamsa, in Pali language, reads meghalatanama vijjukumariyo and the Porana texts read as meghalata vijjukumari medhapindikabhittiya samanta caturo passe dhatugabbhe parikkhippi (Mah XXX footnote to 96) meaning around all the four sides of the fat-coloured walls of the relic chamber were placed lightning cloud-creepers. A computer graphic wire frame depiction of the Mahathupa and interior Referring to the same Pali sentence Smither mentions streams of lightning illumining the walls and conjectures that jewels and crystal let into the stone created this effect. The Mahavamsa states that it was for the adornment of the chamber. The Thupavamsa refers to the same as viduraliya (raliya wave, viduli electricity in Sinhalese language). In the backdrop of many other artifacts said to be within, I have suggested that these were real sparks or discharges of electricity from capacitors. These sparks probably traversed all four sides of the relic-chamber. The function of such sparks or discharges could be several security, effect, discharge of excess energy or some other purpose. As described, at the ceremonial enshrining of the sacred relics a large gathering of arahant bhikkhus and people were present. The relic chamber was thereafter likely to be vacuum sealed according to my interpretation. The use of sapphire within appeared to have the purpose of insulation from stray currents of the suggested circuits. Much is as yet in the realm of conjecture. There were certain external elements as well which may relate to this elaborate scheme. The people were invited to enshrine relics and the dome and the square building on top (referred to variously as hti, tee, caturassa-caya, harmika or hatharas kotuwa) were completed. King Dhuttagamani passed away at this juncture and the honorific parasol at the pinnacle with its spire and faceted crystal gem was completed by his brother king Saddhatissa in the manner described before. Having researched more about these aspects, semi-conductors, solid state electronics, electrics, weather patterns, lightning, piezo-electricity of gems and of course the architecture itself, I presented my findings. Undoubtedly the records show that an elaborate arrangement was designed, which I have presented in greater detail in my book and elsewhere. Whether it was implemented as recorded is also as yet uncertain. There is yet much that is unclear and my research is on-going. Although there is much to be described and elucidated I would like to bring to you the focus of this paper the attitude of those involved in this historic programme. FINDING My conclusions included that, in addition to the architecture of domed brick and mortar of colossal proportions, that the physics of semi-conductor materials, lightning protection and harnessing of electrical charges appear to have been known. That this was known 23 centuries ago is akin to the advances in modern knowledge of nuclear physics and quantum technology. 105

136 It appears that the arahant bhikkhus of a great scientific school were clearly knowledgeable and intelligent. The great thera Indagutta, who was gifted with the six supernormal faculties, the most wise, directed here all this, being set over the work. All this was completed without hindrance by reason of the wondrous power of the king, the wondrous power of the devatas, and the wondrous power of the holy (theras). (Mah.XXX 98-99) It appears that the thera Indagutta had considerable understanding of the design, and it may be inferred that the thera was at the very least the project architect, if not the initiator of the great concept and thus overall architect of the project. The honorofic reference to the great thera Indagutta would thus be a fitting and perhaps insufficient tribute. Many great theras from here and abroad attended the foundation stone laying ceremony at which the king having completed the task took his place near the great thera Piyadassi. Also it was the great thera, of wondrous power named Siddhattha who directed the king on the extent of the circumscribed circle for the Mahathupa. The design team / project architects were then clearly the great theras of the Mahavihara. However, due credit was also given to the client (funding agency) who was the king and the devatas. PURPOSE Sir Joseph Rotblat walked away from the Manhattan Project in the interest of peace. So also, the arahant bhikkhus applied their knowledge clearly for peaceful means enshrining the sacred relics of Gotama Buddha within the great stupa. The object of peace was primary to the ancients, perhaps the dissemination of information in an ethical context through a (wireless) link to attuned meditators. Peace in this context does not mean the absence of war, but rather the deeper meaning of the absence of conflict and fear in the human ethos which are often rooted in ignorance or a lack of understanding. The conditioned mind finds this difficult to grasp particularly in the many cultures arising from anthropocentric views of materialistic human dominance and concepts of pervading permanence. The ancient cultures of the Native American, tribal African and those of Asia view humankind as intrinsic and inseparable from the natural order. However, the arahants who being imbued in Buddhist philosophy, straddled these views with the understanding of the natural order through the human intellect and human consciousness (buddhi) and the realization that decay, renewal and change constitute all that is mundane in the cosmos. To move beyond, or rather out of this cyclic or pulsating scheme of things was a goal to be achieved through purity. It is in this light that one views the attitudes of the arahant in this programme. Incidentally, Mr. D.L.O. Mendis in his tribute to Sir Joseph Rotblt at the Royal Society, London, memorial service, on December 9th 2005 shows him to be a humanist well on his way to arahanthood. (see page xlix in the Jayantha Dhanapala volume) Moreover, while challenges of the programme are a necessary adjunct to realization of a goal through informed design decisions, it was the manner in which these challenges were resolved and the purpose of construction that makes the Mahathupa an unique architectural marvel and an icon of equanimity. Such works also require the beneficence of the ruling power whose support was clearly evident, with wages paid and all due honour being given with the acceptance of the design and the designers. Dr. Susantha Goonetilleke, in his eloquent paper presented at the Indic Conference has stated, Further, new historical research is coming up across the world, bringing out hitherto cognitively hidden nuggets. (pg 18 Coming Intellectual Shifts to Asia: The Indic Possibilities from Trends in Developing Economies) That the grand design of the Mahathupa is one such possibility is an amazing thought. 106

137 ACHIEVEMENT My wider message is that this great work combining mind-boggling technology as an envelope of spirituality could be done only in an environment of cooperation and stability. Further, with grace and equanimity prevailing, a conducive infra-structural environment and with the largesse of the state, long-term architectural, artistic or scientific works can occupy the human mind with least disturbance. They flourish and occupy the human mind in times of peace. Selfless works often have greater success due to continuity being possible even if the original author or architect is no longer available. In order to be selfless, as the Mahavamsa puts it, one has to be free from the asava s or free from defilements. The Pali word Asava is more correctly translated as craving. Craving or longing for an object or entity is often bound with some sort of defilement. The defilements include such negative aspects as enmity, anger, hatred, greed, lust, avarice, falsehood. Falsehood alone is often the basis for such modern constructs with adept terms such as misinformation, disinformation, spin doctoring and sometimes selective dissemination of information to serve an agenda. Defilements are invariably rooted in either a lack of awareness (ignorance) or fear. Throughout the chapters of the Mahavamsa, the architects of the great Ruwanweliseya are referred to as being free of such defilements or asavas, such that true inspiration may accrue for resultant action. This to my mind is how such a great work as the Ruwanweliseya was built and this too is the purpose of it being a living monument of Sri Lanka. Peace --- and tranquility --- lead to relief from stress --- and conditions for human comfort ----which is conducive for philosophy --- and the advancement of the arts and sciences -- - spirituality --- discovery --- wonder --- great abilities & advances --- for humanity ---- and peace. SELECT BIBILIOGRAPHY 1. Amendra, Shereen, Pinnacles of Power the aesthetics of the top Sri Lanka Architect, Journal Vol. 104 No. 2, June Geiger, Wilhelm, (Translated into English) The Mahavamsa or Great Chronicle of Ceylon first published Karunatilleke, W.S., (Sinhala) Thupavamsa, M.D. Gunasena & Co., Colombo 2003 (based on Thupavamsha by Parakrama Panditha, the author is not clear as expressed in the Foreword) 4. Vansatthappakasini (Mahavamsa Tikawa), Kolamba Pali saha Bauddha Adyayana Paschathupadi Ayathanaya Silva, Roland Religious Architecture in Early and Mediaeval Sri Lanka a study of the Thupa, bodhimandapa, uposathaghara and Patimaghara, 1988 Druk: Krips Repro Meppel 6. Kulatunga, Prof. T.G. Mahavihara at Anuradhapura, Tharanjee Prints, Maharagama Marshall, Sir John, Foucher, Alfred, with texts of inscriptions edited, translated and annotated by Majumdar, N.G., The Monuments of Sanchi Vol I, Swati Publication Delhi, First published 8. Fernando, A. Denis N., Some Historical Notes on Geology and Mineralogy before the formation of the Geological Survey Department of Ceylon, The Island, Feb Smither, James G., The Architectural Remains, Anuradhapura, Ceylon, Asian Educational Services 1994, first published London Abeysinghe, K.R., Climate of Sri Lanka, Bravi Printers, Kandy New Standard Encyclopedia, Vol. 3, Standard Educational Corporation Chicago Schank, Patricia and Rowe, Lawrence, An Introduction to Microelectronics Manufacturing and Markets, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley 107

138 13. Harman, Dr. N.A,. High Performance Microprocessors University of Wales 2004/ Amendra, Sunil, Computers in the Construction Industry, Post-graduate dissertation, Maankotte, K.N., Divul, Publication of Dept. of Agriculture, Ministry of Agriculture, Lands and Forestry, The Pali Text Society s Pali English Dictionary (part 1(A)), edited by T.W. Rhys Davids and William Stede, The Pali Text Society, Chipstead, Surrey, English Pali Dictionary, A.P. Buddhadatta Mahathera, Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Pvt. Ltd Jayasuriya, M.H.F., Prematilleke, Leelananda, Silva, Roland, Manjusri Vasthuvidyasastra, Archaeological Survey of Sri Lanka and the Central Cultural Fund 1995 Bibiliotheca Zeylanica Series I [Note: The original text of Vastuvidyasastra was authored by Manjusri] 19. Rhys-Davids, T.W. Ancient Coins and Measures of Ceylon, Asian Educational Services, Madras 1996, first published Paranavitana, S., The Stupa in Ceylon, Memoirs of the Archaelological Survey in Ceylon Vol V, Colombo 1946 Additional note: A comment on the above paper was that the word asava was not pronounced in accordance with the Pali text. Following which the correct pronunciation and meaning was researched and that the word asava would mean cankers, the root cause for the arising of defilements which could give rise to craving. Thus the arahants could be said to be free of the root causes or cankers which give rise to defilements and craving. SHEREEN AMENDRA is a Chartered Architect and Fellow Member of the Sri Lanka Institute of Architects (SLIA) and a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) from 1986 to She is also a Landscape Architect and Founder Member, Committee for Establishment of Sri Lanka Institute of Landscape Architects (CESLILA) from 2003 to date. She is registered to practice with the Architects Registration Board (ARB). She holds two M.Sc. degrees in Architecture and Landscape Design respectively and followed a Short Course in Environmental Impact Assessment in 1993 from University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka collaborating with Institute for Infrastructural, Hydraulic and Environmental Engineering, Delft, The Netherlands. She is on the visiting academic staff and an external examiner to the Department of Architecture, University of Moratuwa, the Department of Forestry and Environmental Science, University of Sri Jayewardenepura and the Colombo School of Architecture and was on the staff of the SLIA Lecture Course and Centre for Housing Planning & Building. She is a Zonta International Award recipient and has been associated with many large and small-scale projects and studies in her field while serving over ten years in the public sector alone and since in the private sector. These range from buildings such as sound studios and auditoria to environmental studies for townships and many macro level and small landscape design projects. Archt. Shereen Amendra has contributed many articles to architectural publications and to the newspapers and has presented papers on a variety of subjects. She has introduced and popularised terminology such as visual pollution, space modulation and visual sphere of influence through these means. Her recent book Beyond the Seeing Eye: The Mahathupa of Lanka was a result of many presentations on the subject. She has served on the Committees of the Sri Lanka Association for the Advancement of Science (SLAAS) and the Sri Lanka Natural History Society and in an advisory capacity to Local Authorities. She has a wide range of interests and is an avid reader and humbly claims to be forever a student. 108

139 Vote of Thanks Professor Arjuna Aluvihare Chairman, Sri Lanka Pugwash Group Professor Arjuna Aluvihare Ladies and Gentlemen: It is a pleasure to have participated in this inauguration of what is clearly going to be a very practical Pugwash workshop - in that participants will see and feel the current relevance of our ancient systems. It is also a pleasure to acknowledge with gratitude the incisive comments of Dr Jayantha Dhanapala and Professor Tissa Vitarana. I have had the good fortune to have known both of them for very many years - and neither age nor eminence have dimmed there ability to be sincere and perceptive on this kind of occasion. The comments of Udula Bandara Awasadahami and Shereen Amendra have set the scene for a good meeting. Following this plenary session, in accordance with Pugwash tradition there will be two closed sessions in Colombo without any outside Observers, after which participants will be taken on a three day field trip. Inter-action among participants in the course of the field trip is another popular Pugwash tradition. On their return to Colombo they will have another concluding session when some Resolutions will be presented. Our sponsors have many demands made on them - and their perception in helping us is welcomed and acknowledged with gratitude: Mr Nahil Wijesuriya who has supported us in respect of all the hotel accommodation in Colombo, Sigiriya, and Kandy; Mr Pesi Pestonjee who has looked after all transport, including airport clearances; Mr Ariyaseela Wickramanayake who is hosting the workshop in Pelwatta, and Mr Selvam Canagaretna who has organized this morning s inaugural session. Mr V Tharumaratnam who supported the first Symposium on Tropical Agriculture in 1982, of which this Workshop on Learning from Ancient Hydraulic Civilizations to Combat Climate Change is in a sense a sequel, is also present today. Finally I must add my enormous respect for our ancient irrigation engineers and rulers - who without the benefit of modern technology were able to plan and build with the past, the present, and the future in mind - not claiming immortality or omniscience. If only we can have humility and wisdom to accompany us with our technology today - in facilitating sustainable development! 109

140 Thank you all for your attendance - and good wishes, specially to the foreign delegates. Hope you have a happy stay and a rewarding visit to our ancient sites in Sri Lanka! Professor Arjuna Aluvihare Chairman. Sri Lanka Pugwash Group Professor Arjuna Aluvihare Vidya Jothi Professor A P R Aluwihare, Chairman of Pugwash - Sri Lanka Emeritus Professor of Surgery at the University of Peradeniya. Trinity College in Kandy, Kings College, Cambridge, and the London Hospital (UK) (MBBChir1963). Postgraduate work in Sri Lanka and England with the FRCS in 1966, and the M.Chir(Cambridge) in 1970 at the Royal College of Surgeons of London and St. Marks Hospital. He joined Peradeniya University He has researched and written on electron microscopy, surgical matters (including new operations and training) human rights topics, development and education. Many concurrent posts in Sri Lanka, England, Kuwait. He was at one time Vice Chancellor Peradeniya, Chairman University Grants Commission of Sri Lanka, member Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka, and member ACHR- WHO, Chairman Board of Study in Surgery of the PGIM Colombo, founder President of the SAARC Surgical Care Society and Past President Medical Section of the SLAAS, South East Asian Regional Association of Medical Education, College of Surgeons of Sri Lanka, and National Academy of Sciences of Sri Lanka. He has Honorary Fellowship of the Bangladesh College of Physicians and Surgeons, Royal College of Surgeons of England, the Institute of Chemistry (SL), Ad Hominem Fellowships of the College of Surgeons of Edinburgh and Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, Honorary DSc of the University of Sabaragamuwa. He has traveled widely. 110

141 Proffered Abstracts Authors of Abstracts and Papers Page Thiru Arumugam 112 Sri. B S Bhavanishankar and Sri. G S Narayanan 113 V R K de Silva 114 Dr. Asoka Dissanayake 116 Professor K R Fletcher 117 Dr. T Jayasingham 118 Gamini Kulatunge and H Sriyananda 120 Ananda Meegama 121 D L O Mendis 123 Dr. C R Panabokke 125 S A S Perera 126 Leelananda Prematilleke and Arjuna Aluvihare 128 Nissanka Seneviratne 129 Dr. K Suppiah

142 Abstract A new River for the Jaffna Peninsula in Sri Lanka Thiru Arumugam Jaffna Peninsula with an area of 1000 sq km is on the northernmost tip of Sri Lanka linked to the mainland by an isthmus. Elephant Pass lagoon with an area of 77 sq km nestles between the peninsula and the mainland and is connected to the sea. Kanagarayan River from the mainland with a total catchment area of 930 square kilometers discharges into this lagoon. Jaffna Peninsula has a maximum elevation of 10 metres and has no rivers, and fresh water supplies are obtained from 100,000 wells. These wells are replenished by percolation from the monsoon with an average rainfall of 1270 mm between September and December. There has been over-pumping resulting in increasing salinity in the wells due to sea water intrusion through the fractured limestone aquifer. 30% of the wells are now saline. Construction of this project commenced in 1962 but was never completed. The project envisages two closure bunds on the Elephant Pass lagoon converting it into a freshwater lagoon. From the northern end of this lagoon a 4 km long 12 m wide link channel will supply freshwater through regulatory gates to two presently saline inland lagoons in the Peninsula: Vadamarachi lagoon (area 77 sq km) and Upparu (area 25 sq km). These two lagoons will have spillways and discharge gates where they now discharge into the sea, to prevent salt water intrusion. When the project is completed all three presently saline lagoons will become freshwater lagoons and Kanagarayan River instead of discharging into the sea at Elephant Pass will flow through the Peninsula and discharge at the furthest ends of Vadamarachi and Upparu lagoons thus providing a new river for Jaffna. The benefits include (a) 8100 hectares of rain fed paddy are cultivated in the Peninsula, irrigation water from this project could triple the present yield, (b) 4400 hectares of land bordering the lagoons are now saline but can become cultivable after leaching, and (c) there will be an improvement in the water quality in the 30,000 saline wells. Environmental flows through the link channel regulatory gates will have to be carefully controlled to maintain the water balance ecosystem of the freshwater lens riding over the salt water in the aquifer. Too high a level in the receiving lagoons will result in percolation losses and seepage of fresh water to the sea. Too low a level will result in salinity due to sea water intrusion. This project can also be classified under the sub-theme of new sources of water and water re-use as it is a new source of river water to the Peninsula and it re-uses water from the mainland already used for cultivation which now runs to waste to the sea. 112

143 Abstract Traditional Methods of Water Managment in South Indian Tanks Systems Sri. B. S. Bhavanishanakar Sri. G. S. Narayanan India has a long tradition of tank systems which are small water bodies harvesting the rain fall from somewhat small catchments of a few hectares to 30 to 50 sq. km to facilitate supplies for irrigation, domestic and other uses including for drinking water to humans and animals. Many of them date back to second century A.D. onwards. Although they are found throughout the country, they are more prominent because of large numbers in South India more specifically in the States of Tamilnadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and parts of Maharashtra and Orissa with its nonperennial monsoon fed streams and rivers. Traditionally, the fertile silt deposits in the tank beds when they dried up during summer, is used for improving the productivity of the irrigated lands under the command of such systems; the trees grown on the tank bunds were sources of small timber and as fuel wood for energy requirements. They sustained a wide variety of aquatic life such as fishes. and bird life. They played an effective role in the ecological balance and sustained biological diversity. With the advent of the British Rule some two centuries back, and also the subsequent free Indian governments both at the Centre and the states that followed, major government investments were made in the construction of large scale, medium and major irrigation projects to grow more food and fibre requirements of the burgeoning population. There was a steady neglect and decline in the attention to the traditional tank systems and this skewed priority has currently resulted in the degradation of the tank systems. This is causing environmental and ecological disturbances that are keenly felt in the deteriorating quality of life all over both in the plant and animal kingdom. The humans are feeling the impact in the present times. It is getting worse day by day. However, sensing this trend the governments, the communities and the general public who are currently realising the importance of these tank systems with the traditional systems of water management practices, have started the restoration and rejuvenation of these small water bodies. Large scale restoration works on these systems are being undertaken integrating the traditional practices with wisdom of the ancients and the modern scientific techniques. Donor agencies like World Bank, ADB and other developed countries have come forward to finance such projects. This paper mainly describes the traditional methods of water management as practiced in the past from centuries with some concrete examples culled out from various parts in South India 113

144 Abstract The Evolution of the Sri Lankan Culture and Civilization with special relevance to Accounting Systems V.R.K. de Silva The introduction of Buddhism to Sri Lanka by Arahant Mahinda son of Emperor Asoka of India, saw the evolution and development of a culture and civilization unique in manifold aspects in every facet of society that are still marvels in the world. The royal status accorded to the missionary Arahant Mahinda by King Devanatilplyatissa yielded and continued to yield rich dividends. The Dhamma of the Thathagata was applied to every aspect, be it in agriculture, industry, engineering hydraulics, maritime trade and commerce, social development, culture, morality or education, resulting in the perfection of the human personality. The greatness of the Sinhala civilization was the absolute mastery of hydraulics in the construction of reservoirs. It was the centre piece of the Sinhala Civilization. This involves agriculture, agro based industries, scientific organic agriculture, steel industry, sophisticated systems of trade and commerce, finance accounting auditing, and supplies management etc. The concept of storing water for the parched lands of the dry zone as epitomized by the great engineer King Parakramabahu the first, was that, not a drop of water should flow into the sea without serving man. This embodies the thinking of the Sinhalese from the time of known documented history of the country as recorded in the great chronicle of Sri Lanka, the Mahawansa. The central hills from where the water flowed down to the dry zone was collected in huge human made reservoirs and through a system of channels irrigated these lands for agriculture; and the result was that Sri Lanka was known as the granary of the East. The entire island was studded with villages fed by the huge tanks and each village had a small tank to provide the water required for the agricultural and industrial sustenance if the people. The produce of the land was distributed through a network of inland waterways and roads. This enabled not only the distribution of goods, but also provided transport for the mobility of the people. The remote parts of the country were accessible through these water ways and roads, where remains of bridges are seen even to this day in Anuradhapura and elsewhere. The sophisticated economy required the development of a steel industry and the remains of furnaces are to be seen throughout the country especially in the Samanala Wewa area. The steel industry was energized by a system of wind control, and high grade steel was manufactured for agricultural implements, construction industry tools and weaponry for local needs and exports. (The scimitar of Sulaiman the magnificent, and our steel were famous in the then known world). It is now known that Sri Lanka provided equipment for the maritime industry and there were many callers from outside lands. The construction industry included not only reservoirs and channels but also included the construction of tall and huge buildings like the Lovamahapasadaya and Dagobas. The embellishments of the buildings required precision instruments. The health care system was based on principals of Ayuruveda and surgeries carried out required highly sophisticated instruments. The physician King of Sri Lanka Buddhadasa used these instruments for the treatment of patients and animals. He built hospitals for humans and animals. The culture of this land was totally based on the Buddha Dhamma which was all pervasive. The Buddhist clergy were the architects and protectors of this culture. The cultural benevolence stands in sharp relief to the cultural imperialism of the present day. 114

145 The necessity for recording of accurate accounting was paramount due to the complexity of the economy. Here too we see the highly accurate accounting documents which are revealed in the inscription of King Mahinda IV, dated AD at Mihintale. Except that which is given as means of subsistence for the collections of revenue of the villages and lands belonging to this vihara (temple) all other affairs transacted bona-fide with the concurrence of officials at all the respective places of business shall be entered in the register Whatever is spent daily on the maintenance of the Mahathupa on revenue collections and on the renovations of work shall be entered in the register from the particulars contained therein. A statement of accounts shall be made with the concurrence of those at the respective places of business and such entries as are found false shall be expunged front the account. The sheet of accounts shall then he placed in a casket under lock and key. Every month the sheets of accounts so deposited shall be made public and a fresh statement of accounts be prepared from them. From the twelve statements of accounts so made during the year there shall be compiled a balance sheet at the end of each year which shall be read out in the midst of the community of monks and be thus finally disposed of. The employees who infringe these rules shall be made to pay fines and be dismissed from the services. (Epigraphic Zeylanica Volume 1, Tablets of Mahinda V, page 106 to 107). This passage reveals that accurate accounts had been prepared and discussed as done in modern times. This shows the highly sophisticated system of accounting, internal checks and internal audits, as in modern times. The community of monks discussed the annual accounts and approved the same. This corresponds to the modern practice of companies having an Annual General Meeting. From this inscription we see the importance of accurate accounting and that this practice was not confined to Temple properties but also for every other sector of activity. 115

146 Abstract Obesity in Sri Lanka Dr Asoka Dissanayake In Sri Lanka, the prevalence of obesity is highest in the Western province and lowest in Uva. The Western Province has a disproportionately larger share of the GDP. A question that comes to mind is whether subsistence agriculture can be adapted to meet current demands? I would like to propose that the Government intervenes by: Giving 5 years notice that from 2012 onwards no attempt will be made to keep prices of wheat flour, sugar and milk powder artificially low. Instead the Government should gradually use more funds to: * Increase the cultivation of fruits and vegetables by - a) Spending more on research to develop high yeilding varieties of vegetables and fruits. b) If carrots, radish and other so-called upcountry vegetalbes could now be grown in Dambulla nad Embilipitiya, why cannot we develop hybrids of apples, pears, oranges suitable for our climate increasing the variety of fruits produced locally? c) Ensure a ready and reliable supply of high quality seeds and planting materials. * Encourage the growing of various varieties of yams by providing high yielding varieties. Once these yams are available all over, they would be a replacement for bread. * Develop processes for bottling of local health drinks such kola-kenda and develop other means to preserve fruits and vegetable without loss of nutrients. * Discourage the use of chemical fertilizers by not providing these at subsidized rates. Instead allocate funds to local government bodies to go in to solid waste management and production of low cost organic fertilizer. By doing so the Government will not only encourage production of healthy foods but also deal with the problems of garbage disposal. 116

147 Abstract The Water Management Network of Angkor Associate Professor K R Fletcher University of Sydney The Greater Angkor Project of the University of Sydney, the École Française d Extrême- Orient (EFEO) and APSARA- the Cambodian agency that manages Angkor has shown that the urban complex was far larger than the area of the major temples and has comprehensively mapped Angkor s vast water management network. The main temple cluster has been shown to lie at the centre of a dispersed, low-density urban complex covering about 1000 km 2, spread across a vast, tripartite network of linear embankments and channels that developed between the 9 th and the 13 th c CE. Angkor s immense water tanks and temple moats are the familiar parts of a profoundly ritualised, elaborate hydraulic engineering system. That system would have enabled the versatile control, storage and redirection of water across the landscape to assist systematic flood control and to support agriculture. Previous debates about whether or not there was a water management network can now be replaced by analysis of its functions, its pattern of development, and the relationship between the network and the demise of Angkor. (Professor Fletcher did not attend the workshop. He was represented by Dr. O Reilley) 117

148 Abstract Water usage Conservation by Tradition Dr. T. Jayasingham Hindu mythology treats land, water, fire, wind, and sky as five demons, not to indicate their monstrous nature but to emphasize their power as beyond comprehension, and only by way of adhering to their wishes would survival be ensured. This may look foolish on the surface in an age when even creation of life is seen as a possibility. But let us look at the principles involved beyond the mythology or the religious make up. Misuse of land could cause less fertility and barrenness which affects the growing of plants which produces the fundamental energy for life on earth. Misuse of it could cause earth slips, erosion etc which damages the sustainability of the land and also increases the associated risks. The earthquakes which have shocked the globe day after day in the recent past cannot be totally isolated from underground nuclear explosions in the Pacific specifically. Godzilla may be a movie but it states the possibilities. Fire also was one which when not controlled could destroy crops and property alike and religion also asserts that the Truth/good was not destroyed by fire. Today the arms race is called the fire power and we use it liberally knowing but ignoring the dangers it poses. Nuclear power and the nuclear race only takes us to the brink of destruction. Similarly we see the changes in the monsoons, cyclones, as powers of wind and climate change which had been appreciated historically. But our carelessness has led to Ozone hole (damage to the sky) causing more Ultra Violet radiation (UV), also causing ill health and increase in the global temperature. Similarly damage to the sky by pollution had caused wind and sky to be less friendly than before, where breathing masks are near realities of day to day life. Let us take water as it is the main topic of the day. A goddess was designated for the rains and water and satisfying her was necessary for continuous rains. There had been many rituals associated with it which may be introduced in the periods of time and may not be of great importance. Water usage has been very rational and only for necessity avoiding wastage. Let us look at some of them. The houses which were often built with a central square had large vessels for collection of rain water which was primarily used for drinking and cooking. This principle is being promoted and developed into the modern housing systems called rain water harvesting models which is an ancient practice. The multi-storey cropping which is seen in Kandyan home garden systems and dry zone home gardens are best examples of best usage of water and resources where the soil is kept moist all the time. In the mono-cultural practices these are easily ignored for the sake of increase of production. Wells had good practices for extraction of water which was manually or using cattle to facilitate the pulling which practices are slow in extraction and really provides time for recharge of water from the soil. It is also a noted practice that they used these extractions in the morning and evening only, maybe because of physical fatigue but also it was a rational use of water as irrigation during day in the tropical zones is not of much use, in fact may be harmful. Multi-crop cultivation even practiced today in Jaffna where paddy land is cropped with vegetables and greens after harvest on the residual moisture of the land which is one of the best water usage systems one could practice. The present day irrigation of many crops of paddy really becomes a wasteful process as paddy requires much more water for the crop than equivalent vegetables. It is not cropped with onion or chillies which also draw large amount of water. The tree crops really take the least and this had been practiced in uplands making sense of the usage. 118

149 Small dam concept is of great importance and has been practiced highly successfully in Sri Lanka and many other countries as against the large dams which have been known to be white elephants. Small ponds collect surface drainage without affecting the water flow downwards as the collection is restricted by the bund height. Lateral flow had been facilitated in many models. The silt is removed by the community for fertiliser which is seen in Jaffna today, which also maintains the pond, but the Victoria reservoir has been silted. The mega expense involved had delayed the de-silting for a long time and it is no longer a community activity but a state affair, and the state may not have a direct interest unlike the community. Rainfall perhaps is the only source of water in the tropics and the flow of it along the contours produces surface flow, stream flow and rivers, lakes etc. essentially wetting the whole land which is necessary. These were natural phenomena which prevented floods and also ensured continuous supply of water through slow leaching wetlands. The parapet walls constructed around the houses in the modern times was one of the biggest blows to natural drainage when water was unable to flow along contours as the contours were modified by filling or by building a wall and the water had to find a new course to drain causing floods in many plots or areas. Further the paved ground also did not permit water to reach the ground water and thus replenishment was nearly impossible and the sources were drying up which generates a whole course of events including loosening up of soil making buildings unstable over time. Moreover the water potential reduces drastically. This is at a time when more water is drained quickly over time for unlimited periods. A sequence of activities that lead to doom. We have seen many areas salinized over time e.g, in Jaffna, Nilaweli etc. Traditional washing was in the lakes and rivers and utilized very limited water unlike the washing machines of the day which use many times more than previously for a unit item. Further if we look at the increased need of power which again draws on the water, the powers which had used lot of water to produce it goes on. Conveniences have caused crippling to Conservation. Could we go back to Jungles? May be not. But we are going to be human with flesh and blood no matter how sophisticated we become and water is going to be a prime resource that we would need to conserve for the benefit of the Humans. More rational use would ensure that. I would like to close with the quote from Mahatma Gandhi there is enough for the need of every one but not for the greed. 119

150 Abstract Climate Change Learning from the past K D G Kulathunga and H Sriyananda Climate change is nothing new both gradual and abrupt changes in the climate have occurred in the past, and it has not been always unwelcome. Climate change has, on occasion, been the driving force in the advance of civilisation and abrupt climate change has, again on occasion, led to the collapse of civilizations. What is new is that activity of modern man has become the new driving force in climate change, reversing cause and effect. If the changes have been consciously planned for, then it would be perfectly acceptable. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The effects of post-industrial human activity have always been unanticipated, and more often than not, to the detriment of man. There is also the possibility of catastrophic change, if the present trends are allowed to continue for some time. Are there any lessons that we can learn from ancient civilisations, to avert such a catastrophe? The hallmark of modern civilisation is our attitude to nature and natural resources. Nature is to be conquered and subjugated, and natural resources are there to be exploited. This we believe is a philosophical concept, perhaps inspired by the story of genesis, where the world, including all plants, animals and even women are said to have been created in the service of man, and man alone. This attitude has been reinforced by the belief in the so-called selfish gene. The philosophy behind long-enduring ancient civilisations, whether occidental or oriental, was entirely different. Man had a place, albeit a very special place, but alongside the rest of a cooperating, not always competing, ecosystem. The address by the Chief Seattle to the President of the United States is typical of this attitude of the ancients. Where can we start building a new, stable world, among co-operating species? After air and water, the next most essential requirement for life is food. Agriculture, in a stable ecosystem, is the activity that can produce not only food, but also energy (fuel), fodder, fibre, and most importantly, social interaction and a sense of community and belonging. Modern industrial agriculture does no such thing, and in addition, pollutes the essential air and water, and also the soil. It is possible to start this experiment of learning from the past from this point, for communities that have retained the art and the science of sustainable agriculture still exist. To date the approach has been a mechanical one not allowing for the creative processes inherent in nature. The natural processes have a time frame built into the systems and the exploitation of the system could upset the balance. The high technology input can overcome the built-in safeguards for some time till catastrophe occurs. To understand this, a more grounded approach on nature is needed in place of industrial or administrative type of approach. An important part of the new approach should be to accommodate people not as productive units of labour but as human potential that could develop into critically evaluating the possible outcomes and selecting what is best suited for a given situation. 120

151 Abstract The Software of Development An attempt at social engineering to regenerate the village Ananda Meegama Sri Lanka like many third world countries remains a land of villages, although urban life styles are prevalent everywhere. The village economy is characterized by underdevelopment and in general low productivity, due to lack of capital and organization, leading to a malaise in all productive activities. Population growth has heightened the problems and the lack of remunerative work has led to one million women being abroad at present working as housemaids, with grave consequences to themselves, the family and young children. The unemployment resulting from underdevelopment has led to three insurgencies in the last three decades, one yet continuing with great loss of life and property and unimaginable brutalization of society a heavy price to pay for blocking essential reforms in the village, proposed fifty years ago. In 1956 using the franchise people carried out a revolution that took power from a dominant class that had ignored the interests of the masses. A veteran socialist Philip Gunawardene took office as Minister of Food and Agriculture. He attempted to break the links that chained the village by drawing on concepts from the agriculture and irrigation civilization of ancient Sri Lanka as well as from modem science. His programmes in the main, depended on successfully utilizing the software of development. He was not opening out land with machinery, putting up buildings, or building dams. He was organizing the poor so that they could protect their interests, develop institutions that could be used by the humble villager, ensure that the peasantry adopted new methods and used high yielding seeds. These were onerous tasks indeed, difficult to attain in the best of circumstances, an uphill task when the interests that stood to lose had the ear of the powerful. Analyzing these problems of the village, the Minister saw a poor peasantry, indebted to money lenders and traders, lacking capital, equipment, raw materials, fertilizer and seed, and the absence of marketing outlets for their produce. Cooperation seemed the key to break out from the malaise, an idea very much derived from the relations of production, underlying the practice of agriculture and irrigation in ancient Sri Lanka. Agriculture To achieve this objective the Minister proposed 11 Tenurial reform - the Paddy Lands Act of ] Formation of cultivation committees 3] Formation of multi purpose cooperatives through which inputs and services could be provided in return for produce 4] Establishment of a Cooperative Development Bank to provide credit through the cooperatives This was the broad scaffolding of the multi pronged drive to regenerate the village. He did not have political cadres to assist the villagers in the task of forming these organizations, and depended on the bureaucracy. Inspired by the dynamic Minister and his innovative programme they rose to the occasion and performed valiantly, under-funded and understaffed. The problems came from politicians pressured on by landlords, traders, and the elite, fearful of a new mode of production, which if it were successful would challenge the organization of production elsewhere. They stymied the programme through legal means; however, when the Minister struggled on - opponents decided that the best way to scuttle the programme was to prevent the formation of the bank and to take the subject of cooperatives away from the Minister, forcing his resignation. 121

152 This is not to say that the economy thereafter remained stagnant - the stage was set for the emergence of the strong in the village economy they made the best use of all the available institutions, to the detriment of the majority who went into debt, sold their land and assets and were forced to migrate or go to war or depend on political patronage. An economic policy characterized by international experts as betting on the strong - the reigning philosophy forced on most third world countries. The attempts to form an independent citizenry not bowing to everyone with authority and money has long being given up. The opportunity to establish an economy where the villagers were not debt ridden and could support themselves through producer and sales cooperatives was lost. It was an attempt at a major piece of social engineering and its history is relevant to discussions of the current impasse in many third world economies. 122

153 Abstract Science and Civilisation in Sri Lanka - Lessons from the Nile river civilisations D. L. O. Mendis There is much common ground in the Arab Water 2004, Action Plans for Integrated Development, and Sri Lanka Water Heritage in the Ministry of Irrigation and Water Management, Sri Lanka, in that both seek to achieve optimum utilization of Water for People and Nature. (Mendis, Ed. 2003). Egypt and Sri Lanka both have long histories of such utilization, the former from river flow dating back more than 5000 years, and the latter from seasonal monsoon rainfall, dating back about half that time to the mid first millenium BC. The Nile river civilisation is in a similar class as the ancient civilisations of the Indus valley, the Tigris Euphrates rivers, and the ancient hydraulic civilisation of China. China s history was researched by Joseph Needham starting in the early 1940s, assisted by a team of researchers on aspects of history in a rich variety of disciplines. Needham published seventeen volumes of his Science and Civilisation in China, before his death in Final stages of the work is continued to this day at the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge, England, where this author had the privilege of working in the late 1980s and early 1990s as described below. Sri Lanka Water Heritage was started in 2002 in the Ministry of Irrigation and Water Management to enlarge a proposal for a Water Museum at Minneriya, an ancient reservoir dating back to the 3 rd century. (Mendis, 2002) This work was presented in outline in a paper titled The Ancient Water Heritage of Sri Lanka, at the 3 rd International Water History Association conference at the Bibliotheca Alexandria in December Many papers were presented at the IWHA conference discussing such aspects as law, economics and politics, and science and technology, in the history of water in many countries around the world. Among memorable events at that conference, some presentations in Section D on Water Management in the Nile Basin, and the post conference tour which included a visit to the Roda Nilometer, near Cairo were personally most important. These two events gave rise to this paper. Joseph Needham had published a four stage hypothesis for the evolution and development of the ancient irrigation works in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) as follows: 1. Rain water tanks from which water was baled out at leisure 2. Small tanks (reservoirs) now called village tanks 3. Large reservoirs each of which submerged a number of small tanks 4. Construction of a river diversion weir and channel to augment a large reservoir (Needham, 1971, p. 369) This hypothesis assumed that storage was an earlier stage in irrigated agriculture than river diversion irrigation, and dealt with the evolution and development of storage reservoirs according to size. An alternative 7 stage hypothesis where river diversion was earlier than construction of storage reservoirs, which depended on invention of the sluice, was sent to Professor Needham as follows (Mendis, 1989): 1. Rain-fed agriculture 2. Seasonal or temporary river diversion and flood or inundation irrigation on river banks 3. Permanent river diversion and channel irrigation 4. Development of channel spills and weirs 5. Invention of the sluice based on experience of operating channel spills and weirs 6. Construction of storage reservoirs incorporating sluices, in dry valleys 7. Damming a perennial river using the sluice for temporary river diversion during the dry season, or the twin tank technique. 123

154 Later, further research on this hypothesis was carried out by this author under the guidance of Professor Needham at the Needham Research Institute with support from the British Council, and it has now become the basis for the new project Science and Civilisation in Sri Lanka, announced in Meanwhile, design of new irrigation projects in Sri Lanka continued to follow the four stage hypothesis, thereby leading to the destruction of the ancient systems. Two examples of this were the Uda Walawe Reservoir constructed in , and the Lunuganvehera reservoir in both in the southern area of Sri Lanka. Failure to consult the local people when designing these projects not only led to physical problems on these projects but also contributed to major social uprisings in the area that led to insurrections in 1971 and , that spread island-wide. The root cause of dissatisfaction was lack of promised, much hyped benefits, principally adequate water resources for their livelihood agriculture. Irrigation bureaucrats had failed to see the value of traditional knowledge in the existing ancient systems, some of them still in use, which the project designers had ignored as being inefficient when designing the new mega-projects. These ancient systems are now seen as water and soil conservation ecosystems, in which irrigation is the dominant function, but not the only one, since drainage, soil conservation, and flood control, are also important subsidiary functions. The key to the construction of the ancient large storage reservoirs was the invention of the sluice or sorowwa with its access tower or bisokotuwa, the fifth stage in the 7 stage hypothesis given above. It was realised that this artifact has much in common with the nilometer, seen during the visit to the Roda nilometer mentioned above. It is proposed to base the Science and Civilisation in Sri Lanka project on three aspects of the ancient water and soil conservation ecosystems of Sri Lanka, namely - their evolution and development through a period of more than 15 centuries, beginning sometime in the mid-first millenium BC - their stability and sustainability during this period, and - their apparent final decline and abandonment after about the 13 th century. A feature of Sri Lanka history is the existence of chronicles dating from the early Christian era, called vamsa katha, of which the Mahavamsa (great chronicle) and the Culavamsa (little chronicle) are the best known. In modern times, the University History of Ceylon (1959, 1960) and the History of Sri Lanka (1990) are in effect a continuation of these chronicles. A notable lacuna in these publications that the new project Science and Civilisation in Sri Lanka seeks to complement are the aspects related to science, technology and engineering. It is believed that the history of the Nile river civilisations, especially the documentation in the Bibliotheca Alexandria will be of great relevance in this work. References: Brochure (2003) Science and Civilisation in Sri Lanka: A Panel discussion on an Idea whose time has come. Organisation of Professional Associations, Colombo. Brohier, R L (1934) Ancient Irrigation Works in Ceylon. 3 vols. Government Press. Mendis, D L O (1987) An Example of Technovation from Ancient Sri Lanka Invention of the Horowwa (sluice) with its Bisokotuwa (acess tower) in the 4 th century BC. Proceedings of the First Indian Engineering Congress, Calcutta. Mendis, D L O (1989) Hydraulic Civilisations, Irrigation Ecosystems and the Modern State. Professor E O E Pereira Commemoration Lecture, Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka, 1989 Mendis, D L O (2002) Water Heritage of Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka Pugwash group Mendis, D L O (Edited) (2003) Water for People and Nature. Arumugam Commemoration volume. Sri Lanka Water Heritage, History of Water Conservation, Ministry of Irrigation and Water Management Needham, Joseph, et al. Science and Civilisation in China. (1971) Vol. 4, Part 3, p Cambridge 124

155 Abstract The Abandoned tanks of the Rajarata and Ruhuna: Principal Reasons for their Abandonment and Prospects for Restoration [Dr C R Panabokke, Research Fellow, IIMI] A total of six river basins that make up the Rajarata, and eight river basins that make up the dry zone part of the Ruhuna have been studied in detail. A further ten river basins of the Wayamba or North Western Province (NWP), and ten river basins of the Northern Province (NP) were also studied in a more general manner for purposes of comparison. The percentage of functioning and abandoned tanks of each of the foregoing regions is shown below: Region Total No. of Small Percentage Percentage Tanks Functioning Tanks Abandoned Tanks Rajarata (NCP) 4, Ruhuna(SP) 1, Wayamba (NWP) 6, North (NP) 1, Adopting a heuristic 1 approach, it could be demonstrated that there are different sets of reasons for the abandonment of small tanks in the different regions of the dry zone, especially in the Rajarata and the Ruhuna. In the western aspects of the Rajarata the abandonment is primarily due to the poor soil and land quality, combined with a low hydrological endowment. In the eastern aspect it is primarily due to the sharper relief of the meso-land forms, and less to the land quality and nature of the hydrological endowment. The more stable small tank cascade systems are characterized by almost a total absence of abandoned tanks. These are found in the upper aspects of the subwatersheds. Reasons for this are explained. In the Ruhuna, the primary reason for the occurrence and preponderance of abandoned small tanks in the semi-arid environment is the sodic soil (solodized solonetz), in combination with a very low hydrological endowment. By contrast, the primary reason for the occurrence and preponderance of abandoned small tanks in the quasi-cascades of the Timbolketiya topo sheet, which is situated in a semi-humid environment, is the very high runoff generated from the shallow and rocky land surfaces of the small tank catchment areas. Differences in the macro- and meso-drainage patterns between the Rajarata and Ruhuna landscapes, and their bearing on the nature and distribution patterns of small tank cascade systems in the two environments are also explained. Socio-economic circumstances of the well endowed and the less well endowed small tank cascade systems are also analysed. From any point of view, it could be stated that there had been adequate justification for the restoration of the abandoned ancient major irrigation reservoirs in the dry zone. The same rationale cannot however be extended to the restoration of the many abandoned small tanks in the same region. Selective criteria are now available for determining which of those types of abandoned small tanks would be worth restoring. These criteria will be explained and discussed. 15 September, heuristic - to discover, understand or solve problems by experimenting, evaluating possible answers or solutions. 125

156 Abstract Reverting back to Sustainable Agricultural Practices of Ancient Hydraulic Civilisations of Sri Lanka to Combat Climate Change through Patented Delta-D Technology Eng. S.A.S. Perera Greenhouse effect, global warming and climate change have become the most important topics discussed at almost all international scientific and political forums, since, during the past few years the entire world has experienced rapid changes in the climate. By the Kyoto Protocol, many countries have agreed to curtail the emission of green house gases, such has CO 2 and CH 4 into the atmosphere, and to grant funds to projects that will reduce the emission of green house gases. Emission of the main greenhouse gas CO 2 to the atmosphere mainly occurs through combustion of fuel to produce energy required by modern civilizations of the world. The average CO 2 production due to the combustion of, 1 ton of coal is 3.5 tons, 1 ton of gaseous or liquid hydrocarbon fuel (natural gas, liquid petroleum gas, petrol, diesel, kerosene, fuel oil) is 3 tons and 1 ton of biomass fuel is 1.6 tons. The main contributors of CO 2 to the atmosphere are developed countries, since, the per capita energy consumption in developed countries is several fold that of developing countries. The main economic activity in most of the developing countries of the world is agriculture. During the times of ancient hydraulic civilizations of the world, eco friendly, sustainable agricultural practices, such as, water conservation, use of agricultural and farm wastes as organic fertilizer, use of natural habitats and food chains to control weeds and pests, were followed, leading to, negligible adverse effects, on the eco system and the climate. For example, during the reign of King Maha Parakramabahu ( AD), Sri Lanka was self sufficient in food and had exported the surplus to neighboring countries. This period is known as the golden era of Sri Lankan agriculture. However, as a result of rapid industrialization of the world, chemicals have replaced, organic fertilizers, natural habitats and food chains. Whilst ancient farmers converted their agricultural wastes into organic fertilizer, present day farmers in developing countries haphazardly burn their agricultural wastes, thus, significantly contributing towards global warming. For example, Sri Lankan farmers annually produce around 2.5 million tons of paddy and 4.0 million tons of straw and paddy husk, as by-product. Most of this straw and paddy husk is burnt by farmers, since, there is no utility value. Each ton of straw or paddy husk burnt produces around 1.6 tons of CO 2. Hence, haphazard burning of straw and paddy husk emits around 6.4 million tons of CO 2 to the atmosphere, significantly contributing towards global warming and climate change. Sri Lanka is one of the very few countries in the world that does not produce fertilizer for its own requirements, despite having a 60 million ton deposit of rock phosphate at Eppawela. At present, all the chemical fertilizer requirements of the country are imported at a massive cost. To add to this burden, the government gives a massive fertilizer subsidy, which amounted to around Rs. 12 billion in 2006, to the farmers of the country. Despite the fertilizer subsidy and other high costs incurred by the government, the 126

157 agriculture industry in Sri Lanka is in a very poor state, where, the farmers are suffering due to low profits and the consumers are suffering due to the high costs of agricultural produce, such as, rice, cereals, vegetables, fruits, etc. The main reason for the very low profitability in farming can be attributed to, complete dependence on chemical fertilizers and other agrochemicals and the fact that more than 75% of the chemical fertilizer (of value approximately 11 billion) applied to the soil gets leached out due to the very high solubility of chemical fertilisers in water and hence, the desired amount of fertilizer not getting absorbed into the plant. It has been reported in medical journals, conferences, newspapers, radio and TV in Sri Lanka that, people living in farming areas, such as, Anuradhapura, Hingurakgoda, Minneriya and Polonnaruwa in the north central part of Sri Lanka, where high quantities of chemical fertilizers are used, are suffering from kidney and liver related diseases, due to pollution of ground water, lakes and other water bodies that supply drinking waster. Blue baby syndrome has been reported in Kalpitiya, an agricultural area, where ground water has got severely polluted due to excessive use of chemical fertilizers. Hence, it is obvious that over dependence on chemical fertilizers has increased the cost of agriculture and adversely affected the health of people. Ground water and surface water pollution is not a problem specific to Sri Lanka. It is a global phenomena related to the use of chemical fertilizers. This is one of the main reasons why the use of organic fertilizer is advocated and encouraged in place of chemical fertilizers. Delta D Technology is a patented process, developed by the author, to rapidly digest all types of biomass into mineral rich organic fertilizer, within 1-3 days. The novelty of this process is that a digestive fluid called Delta-D is used to rapidly digest starch, fat, protein, cellulose and other organic matter in biomass. The time required for digestion depends on the type of biomass and the quantity of Delta-D used. After the digestion is complete, locally available mineral powders, such as, Eppawela Rock Phosphate (ERP), Dolomite, Calcite, Mica, are added to enhance the Phosphorous(P), Calcium(Ca), Magnesium(Mg) and Potassium(K) levels in the fertilizer, while neutralizing Delta-D. The final product is an organic fertilizer richer in N, P, K, Ca and Mg than traditional compost. This technology can be used to solve the urban solid waste (USW) problem since, large quantities of USW can be converted into organic fertilizer within 1-3 days, compared to traditional composting which takes more than 3 months. The process has been tested with all types of biomass and the fertilizer produced has been tested by cultivating, rice, vegetables and fruits successfully. With the support of the Janatha Fertiliser Enterprises a corporation under the Ministry of Agricultural Development around 1330 entrepreneurs have been trained to convert rice straw into organic fertilizer using this technology. The technology has been introduced to 75 local authorities to rapidly convert USW into organic fertilizer. If technology is implemented islandwide, it will provide simultaneous solutions to the USW problem and the fertilizer problem in Sri Lanka. It will also significantly reduce Sri Lanka s contribution to global warming by stopping the burning of 4 million tons of straw and paddy husk which emits 6.4 million tons of CO 2 to the atmosphere. By carbon trading, Sri Lanka can earn around USD 76.8 million per annum due to the said reduction in the emission of CO

158 Abstract Lessons from Ancient Sri Lanka s Rice cultivation Nissanka Seneviratne Centuries ago, in the days of her pristine glory, the flourishing civilization of Sri Lanka was sustained by a rice base agriculture. Rice farming was dependent on water. Natural resources were harnessed to support rice farming. So careful observations were made on the rainfall pattern and water from the seasonal rains trapped in tanks or reservoirs which are wonders even today. True, there was land clearing for the tanks and some disturbance of the natural landscape. Yet, what is important to remember is there was a judicious utilization of natural resources of land and forest in creating the water storage systems. There was no reckless hacking of natural forests to achieve other objectives. Compare this situation with the more recent destruction of natural forest in S. America, Africa and elsewhere in the name of development or economic prosperity. Huge areas of the Amazon rain forest have been cleared for cattle ranching; the beef exported reducing marginally the price of hamburgers in prosperous USA. Wholesale destruction of natural forests has contributed in no small measure to climate change, while judicious utilization of natural resources in ancient Sri Lanka did only minimal damage to the natural vegetation while ensuring the availability of water for human activities especially rice farming. Rice farming in anc i ent Sri Lanka was essentially a human activity with people providing the labour. But it was more. It was an occupation which drew in people of the community and bonded them together in achieving share; objectives so words like nekatha, kaiya and panguwa are pregnant with meaning. Nekatha was the appropriate time when people gathered together to participate in the operations of land preparation, water diversion, planting, and so on: kaiya was the chatter of those who participated. And most importantly, panguwa symbolized the concept of sharing. The community worked together and shared the fruits of their labours. In the language of the modem age rice farming was labour intensive while crop production in more recent times has been increasingly dependent on machinery accompanied by emissions of gases that promote climate change. The ancient rice farmers were rewarded in measures appropriate to their age. Today, however, monetary considerations and wages are the principal determinants which drive out peasant farmers and the agrarian population to the towns and cities aggravating problems which induce climate change. A reversal of this trend by keeping people on the land and contented with increased earnings from their labour and produce will certainly reduce the products that cause climate change. The value of human labour in supporting life systems should be recognized. 129

159 Abstract Traditional Agriculture practices in the Dry zone in Sri Lanka Dr. K. Suppiah I deem it a rare privilege, to contribute something, to the extent you can tolerate, on the theme of the conference Learning from Ancient Hydraulic Civilizations to combat Climate Change, and I beg your pardon, if I happen to make any mistakes in the course of my talk for a while. Ladies and Gentlemen, Please permit me to tell one important matter, before I start talking on the subject proper, and that is to say in all humility, that I have attended some Seminars, Conferences, Discussions etc., both locally and internationally and found to my dismay that Decisions taken, Resolutions passed or adopted, Consensus reached, are all forgotten after some time. Unlike those, I wish that it is ensured, that the decisions taken and resolutions passed in this Conference are all implemented in full, towards the progress of the World in general, and our Country in particular to benefit the people, particularly the poor. Now, coming to the subject proper, I consider the theme you have chosen to deliberate on in this forum, itself is a vast subject, on which one cannot talk in a limited time, however, I shall try to confine only to some important matters, pertianing to this subject, particularly relevent to my Country, eagerly awaiting to learn very much more from you ladies & gentlemen. To start with the latter part of the theme Climate Change I do not think that the Hydraulic Activities alone can influence to stop change in climate on the earth, but other factors like wars, industrial waste, deforestation etc are a few amongst many others - that are responsible for such changes. I dare say that the wars inflicted on the mases world over by political criminals, occupy the first place amongst the reasons responsible for climate change, so as you all are aware that even most dangerous chemical weapons are alleged to to have been used in wars of recent times. Perhaps, the poisonous gases, some of which may not have been even identified, along with industrial waste, are responsible for the erosion in the Ozone Layer, which undoubtedly will have it s impact on the earth and mankind. The deforestation process committed by both the civilians and the Governments too play a big role in the change of climate, as is evident from the decline in the rainfall gradually, throughout the year, all over the world. Unfortunately, my country too is saddled with this triple headed monster, which would have been easily avoided, if saner counsel would have prevailed amongst those politicians, who held the reigns of governance, particularly since independance. Now, to say a few words about our ancient hydraulic civilization, I say without fear of contradiction, that it was in no way inferior to the present expensive mechanised system, with no intrusion into nature and well-being of mankind. I believe that the gravity and lift irrigation methods available to us, in the modern world was also available in the ancient culture, with the only difference of the usage of manpower, instead of machinery used in the modern world. In the ancient days gravity irrigation schemes were popular and we had enough rainfall, tanks - both BIG - the main reserviors - and small - the feeding ones, and crops - the main being paddy and subsidary ones including vegetables, pulses and fruits, were cultivated in harmony with the soil. In the lift system of irrigation which became inevitable in certain parts of the dry zone of the Country, particularly in the North and East, the farmers used well - sweeps to draw water from the wells in adequate amounts to irrigate their cultivations, mostly rubsidary crops, and this system helped them to cultivate throughout the year, due to which, the farmers economy was stable. In the Ancient Hydraulic Civilization, the other important factor was the use of natural manure both green and black - made of compost with cattle and goat dung. Perhaps, you will be 130

160 interested to know as to how the farmers found all their requirements of manure and to tell you something within my personal knowledge, there was hardly a household in the nothern part of Sri Lanka which did not have at least one head of cattle and a goat, which they reared not only to meet their needs of milk and milk products, but also for the sake of their excreta - the dung, which they considered as a treasure because they were able to obtain good money, after making a heap of the dung., if they did nt have land of their own for cultivation. Another interesting feature was, some people owned big herds of cattle, goats and sheep, to either meet their need of manure or to hire them for specific periods, to others to use the dung, for their requirement of manure. In those days, I must emphasize here that the farming community were not only contended in their life but also served the nation for a healthy life by provinding natural food, rich in values devoud of contamination and pollution, whereas in the present mechanised system of cultivation, with the use of artificial manure, untold damage is done to the well-being of the mankind, not only in the food produced, but also to the water resources, particularly the underground one, the source available to the majority of the population of Sri Lanka. As a result I dare say that people are afflicted with various chronic and serious ailments, resulting in reduction of even their lifespan. I fear that a day may dawn, when people will find that water in their neighbourhood, in certain parts of the country, is not fit for consumption. As such.1 strongly recommend to this conference that a resolution be adopted, demanding the Governments world over and the militant groups to (1) stop wars (2) the Governments to ensure that industrial waste are safely disposed of (3) deforestation must be compensated with aforestration (4) encouragement in various forms for the public to revert to use of natural manure and for the production of same and (5) to prevent soil erosion and water pollution, all of which could be easily accomplished, as the saying goes if there is a will - there is a way, particularly in small countries like ours. At this juncture, I am reminded of one Mr Ari Wickeramanayake who is said to have control over the Pelawatte Sugar Plantation, formerly owned by the Pelawatte State Plantation, who is endeavouring to resurrect the plantation which was run-down earlier, without using artificial manure and employing manpower, giving a boost to the economy of the villagers in the neighbourhood. We are fortunate to be with him for a whole day, as his guests, where we will be able to learn much from his entrepreneurship and let us wish him all success, with the hope that he will form a model, for the Government, and other entrepreneurs to take an example, in this field. In short he will be contributing his mite against deterioting climate change. In conclusion may I say, one of my two ambitions in life, is to die as a Farmer, for which I hope I am not late even now and wind up with the trust that I have not bored you with my utterance. I take my leave from you, making myself available for any clarification and amplification and wishing you, all the best during your stay in our country and thereafter. 131

161 Proffered Papers Authors of Proffered Papers Page Shereen Amendra 133 S. Arumugam 139 Dr. Nirmala Benjamin 141 G D Deshpande 143 Dr. Prathiba Deshpande 145 D G B de Silva 147 Professor C B Dissanayake 155 Ms. S K Mendis 156 Aiichiro Mogi 158 Professor R S Morwanchikar 179 Dr. C R Panabokka 182 Dr. Kavan Ratnatunge 184 K D G Kulathunga and H Sriyananda 187 Dr. T Sundaresan, MD 191 Eng. S K S H K Suriyaarachchi

162 Visit to the City of Anuradhapura The Ran-masu Uyana and Sakwala Chakraya Shereen Amendra The delegates visited some ancient sites in the Sacred Area of the City of Anuradhapura. Of particular interest was the visit to the South- West quarter of the city by the bund of the Tissa Wewa, the tank or large artificial body of water said to be built by King Tissa in 240 B.C. and perhaps even older. This tank is fed by the Jaya Ganga bringing water from the Kala Wewa 54 miles (90 km) away, which was visited before arriving at Anuradhapura. Immediately below the bund (levee) lies the Isurumuniya rock with the spine of the Vessagiriya rock lying Southeast of it. Piped water systems are said to have Jaya Ganga been in use here in the 1 st Century. To the North of Isurumuniya is a series of bathing pavilions set in a park known as Ran-masu Uyana or Gold-fish park, after an inscription found elsewhere. The bathing pavilions, ingenious hydraulic structures and landscape are extensively recorded. The park is largely thought to be a secular park, described as the King s pleasure park, however, some participants put forward the view that it was part of the aramaya of resident priests, as indicated in the archaeological report of Of special note was the carving on an inwardly inclined rock face pointed out by Dr. Kavan Ratnatunge. This carving is recorded in the archaeological reports printed 1907 by H.C.P. Bell, Archaeological Commissioner at the time. An extract from the report is given below: Among other ruins he mentions,. separate entity consist of caves, structural buildings, and three exceptionally fine pokunu formed of dressed stone, the whole belonging either to the Isurumuniya sangharamaya or to a sister monastery adjoining it. The ruins at this ancient site, though comparatively isolated did not escape considerable modification by later time additions, into which brick and mortar freely entered. Convenor of the Pugwash Workshop, Mr. D.L.O. Mendis invited the participants to express their views and observations. The low relief carvings of elephants and the bathing pavilions at the site were of considerable interest, with the participants venturing their thoughts on whether the park was secular or monastic. It is my view, that it was perhaps both at various times past. If so, it is unclear whether the carvings and also the so-called sakvala chakraya were a symbolic ancient cosmographical chart or a representation of a pragmatic physical landscape. It is useful to mention here that even modern architectural or Low relief carvings of elephants landscape works are often conceptualized and generated with the background of one or more of a variety of factors. These generic influences vary from the pragmatic such as context and function to drawing on mythology, legend and other forms of symbolism to synthesize a design. 133

163 Other participants including Mr. Udula Bandara Awsadhahami was of the view that the circular carving was an object of meditation, known as a kasina taking the view that the park was monastic. Copied below in toto is the description and views of the archaeological commissioner Mr. H.C.P Bell: Cave No 2 lies beneath the west face of the penultimate rock forming its back and roof and floor. It was entered by a few steps leading down from the rock ridge. A worn, and hardly recognizable asanaya of bricks rests against the rock at back. To the left (north) of this seat, or alter, is cut shallowly on the steeply projecting rock face a great chakra, or circle 6 ft in diameter, scored by rectangular divisions containing figures (mostly small circles), the whole girt, as a tyred wheel, by a band on which is displayed variant piscine and crustacean life swimming round from right to left. The centre of the chakra is filled by a large circle comprising seven concentric rings, within a square 1 ft 2 in., to which cross lines are drawn vertically and horizontally from the encircling hand, cutting the chakra into quadrants. Further, parallel lines divide the circles vertically into ten strips, or slices, varying in width from 3 in. to 9 in., but matching to left and right of the central vertical line. Professor Morwanchikar meditating All strips but the outer two are bisected by the horizontal base line and subdivided into dual or quadripartite partitions The outermost strips, unbisected, contain a single small circle, quadrisected by cross lines, and a figure of phallic suggestion. In each of the penultimate divisions right and left is a tiny circle in line with the horizontal bisection of the chakra, but nothing else. In the third pair are shown four more quadrisected circles, two and two, one in each of the upper and lower partitions left and right. The fourth strip to right contains four more such circles, bigger, and each in a separate partition. But that to left has compressed its circles into a quadripartite panel below the horizontal base line; leaving the upper panel free for four distinct diagrams - second seven.ringed circle (differing only in size from its larger counterpart in the centre of the chakra), beneath which are two umbrella~like emblems, and a pinnated three.forked figure -the whole intertwined by a fret. Each of the eight divisions of the fifth strips, which meet as one broad band, above and below the concentric ringed circle on either side of the central vertical line of the chakra holds one of the small circles with cross lines ; the two left upper partitions containing also a square and a wavy diagonal line. Outside 6 ft in diameter, Sakwala Chakraya Circular carving perhaps an object of meditation all these divisions is the 4 inch tyre or band bounding the chakra. 134

164 This weird circular diagram, incised on the bare rock -even more unique in a way than the elephant bas-reliefs of Pokuna A-may with every show of reason claim to be an old-time cosmographical chart illustrating in naivest simplicity the Buddhistic notions of the universe. The concentric circles with their interspaces at the centre of the chakra can assuredly mean only the Sakvala, in the centre of which rises Maha Meru, surrounded by the seven seas (Sidanta) and walls of rock (Yugandhara, &c.) which shut in that fabulous mountain, l,680,000 miles in height, half below, half above, the ocean s surface. Sun and moon (in the second strips) lie on either side of the Sakvala : round about in space are scattered innumerable other worlds represented by quadrisected circles.* Below and around is the world of waters (i.e., the circular band) in which swarm gigantic uncouth denizens-fish, turtle, crab, chank, and other marine fauna.! This ancient map of the world -perhaps the oldest in existence is of quite extraordinary interest. Its presence here, within an eremite s cave at an out-of-the way nook of ancient Anuradhapura, testifies to the antiquity of that astronomical lore still pursued in some of the Buddhist monasteries of Ceylon. No inscriptions occur at any of the caves; nor have any been discovered anywhere among these ruins. *Still used as an astrological emblem for the earth. End of report. The comments by Professor Emeritus Thomas Pastorello of Syracuse University appeared as a posting on the internet, but are not discussed here and are related to symbolism. The term Sakvala chakraya was thus applied to this carving. It is also curious that Dr. R.S. Morwanchikar noticed some inscribed letters on the rock face above the chakraya. Dr. Ratnatunga suggested that the authorities should be informed so that rubbings may be made. Architect Amendra pointed out four depressions in the flat rock in front of the cave which appeared to have been cut in the form of a seat, or rather a location for sitting facing the carving on the rock. Rock face above the chakraya While it has been suggested that the carving is a cosmographical symbol and also perhaps an object of meditation, Archt. Shereen Amendra opined that given the degree of building activity of great technological advancement in the environs at the time, and that many artisans and designers were active in Anuradhapura, the carving was perhaps a design representation of a pragmatic landscape. Thus whether the carving was an early design for yet another project of importance at the time was a possibility. As much as architects offices are a hub of activity for any new development or project today, it was suggested that perhaps such great works as seen around the City required a design office. Also, a project which does not come to fruition for some time may have required a more permanent record, being thus committed to the form of a rock carving. It must be noted here that while the arahant theras were directly involved in the design of the Mahathupa or Ruwanweliseya as recorded in the Mahawamsa, the Great Chronicle of the island, monastic theras do not usually involve themselves with secular works. However, it is noted that the architect who displayed the bubble form for the stupa to king Dhuttagamani, was a lay person. Drawing parallels with the layout of Sigiriya was the basis for this argument. It may also be possible that envisaged function of Sigiriya may have been for the use of the theras and later was designed to serve secular needs. Details of this are given below although every aspect was not discussed in detail at site. The letter is in response to Dr. Siril Wijesundera who re-awakened my interest in this carving. It was initially known to me during a visit to the Ran-masu Uyana for a design exercise and measured drawings with landscape students when I was a lecturer at the Centre for Housing Planning & Building (CHPB). 135

165 Four depressions in the rock - perhaps a location for sitting 28 th April 2007 Dear Sirs / Ladies, SAKVALA CHAKRAYA A landscape architectural interpretation. (Sihagiri Bhu-dharshana salasuma) By Shereen Amendra An amazing find. Thank you Dr. Wijesundara for sending me the link. Having studied the diagram, I have my own ideas about it that I would like to share. As such, I extract the description from the link and make my own comment below. My views are attached below. 1. Extract: by a band on which is displayed variant piscine and crustacean life swimming round from right to left. Comment: Perhaps a moat with water depicted by the marine life. 2. Extract: The centre of the chakra is filled by a large circle comprising seven concentric rings.. Comment: A representation of a mountainous relief in the landscape Sigiriya? 3. Extract: cross lines are drawn vertically and horizontally from the encircling hand, cutting the chakra into quadrants.. Comment: Gardens in char bagh style, lines depict pathways? 4. Extract: a figure of phallic suggestion. In each of the penultimate divisions right and left is a tiny circle in line with the horizontal bisection of the chakra Comment: Perhaps denotes entrance gateway (phallic symbol and sun-like circle) and exit (other symbol and moon). 5. Extract: quadrisected circles Comment: Representation of trees? Small and large trees, or perhaps, shrubs and trees. 6. Extract: second seven.ringed circle.. Comment: Another rock relief in the landscape perhaps Pidurangala or more likely Mapagala at a SW-NE orientation given the scale and proportion of the entirety. 136

166 7. Extract: two umbrella-like emblems, Comment: Representation of Man-made pavilions? 8. Extract: pinnated three.forked figure Comment:??? Perhaps a column, or lightning conductor (see the five-finger ornament ) Maybe even a representation of a Bodhi tree (see ancient coins Brig. B. Munasinghe) 9. Extract: the whole interwined by a fret.. Comment: Perhaps a representation of a pathway. Present Sigiriya layout has a winding pathway in a quadrant bounded by the rectilinear paths. 10. Extract: wavy diagonal line.. Comment: Representation of either a waterway or perhaps the organic shaped edge of a rock. 11. Extract: Outside all these divisions is the 4 inch tyre or band bounding the chakra. Comment: Likely to be a representation of a moat (with fish, turtles, crustaceans..) General comment: Vessagiriya and the Ran-masu uyana area, the spine of rock mentioned is said to have been the library complex and monastic area. The ran-masu uyana (with the three ponds) later (or before) became the King s pleasure park. It is likely that the monks along with the library had a study area or office space. The greatness of the Arahants and their architectural designs in the building of the Ruwanweliseya is shown in the book Beyond the Seeing Eye: The Mahathupa of Lanka by Shereen Amendra. It is suggested here, in this writing that the Vessagiriya complex and spine of rocks were the design office of the architect monks. Perhaps other projects were in the pipe-line such as the development of Sigiriya. It appears that the Sakwala Chakraya is an early outline design plan for the development of Sigiriya (the central concentric rings), the other perhaps Mapagala rock, or even one of the cistern rocks. The quadrants the gardens and the quadrisected circles representing the trees. The band around to be the moat (with marine fauna) surrounding the rock and gardens. The orientation may have been different (E-W if the cistern rock or SW-NE if Mapagala rock). Early design plans often change and the circular moat may have become rectangular in layout. The chronology may also be explained in that there was considerable building and design activity at the time. For the building of the Lohapasada, the plans were sent for, and brought from abroad (the celestial heavens). Read: Mahavamsa Chapter XXVII Verses 8 to 21. Drawings were made on linen with a red arsenic pencil. If a project is deferred for a longer time it is reasonable that a more permanent record be made, perhaps on rock. These are my views. Could this then be the earliest recorded landscape design plan in history?? If so, landscape architects, architects, archaeologists and others have exciting new studies. Present day, graphic symbols for rising ground, trees, pathways and water bodies are very much similar. Thank you Dr. Wijesundera for drawing my attention to the Sakwala Chakraya. Also with gratitude to all who have studied, researched and drawn the representations, from the amazing Bell report onwards. There are many interpretations of any given artefact, and the symbolism approach is yet another, it may even be astronomical or cosmological. However, it appears plausible that it may be a landscape architects project plan from ancient times. Shereen Amendra Chartered Architect / Landscape Architect Author of Beyond the Seeing Eye: the Mahathupa of Lanka End of Letter. 137

167 The above is self explanatory. The Pugwash delegation left the site, climbing up to the bund of the Tisaweva, the waters of which were supplied to this ancient water park. A walk along the bund with the wind-ruffled waters on the right and lower ground of the park on the left brought us to the steps to descend near the Isurumuniya rock in the fading light. Later in the evening the ephemeral singular dome of the Ruwanweliseya was visited. Much has been written in other papers about this unique structure enshrining the relics of the Buddha. However, noticeable on the visit were the slabs of stone on the upper terrace or maluwa marked with the footprints and a vertical element in the centre. According to the Selalihini Sandesaya, a classical Sinhala poem and the 12 th Century Dharmapradipika written by Gurulugomi, sixteen places have been designated by such carved stones for worship of the stupa at cardinal The Ruwanweliseya on a Poya night points. It appears that presently the stones have been randomly placed as some were upside down. A similar type of stone seen in the museum is pictured here. While the tour of Anuradhapura Sacred Area began with a visit to the Jetawana Project Museum, a visit to the colossal Jetavana stupa and the Abhayagiri Complex, it also took in the Lankarama and a drive by the ancient citadel of Anuradhapura. The visitors had many observations. Stone displayed in the Abhayagiri Museum 138

168 A River for Jaffna S. Arumugam The Jaffna peninsular with a scanty rainfall which can sometimes be only 30 is different from other parts of the northern province which enjoy a rainfall of over 60 during the year. To convey the beneficial aspects of the abundant rainfall from one part of the province to another which is bereft of such bounty, is a legitimate aspiration for agricultural development. The late K Balasingham, Member of the Legislative Council, visualized early in the 1930 decade, the utilization of the lagoons by their conversion into fresh water lakes. His criterion was the oft-repeated saying of Parakrama Bahu the Gre,., that not a drop of rain should be allowed to flow into the ocean without profiting man. These lead to the consideration of the full utilization of the flood waters of Kanagarayan aru, the main river in the northern province. The aru has its source in Vavuniya and passes through Puliyankulam Mankulam area to fill Iranamadu tank. The surplus flow enters the Elephant Pass lagoon, ie. the lagoon to the east of Elephant Pass bridge, and goes to waste in the open sea, through the large bridge at Elephant Pass. One day in the month of February 1949, a family travelling on the road had stopped on the road near the Elephant Pass bridge, for their picnic lunch. When washing their hands in the water the fond father was heard explaining to his little son s inquiries the reason for the presence of fresh water on the east side of the road in spite of the west side being open sea. The little boy s impetuous response was Let us bring some earth in our car and fill up the bridge, then there will be fresh water always. That year the Kanagarayan aru had a copious flow; the Iranamadu irrigation tank had filled and been spilling. The surplus flow had filled the lagoon to the east of the road, and though the Iranamadu tank had stopped spilling in Janaury, the water in the east lagoon was still fresh even in February. But it would soon become brackish due to seawater entry through the bridge unless some earth was brought and filling done. Perennially Fresh That the water in the eastern side of the road should remain fresh throughout the year, forms the basis of the Elephant Pass Fresh Water Reservoir project on which work is in progress. The Elephant Pass lagoon receives the waters of the Kanagarayan aru, Nethsali aru, Perementhal aru, Theravi I aru, and other streams, and covers an area of about 11,400 acres stretching from Elephant Pass to Chundikulam. It is bounded by Vanaekulam to the north and by the Karachchi lands to the south. With the erection of an obstruction near the bridge and suitable embankment spill near Chundikulam, the fresh water that enters the 1agoon will form the Elephant Pass Fresh Water Reservoir. A link channel to the north through Mullian area connects this reservoir to the internal lagoon within the Jaffna peninsular usually known as the Vadamarachchi lagoon. The Vadamarachchi lagoon is a long sheet of water connecting from Mulliyan in Pachchilaipalai, spreading through Chempiyanpattu, Eluthumadduval, Varani, Karaveddi, Vallai Veli, and connects with the sea near Thondamannar near Valvettithurai in Vadamarachchi. It also branches off at Sarasalai, and extends towards Jaffna town connecting up with the sea at Arialai near Chemmani. It is about a mile wide, and as it extends more or less right through the heart of the peninsular, it is an ideal store house influences life in the peninsular. 139

169 As a result of the 600 foot barrage recently completed at Thondamannar, entry of sea water has been cut off and is prevented from entering this internal lake, which was originally the Thondaiman Aar. Three Items The nature of work envisaged to be done at Elephant Pass consists of three items: A dam by the side of Elephant Pass bridge would conserve and save the flood waters of Kanagarayan aru, and also would in addition prevent any entry of seawater from the open sea in the west. A one and a quarter mile roadway dam and spill built across the lagoon at its eastern end at Chundikulam would ensure the safe discharge of surplus flood waters and will also in addition prevent salt water ingress from the eastern ocean. While these eastern and western structures would help to receive and store in safety, the fresh water flood flow, the third item, viz. a link canal will convey the water thus stored to the heart of the Jaffna peninsula. On completion of these works, the Kanagarayan aru flood waters would first be utilized in leaching out the brackishness present in the Elephant Pass (primary or parent) reservoir, and in the Vadamarachchi (secondary or service) reservoir, simultaneously. The primary reservoir with its clayey bed will respond much quicker than the secondary with its alluvial bed. to these leaching out measures. Though the process of leaching cannot obviously be concluded for some time, yet there would hardly be any delay in reaping the benefi cial aspects. The benefits will commence immediately, and improve more and more with each rain season. Moreover, it is well known that partially brackish water, though not fresh to the palate, is nevertheless useful for cultivation needs, as is the case with the water found in many wells i n the coastal regions of the peninsula. Inland Lake As days go by the heat of the sun during the months of February, March, April etc. will cause considerable evaporation in the reservoirs. Each day the amount of water lost in the secondary will be supplied to it by the primary through the canal, and the secondary will therefore continue to be full, (being supplemented every day), as long as flow from Elephant Pass reservoir is possible. Such conditions could go on till the southwest monsoon in June, July cause enormous evaporation which it may not be possible to supplement. In effect this will result in having an inland lake in the Jaffna peninsula. The benefits that will accrue to the lands i n the Jaffna peninsula as a result of having a vase fresh water lake will be many-foid. It would tend to make the underground water table copious and raise its level; the level of water in the wells would be higher as years go by. Moisture will be prevalent in the subsoil. Plant life will become luxurious gone will be the days when trees and coconut palms get scorched and drop in the hot season. That this work will benefit the agricultural development of the neighboring area of over 15,000 acres is beyond doubt. It will also cause the flow of Kanagarayan aru waters from its source in Vavuniya district through the Jaffna district and over the spillway at Thondamannar and at Ariyalai in the outskirts of Jaffna town. (Source: The Observer, October 17, 1954) 140

170 55 th International Pugwash Conference, Hiroshima, July 22-27, 2005 Sustainable Development and Non-Military Threats to Security The tsunami of December and Health rehabilitation activities Dr Nirmala Benjamin The tsunami by its destruction and devastation invited local and world attention. December 26, 2004 has become the black day to be remembered in the history of Sri Lanka. Medically one could call it an exaggerated bereavement status, what nature has done to the Sri Lanka people. The so-called garden city is being converted to a garbage city. Walking down the trail left by the tsunami in various coastal areas, one could feel how lucky and fortunate we are to be alive and living in comfort. The entire Sri Lankan community of citizens including the medical personnel, without a national directive and assistance rose to the occasion spontaneously. We should be proud of our peoples esture. This timely help has paved the way in the rehabilitation process iat followed. Let us now march forward to develop a better Sri Lanka, onsidering each fellow human being as human irrespective of caste, reed, race, or religion. This will pave the way fora lasting peace, and n united Sri Lanka. Let that be the Message tsunami has given each ne of us in its bitter way. People who had enjoyed a comfortable life in their homes have been pushed to refugee camps. Adults and children from all walks of life have had to suffer exposure to a public life exposed to many risks. hopelessness and uncertainty prevails in their faces and minds. Various personnel from different countries extended friendly hands to rehabilitate our people and restore their livelihoods, but it is we who can go to the bottom of their hearts to analyse and alleviate their problems. I n rehabilitation as a second phase now the most important step is to Provide them with a house to live in on their own. The camp culture cannot go on indefinitely. The emphasis should be on the family triad father, mother, and child. Men have lost their jobs and left with no facility to re-start their active life. Every single man must be provided with facilities to re-start his old profession or a new life. It is a fact worth noting that the buoyancy of a man to withstand stress situations are less compared to a woman. Therefore as an alternative they may resort to various lines of refuge such as going into the world of alcohol, drug addiction, and resort to sex abuse, and violence against women and children. Men should be put on their track without delay. The expertise of the engineering and other professionals is required at this j uncture to plan for job facilities. As regards re-modeling women we should first respect their feelings and grievances. Arnother always likes to have a well-set happy home as a base to nurture the family. So the importance ofhousing comes into her rehabilitation needs as well. Privacy should be provided for them at all times. If and where necessary they should be provided with the basic household items to run a house. For those women who have lost their children and / or their husbands, safety and security are mandatory. A mother s love towards her child or husband is deep, and those who have lost their immediate kith and kin should be identified and psycho-therapy given to boost their morale. Confidence-building is important. The most important aspect of rehabilitation is the care of the children and the young adults, our future citizens. A healthy country needs healthy citizens. Here health means both physical and psychological. The young generation are very vulnerable to various stresses. It is easy for them to be misguided and pushed into unsatisfactory habits such as alcohol / drugs / sex abuse etc. Once the damage is done it will be difficult to rehabilitate them thereafter. The extent of the psychological trauma suffered by these c hildren is by no means minor by any standards. These children have lost their parents, siblings, friends, pets, toys, schoolbooks and prized p ossessions, which all children passionately guard. They have had experiences of near death situations, and felt totally helpless when their loved ones were washed away by the tsunami. 141

171 Evidence ofpsychological effects should be carefully evaluated in children and adolescents, who were affected by the disaster to prevent long term psychological trauma since almost all children are more vulnerable to psychological trauma than adults. Even among them there area few who are more at risk, such as physically injured ones, ones who have had near death experiences, who have lost one or both parents and are without proper substitutes; adolescents, and most important to realize, those whose adult caretakers are depressed injured, unable to cope with stress, and not able to offer proper parenting. Education, I stress, is the right of every child. So our attention should be directed towards providing them education and facilities to continue their studies. Considering all these and much more not mentioned here, the rehabilitation work should be directed 1. To provide a safe house 2. Providing the males with facilities to carryon with their jobs: Start vocational institutes Open rural factories on small scale till the state decides to about fishing procedures 3. Females to be given sewing machines and basic household items to ensure a comfortable and a profitable life, of course in addition to a home 4. Children to be given good nutrition, good health care facility, maybe mobile health camps on a regular basis to continuously provide them good health care is a good idea. Identify the orphans and needy and house them and provide them with security and safety. 5. Mass immunization against communicable diseases as a preventive step is mandatory. These diseases could spread to the entire country with these people moving to varius parts. 6. Provide these children to have their rights with regard to their name, family, relatives, privacy, education, religion and inheritance. Protect them from drugs, alcohol, smoking and sexual abuse. 7. Good water supply for safe drinking, with minerals intact to supply their needs. 8. Provide them with a balanced diet, ensuring adequate protein, fats, vitamins and minerals. Promote farming for the consumption of greens which give iron and folic acid, fresh fruits for vitamin C and fibre, Dairy farms to provide milk for calcium needs. 9. Constant monitoring by health workers as regards their progress. Trauma counseling if and when required should be given by Health workers like Doctors, Nursing officers, Midwives, Teachers, close relatives, clergy. They need to be trained by skilled medical practitioners. This should be done continuously on a regular basis. 10. Electronic media instead of highlighting the damage caused by the tsunami, causing more damage, can give psychotherapy programmes in an effective manner. 11. Need to update hospital facility in rural and district levels, and equip them better to provide the people with national health care. 12. It is sad to state that the National Health Policy is non-existent at present in our country. The policy should be drawn up and presented to the public for amendments and improvements. By this a national co-operation is achieved by various sections of professionals, and Unity is Augmented. 13. Lastly a Natural Disaster Plan should be available for the citizens to be prepared to act in the event of forewarned catastrophe. 14. Amidst celebrating our 57th year of national Independence we should bear in mind the suffering of the tsunami victims who for all intents and purposes have lost their life s independence. 15. Let us provide our selfless service to rebuild a healthy Sri Lanka. 142

172 Utilizing Traditional Wisdom In Water Conservation for Combating Climate Change (with special reference to the various ongoing Initiatives And Efforts by ICWC and other Organizations in India) G.D. Deshpande Several periods of prosperity are quite discernible in the history of India. Numerous documentary and field evidences which attest to the then existing water systems which in turn were based on well-conceived planning and regulation, are extant in different parts of India. However, compilation and analysis of all this historical experience is yet to be carried out in a coherent manner. Owing to the neglect with which the data is subjected in course of time innumerable field structures and an invaluable stock of literary and documentary information pertinent thereto are gradually being pushed on the verge of extinction. It is necessary to get all this preserved as a valuable historical heritage. The Indian Council for Water and Culture (ICWC) has, therefore, been formed with the objective of s y stematicall y compiling on a large scale information of the historical water management in Maharashtra and other regions in India and to enable systematic presentation of more and more facts and findings there from before the Indian society and if possible make efforts for the restoration of these water bodies with the peoples participation making use of the traditional wisdom of its water management also with the assistance of like minded organizations in India. INTRODUCTION: The recently carried out exercise by the Maharashtra Water & Irrigation Commission has brought to the fore the possibility of unearthing countless guiding principles through that data which may prove useful in the context of structures being conceived in the new environment of India even today. The methods of water development of respective periods have long been closely linked to the Indian climate, social fabric and living style. Innumerable inspiring examples such as the millennium-old canals off-taking from Kaveri near Tanjawar in Tamilnadu, the water supply system existing in the empire of Vijanagar, the method of guaranteeing water in drought-prone area of Rashtrakutas and Yadawas. the Phad irrigation distribution s y stem ensuring equitable distribution of water existing in Kanhadesh (Khandesh) are spread all over India. The history of India has left a considerably large legacy in the sector of Water Conservation. The dictum -Wherever there is water, there will be a habitation - is the very beginning of this legacy. Therefore, no habitation appears to have set up in the ancient or medieval periods unless assured water existed. However, of late, a kind of regressive practice of Wherever there is a village, water should be supplied thereto has been hard tried to inflict upon by paying least heed to this wisdom. Therefore the responsibility of supplying water to these habitats rests with the Government, which, in spite of its keenness to undertake the task, proves powerless owing to expending millions of rupees on such a type of system for years together. Historical water management system are required to be revived therefore. For this, the Council by undertaking more and more research can present such a scenario of historical water sites for public appraisal and their modernization. At majority of the sites, these historical management systems can again be operationalised with minimal financial provisions and increasing public participation and they may continue to function for several decades on zero budget provision - a fact the Council would like to bring home. 143

173 Several water management schemes are endangered due to pursuit of urbanization and westernization, where historical management has been destroyed by the urbanization there. This Council desires to carry out proper planning of these management systems; desires to bring coherence therein. METHODOLOGY OF WORKING OF COUNCIL: The work of council is carried out in three main streams Hydraulic Engineering Stream - Where it is trying to compile information of Historical Water Management Structures still serving. Water Literature Stream - Clues to be gathered from written compilations emanating from historical or other literary sources Folk Tradition Stream - Water related themes found expressions through social customs. social paradigms, folk songs etc. Highlights of these Streams - To document the Hydraulic Structures and grasp the underlying principles on which systems have been working. To trace the water culture from the literary evidences extant in all the languages of India including incriptions and other material. To appreciate the living traditions that have survived through ages, which influence water, related activities. It provides a strong conceptual base as far as regional water and culture is concerned. Work under all the three streams is being carried simultaneously. PROFESSIONAL COMPOSITION OF THE COUNCIL: This work can assume a proper shape only if it could muster participation of specialists and amateurs such as historians, archaeologists, engineers, scientists, philologists who are wellversed in Sanskrit - Pali - Ardhamagadhi languages - all in diverse fields. The council has sought individual members from different professional disciplines. If classified, the scenario of its life members is like this 1. Engineers Social Scientists Scientists Social Workers Literary Experts 12 Total 156 COUNCIL S NETWORK: The council is a member organization of Global Water Partnership (GWP). The council has also been named to act as a driver organization for strengthening the network of Water and Culture in South Asia region. The council has got a sufficiently big network to carry out its activities in association with number of organizations working in different fields. With the assistance of these organisations, it organises various workshops and seminars on different topic suitable for the councils objectives as mentioned above. The council has so far worked in association with 25 different organizations in India. ACTIVITIES OF THE COUNCIL: The council carries its activities under the above-mentioned three main streams. The prominent activities carried out so far are available on request from the ICWC. It is the need of the hour that the like minded people and organization join initiatives of ICWC and help restore these ancient water bodies duly utilizing the glorious principles and traditional wisdom in conservation and management of water in the current context for combating the repercussions of climate change. 144

174 Climate Change And Water Management A Case Study of Maharashtra-India (with a special reference to khazana well) Dr. Pratibha Deshpande The state of Maharashtra in India is well known for its varied biodiversity, habitat diversity, people and culture etc. Though climate and rainfall would have been variable unplanned human actions aimed at short-term gains are responsible for overall degeneration of proto historic cultures in semi arid regions in South India. Historical Water bodies, such as Lakes and reservoirs and wells hold a great promise as a source of freshwater, the demand for which is constantly growing with passage of time. Unfortunately, these ecosystems are being neglected and destroyed in rural as well as in urban areas. The main problem in their management involves maintenance of water quality and morphometry responsible for water holding capacity. These innumerable lakes and reservoirs scattered all over the country need an urgent management plans for their protection, rehabilitation and conservation. By suitable remedial measures, these water bodies can provide ideal benefits like fish production, charging of groundwater table, conditioning of the climate etc. To achieve this, there is a need of clear-cut protection strategy as an integral component of water policy. It is found through the study of the Maharashtra Irrigation Commission that even today number of water management principles can be unearthed through such glorious historical water bodies which could be well useful and relevant even for today s modern India. Khazana Bawali is a glorious example of historical water management. Khazana Bawali (Treasure Well) situated about six kilometers from Beed, a district place in Maharashtra, was constructed about four hundred and thirty years back during Nizamshahi rule in western India. Most of the cultivable land in this region was arid and this was probably first public facility for irrigation. Barring negligible small portions irrigated by private wells, agriculture was then dependent on insufficient and uncertain monsoon. Beed town of Maharashtra, India lies in the rain shadow - arid region. The rainfall here is scanty and uncertain. The average rainfall of the district is 674 mm. Only 2.47 percent of the total area of the district is under forest. Most of the rainfall occurs in August and September. Draught and famines looms large in this region. Rightly understanding the importance of water for this arid region, the then rulers created this novel water management schemes near here. This project is a large well of 20 meters radius in which rain water oozing from nearby hills is brought through underground tunnels and then used for irrigation by taking it through masonry channels under gravity. Ventilators provided at regular distance in this channel allow fresh air helping water purification and space also allows occasional manual cleaning. Underground construction below bed of the river crossing is one of the engineering feats. Project was once irrigating 1000 acres, but it is gradually on the decrease. Record shows that about 500 acres were irrigated thirty-five years back and now it is further reduced to 165 acres. In the gazetteer published by the government of Maharashtra in 1969, following information is found on page no 659 regarding this well. Khazana Bavli : A little over four kilometers (three miles) West of Bid near the village Pali is a large well called the Khazana bavli which was constructed about 1582 A.D. by the then Jagirdar of Bid. There are three inlets which feed the well and only one outlet. The source of water supply has not yet, been traced. It has channels built for Irrigation purposes which irrigate over a thousand acres of land. Its water level remains the same at all times of the year. Irrigated land is still considered to be a prize possession in India; it was much more so in historical past. Nobody was prepared to part its ownership. Transfer of ownership was rare. 145

175 Agriculture, merely dry farming and occasional army service were then only major occupations and were not much remunerative. They did not generate enough money for purchase of irrigated land. Now the situation has changed. Different means have given sufficient resources for such purchases to many. Original beneficiary families could not resist temptation of getting lucrative price. Many lands irrigate under this project have since changed hands. Automobiles have made cultivation of agricultural lands from distance possible. Rich peasantry as a class has become influential in Indian for political life. Assurance of political support has made at least some of them bold enough to disrespect and ignore rules for personal benefit. Ethic has lost its primacy in social values and tendency to grab all benefits has replaced it. It has become difficult to enforce discipline and regulate the use of public amenities, Secondly; even leaders coming from peasant class are not wedded to interest of small farmers. They have their own preferences. Protection of farmers interest and facilities available to them is not always a priority with them. This project is just in the vicinity of Beed town. Process of unregulated urbanization has swallowed thousands of villages near the cities in India and Beed is no exception, which has also swelled in all directions. Once Khazana Bawali was also providing some water for this town besides irrigation. Now that has stopped. Portion of these water channels, siphons and other regulatory mechanics has already been destroyed and rich, fertile irrigated land is put to residential use. About 225 Acres from the beneficiary zone has already been used to build houses. If this continues unabated, result would be that the whole project would be redundant. Maharashtra State has only 16% cultivable land irrigated. Irrigation facility constructed from public money should not be allowed to be rendered useless. It would be criminal waste. Fate of this project, once a pride for the region, today hangs in uncertainty. If immediate steps are not taken to serve its usefulness, it is likely to remain as a Historical monument witnessing wisdom of the past and callousness of the present. Questions that are posed by this State are of general importance and they are relevant in respect of may other projects. When would we appreciate fully the value and importance of such facility? When wisdom would dawn on and we would stop mad run for urbanization at the cost of our forests and rich fertile lands. It may be definitely a notable thing to say that the 440 year old scheme is still holding its capacity to irrigate the lands. However, the emerging picture of this glorious system is that it is fast becoming a victim of the growing civilization. Conclusion And Suggestions : If we are to save Khajana Bawali and similar irrigation projects existing in the vicinity of cities and towns, we have to take some legislative and administrative steps urgently, as listed below: A. Legislative Measures : * Looking to the smaller extent of irrigated land, transfer of irrigated land, particularly owned by small holders should be prohibited. * Conversion of irrigated agricultural land for any non-agricultural purpose should be prohibited, except for exceptional public purpose. * Historical irrigation facilities which witness traditional wisdom like dams, reservoirs, wells, channels and controlling towers etc. should be included in and treated as historical monuments and should get protection from legislation protecting them. B. Administrative Measures * Equitable distribution of water between entitled beneficiaries should be strictly enforced as per rules and supervised by independent machinery. * Breach of rule and use of unauthorized water by force should be met with penalty debarring such person from use of water from that project. * Parts of the channel and mechanism of this project is damaged. There is need to restore them. 146

176 Water Management: An ancient Sri Lankan Experiment to meet Climatic Effects - A success or Failure? Bandu de Silva Introduction An ancient king of the island (12 th century) has gone on record saying not a drop of water will be allowed to empty into the sea without serving the people. True to his word, he built a network of vast reservoirs, weirs across mighty rivers, canals and channels many of which are being reused today after repairs were effected. That thought and later achievements in the field of water management in ancient Sri Lanka did not arise suddenly. Overemphasis on large irrigation works as this king built might overlook at least 17 centuries of experimentation by generations of Sinhalese which brought about the system of water management to mega proportions. Whether or not this development led to the perfection of the system or towards its disastrous end not so long after have to be studied. The early experimentation included constructing small reservoirs by throwing dams across small valleys to retain the overflow in the catchment area resulting from periodic rain or action of springs. That was sufficient to provide water for food crop production and community needs of village settlements. The second stage was reached after the expansion of settlements, populations and consequently the demand for more food. The positive element in this experimentation which took place around the 12 th century was its mega reservoirs linked to a whole system of reservoirs big and small through cascading networks in a much wider catchment area. That ensured a perennial supply of water unaffected by vagaries of climate as the early settlement regions of the dry zone experienced. This development however, depended on constant vigilance on nature s reaction on the intricate hydraulic system which called for a highly centralized but at the same time a well dispersed system of organization with a highly skilled labour force in the management of the system. Any thing that disrupted this arrangement affected the effectiveness and continuance of the megasystem. These included natural hazards like cyclones which brought about heavy seasonal or off- season down pours which could be caused by depressions in the Bay of Bengal which occur in almost unceasing regularity and cyclones which accompany the depression occasionally, and which sent down volumes of water that could not be emptied through the normal spills provided in the dams and reservoirs. They also included man-created problems like sporadic invasions and civil wars which disrupted normal functioning of the society. These seem to be the major cause of the breakdown of the system. Factors affecting climatic change: Land Distribution and climatic patterns Sixty six (66) percent of the island s total land mass is in the dry and intermediate zones. Rainfall The dry zone (66 percent of land) receives less than 1250 mm of rain per annum, compared to 2500mm to 5000 mm in the wet zone 934 percent of land). The rain is confined to the months of November to January when the North-East monsoon is active and the inter-monsoonal months. Rainfall pattern together with high temperature causes long periods of dryness. Several famines were recorded in historical times. Temperature The island is in the higher temperature zone. The north and the east in the dry zone record the highest national sunshine days. The evaporation rate which is around 6 mm per day in the dry zone is almost double that in the wet zone. 147

177 Drainage Patterns 1. Of the 103 river systems in the island thirty (30) are among what could be called the larger ones. 2. Two thirds or twenty (20) of these larger rivers are located in the dry zone. 3 Mahaweli, the largest and longest river (207miles) starts in the wet zone and fed by 16 tributaries, flows into the bay of Trincomalee after meandering through the dry zone. (Cooray & Panabokke) Population Distribution a) Today, only 20 percent of the population lives in the dry zone while 70 percent inhabit the wet zone. This is, however, a reversal of the settlement patterns which existed for over one and half millennia in ancient times, when the majority of human settlements from the iron age to the colonial times were in the dry zone. b) However, the so called migration to the wet zone before the advent of Western colonizers remained a myth. The rural population did not abandon their land though the capitals shifted and the elite moved with the rulers. They subsisted on water supplied by small village tanks which they maintained through communal effort as the early British administrators saw among the Sinhalese villages in the Kaddukulam Pattu (Trincomalee district). c) When the Portuguese destroyed the Buddhist temples on Trincomalee hill, Tampalagama and Gantalawa were flourishing agricultural districts belonging to the Buddhist temples producing three rice crops annually. This points to the functioning of the Gantalava tank at that time. Their abandonment resulted after the destruction of the temples by the Portuguese. (Fernao de Queyroz, 17 th century Portuguese chronicler). d) Similarly, the Vanni was agricultural land though the yields were low. That the Dutch made them more productive after introducing harsher administrative control after the district was subjugated in the 18 th century shows the fallacy of abandonment of agriculture in the district. Bertolacci, the first British Civil servant and others speak of the prosperity of the Vanni and attributes its decline to colonial intervention. Climatic Problems in the Dry Zone a) Lower rainfall in the dry zone and its seasonality confined to months of November to January; b) Desiccation of the terrain and of the drainage flow due to high temperatures and high evaporation rate. c) Environmental hazards Cyclones and Depressions and Tsunami and Droughts. Depressions that develop in the southern parts of the Bay of Bengal are known to have devastated parts of the dry zone in colonial and post-colonial times. It can be assumed that such effects would have prevailed throughout history. The effects of cyclones and depressions are unpredictable. Droughts studies focused on paddy over several recent decades has shown around 10 percent paddy sown extent failures under both dry weather and drought conditions. The real damaging condition is unseasonal drought conditions, e.g., drought in January in the dry zone could have far more devastating effects. Similarly, unexpected rainfall both in wet zone and dry zone including cyclones could lead to adverse effects on agriculture as seen from present day situation. Motivation The Chronicle, Mahavamsa, records the great king Parakramabahu (12 th Century) saying: It is not fitting that persons in our situation to live enjoying our own ease, and unmindful of the interests of the people. And ye all, be ye not discouraged, when a necessary but a difficult 148

178 work is on hand. Regard it not indeed as a work of difficulty, but following my advice accomplish it, without opposing my instructions. (Wijesinghe Trs.) The king has also gone on record saying not a drop of water will be allowed to empty into the sea without serving the people. Keeping to his word, he built a network of vast reservoirs, weirs across mighty rivers, canals and channels many of which are being reused today after repairs were effected. Following the Leader King Vijayabahu IV mobilized the chieftains, the soldiery, artisans, and craftsmen as well as the population at large, and collected a vast amount of implements and craftsmen to restore the irrigation works at Polonnaruva which had fallen into disuse. When some of the chieftains and men were reluctant to go, it is said in the Chronicle, that women took to the street followed by children when they saw the king leading saying our king is going [alone]; let us follow him. The chiefs and men had to follow naturally. (Culavamsa: 88: &11-115) This is an illustration of the type of motivation which existed. British Government Agent of Trincomalee found the same spirit of motivation still surviving among the emaciated and feverridden Sinhalese villagers in Kaddukulam Pattu in the 19 th century. He decided to assist these people in their noble effort to maintain their village tanks. Another aspect was the co-operative spirit that existed in respect of agriculture which continued till recent times. It is the same spirit which motivates inland farmers today to go to the estuaries of rivers to remove sand bars which results in inundating their up-stream fields. Governor Henry Ward s Remarks Governor Henry Ward remarked that no wisdom and no power in the ruler can have forced such efforts, even upon the most passive of Oriental nations, without a general persuasion that the work was one of paramount necessity, and that all would participate in its benefits. The sacrifices to which a whole people submitted, sufficiently prove the sense entertained of the value of water as the first element of cultivation in a tropical climate, by the former possessors of the soils of Ceylon. Knowledge and Consciousness A close study of the irrigation works clearly show that accumulation of knowledge was gained through evolutionary experimentation on problems relating to construction of embankments, canals and weirs. Observations on climatic change patterns through observation of skies, sun and moon; humidity rate, wind directions and patterns and birds signs and animal behavior, cooing of Niyam-Kobeyya (wild pigeon) heralding drought and mating call of Eti-kukula (heralding rain) have become part of the legacy of Sri Lankan farmers up to these days. Above all, creating an alert community conscious (self-help) farming community ever ready to meet the challenge of small mishaps like bursting of dams is seen as part of legacy to these days. Government Agents of Trincomalee in the 19 th century observed this characteristic even among the impoverished and emaciated Sinhalese villagers in the Kaddukulam Pattu. Ancient strategies of combating climatic effects Beginning with small reservoirs Building small reservoirs to tap catchment surface flow was sufficient for small rural communities but found insufficient to meet growing population demands. The desiccation due to a higher evaporation rate also had to be met. R.L. Brohier, the doyen of Sri Lankan Surveyors, in his masterly work Ancient irrigation 149

179 Works of Ceylon, observes that in the very early days, the irrigation works were less pretentious undertakings. So limited were the needs of the early iron-age men who inhabited the island. This authority, nevertheless, goes to assert that these early works, serve to illustrate the gradual assimilation of that ingenuity sufficiently associated with a remarkable people who have left their mark on the face of the country but have themselves passed away. Brohier pointed out that the enlargement of Kurundi-wewa (Kurungama of inscriptions) in the North East to cater for the large monastic establishment at the historic Kurundi village by building the Tannimuruppu tank. That was only one example of such growing demand confined to a Buddhist monastic community. There are many other examples. Dr. C. R. Panabokke identified 487 small cascading irrigation reservoirs in 9 selected watershed basins in the dry zone. Recently, a reference was made in Parliament to the existence of around 600 such small works in the Wanni. From Henry Parker Deduru Oya Report, 1890 Commenting on small reservoirs Henry Parker observed: The ultimate objective of all these works was to supply the village fields with water. Where springs exist, where a running stream is available, or where the rainfall of the district is not only abundant but regular, or, better still, pretty evenly distributed throughout the year, it might be suffi cient for this purpose simply to build a bund by which to impound the springs, to intercept the stream, or to store up the supply of rain or spring water; and this was no doubt the origin of tanks. But it must have been soon perceived that in many cases this was not enough to ensure more than a precarious supply of water, and that to render the irrigation and cultivation of fields perfectly secure, other measures were necessary. The replenishment of tanks, therefore, was provided for, either by conducting any surplus water that might accumulate in one tank into another below it, or by supplementing the supply by means of a channel from some running stream, or some large reservoir These observations sum up how in stages the ancient Sinhalese tackled the problem of climatic effect in the dry zone in the very early stages where the earliest settler concentration is found. Minor irrigation works which had been the mainstay of early endeavour of the population and continued to be so to the present, could meet temporary climatic effects like yearly dry spells but not prolonged or unusual drought conditions. Two early examples The earliest mention of such agricultural settlements are found in the east of the island, in the Yan Oya basin (Girikanda) in the time of Pandukabhaya, (5 th c. B.C.E) the first of the known `historical rulers; and in Digha Vapi in the South East in the time of King Kavan Tissa (1 st c. B.C.E) who sent his second son, Saddhatissa, to develop agriculture in that area. The tradition continued after Saddha Tissa as his son is seen in charge of the work later. Many of Lajja Tissa s lithic inscriptions were discovered in clearing the jungles for the construction of the Gal Oya reservoir, ( ) though hundreds others were bulldozed. However, Henry Parker s observations on Panda-wewa, a reservoir near Wariyapola (500 B.C,) point to a parallel development of principles of tapping a larger volume of water as early as the 6 th century B.C. He identified this reservoir which has been built by throwing an embankment across the valley of the Kolmunna-Oya as one of the earliest built reservoirs. The reservoir which has been repaired and enlarged over the ages since its original construction, had a bund 24 feet in height, and was a mile to mile and a half in circumference and is said to have flooded an area of 1,000 to 1,200 acres before the bund burst in 1805 owing to a flood. 150

180 He remarked that although the size of the reservoir was surpassed [by other early samples], we cannot fail to be astonished at the boldness and originality of the early engineers who ventured to construct such an earthen bank across a valley down which fl oods of considerable volume pass in the rainy season..the old designer of the works must have been a highly intelligent man to overcome it successfully.he made every effort to reduce the quantity of the earth work to a minimum; to effect this, the line of the bank was turned about in order to avoid low ground, in a manner never found in later works of large size The conclusion is that the early works could not have merely served the communal needs of the people but it would be natural to presume on such evidence that an adequate population who understood rice- growing existed in the northern parts of the island at even this early period, the pre-christian era. Larger irrigation works which required greater investments were introduced gradually; they had to be constructed to meet prolonged water shortages for agriculture, animal husbandry and community use. This resulted in storage reservoirs of great dimension and feeder networks of canals and channels connecting with the network of smaller reservoirs and to the fields. It is said that Minneriya, one of the first storage and distribution tanks also sustained the cultivation of 80,000 fields. Measures to control evaporation rate High evaporation rate in the dry zone which has been measured today at 6 mm. per day was an additional reason for desiccation of the land apart from the seasonality of rain and long drought spells. The ancient Sinhalese grew aquatic plants like lotus (nelunbium) [Culavamsa 88: ] to control evaporation and for the protection of catchment areas, embankments and canal bunds, undertook afforestation of these areas and prescribed strict punishments for violations like damage to embankments and water-tapping. Protection against winds was provided through tree lined wind barriers and through lining of vulnerable embankments, tekkamas and canal bund surfaces with dressed stones (Relapanawa =wave-breakers). Introduction of trans-basin canal network Yodha-Elas (Giant Canals) came to be constructed a few centuries later to transfer water to the dry zone from perennial rivers. These were constructed by throwing anicuts across perennial rivers in the southern part of the island which flowed in north easterly and north westerly directions. The Elahera Yodha Wewa (south-north-east direction) which transferred water from Ambanganga (perennial) to reservoirs in the Tamankaduwa area (Minneriya, Kaudulla and Gantalava) which is an amazing piece of work which was expanded gradually provides a good example where anicuts (dams across the valleys) were built around the low ridges running in north-south direction or north-eastern directions which provided sites for impounding large volumes of water. Reservoirs fed by these canals have higher `heads. A second parallel is the Yodha-ela which connected Mirisgoni Oya flowing from Matale hills to carry water to Nachchaduva-Wewa and Nuwara-Wewa in Anuradhapura which served the metropolis and its enviorns. A third example is the Minipe anicut on Mahaweliganga (south-north-east direction), an equally amazing work as Elahera which tapped a point lower down in the mighty river, and carried water through a canal to Minneriya and Gantalava traversing over 50 miles. Giant s Tank a different Principle Artificial means of irrigation were brought to perfection by the in the 12 th century ruler, King Parakramabahu the Great. In addition to several great works attributed to him, Henry Parker assigns the marvelous work, the Giant s Tank in Mannar district also to him. 151

181 The principle used for the Giant s Tank was different from others. An alteration from the general design was used to suit the lay out of the land. Because of the flat nature of the terrain, instead of throwing an embankment across the river encompassing the valley around for several miles over a large area of the river basin, which was the accepted principle followed to impound the water in other places, a causeway (Tekkama) was constructed with cut granite using a rocky foundation in the river at a point up the river. A channel was cut a hundred feet above the causeway through which water was conducted to a distance of four miles almost parallel to the river diverging thereafter to a distance of six and half miles to emerge in the plain to join the great reservoir down- stream which covered an area of 7,000 acres, making it the second largest reservoir in the island. A total distance of 17 miles was traversed though the direct distance was only 9 miles, the serpentine course being part of the design intended to reduce the gradient. The levels taken along this canal in the course of modern schemes for restoration of the ancient works disclosed a striking illustration of the exactitude with which the ancient Sinhalese worked. This reservoir and its head works are of special significance because the vast acreage it intended to irrigate though consisting of excellent land extending along the coast for over 35 miles and covering over 40,000 acres was in the driest parts of the island. Even under Dutch colonial rule some of these lands were cultivated under the direction of Vanniyars of Pahangama (Pannamkamam) who obtained lease from the Dutch to cultivate them. The significance is that this reservoir served the important economic zone of the pearl fishery for which a seasonal large population congregated along this coastal belt. Shift from Nuvarakalaviya to Tamankaduwa This phenomenon found in the political history of the island after over one and half millennia of settlements centred round the metropolis of Anuradhapura, has generally been ascribed by historians largely to the pressure of invasions from South India. The centre of polity shifted to Polonnaruva after the 10 th century especially after the Cola occupation, but the interest in that region was manifest a few centuries earlier. Foreign invasions, therefore, could not have been the single cause for the shift. From other considerations, it represents a situation of moving closer to perennial sources of water which could have resulted from the need to meet the demands of population increase which called for greater agricultural output. The traditional agricultural areas centred around Anuradhapura were, obviously, declining in productivity due to degradation of the soil and rise in salinity through a millennium and a half of exploitation. Based on a heuristic approach, Panabokke has observed that loss of fertility of the soil was the cause of decline in agriculture in the western parts of Rajarata; and sodic soil in combination with a very low hydrological endowment as in Ruhuna. Uncontrollable pests and rise of weeds are other problems generally associated with cultivation under water-logged conditions. The Sinhalese had devised their own system of controlling these problems through ingenious local remedies which were practiced before modern pesticides and weedicides were used. The cultural practices related to weeding as demonstrated by the following weeding- poem, (nelum kavi) of the Kandyan period point to the extent of the problem caused by weeds. The lament is that of a single woman who not having the benefit of assistance of other members of the family like sisters, had to do the weeding by herself is an illustration caused by weeds under water-logged conditions. Anduru baba Senkadagala vasinna Panduru lala wal kudameti bandinna Akka-nagun neti arume penenna Meda ada kumburanelumen erenna. 152

182 Under these conditions the Sinhalese devised two schemes, one, leaving land to fallow for a season and turning it back to cultivation after a term; and the other, the rotation of crops. Excess flooding though leading to waste of water was also intended to kill weeds; but these labour consuming methods were insufficient. The prospects of moving on to newer lands closer to perennial sources of water if the state patronage was forthcoming, was more attractive. There are references to drought and pestilence from time to time. This would have necessitated the abandonment of villages and moving on to new areas when there was pestilence and for other reasons; or opening up of highland cultivation through chena (slash and burn) cultivation. Even in the time of colonial rule, it was a common practice for villagers in the Wanni to leave their settlements and move to other localities. This practice continued even as late as 1950s in the outback of Matale district where many people abandoned their traditional village of Galdebokka following the prevalence of Parangi and due to adverse climatic conditions (wind-prone area) and moved to Meemure further down the stream where water was more abundant and Chena cultivation was good. (Personal observations). Silting of reservoirs itself, which presents a serious problem as seen today at reservoirs like Gal Oya and Uda Walawe, not to speak of others, could have been a problem of considerable dimension after the system was in use over one and half millennia. Collapse of the irrigation works Tamankaduwa already had a few large reservoirs like Minneriya, Gantalava, which were fed by Mahaweli ganga water through the extended Elahera canal, and Padaviya on the Yan Oya basin was added later. The system was extended by Parakramabahu, the greatest of Tank builders. This area provided new opportunities for agricultural expansion and cattle farming with its extensive undulating land with naturally formed villus and a few major reservoirs like Minneriya, Kawudulu-wewa, Gantalawa and Topawewa but the state-sponsored enterprise of moving settlements did not last more than a few generations. During the usurper Kalinga Magha s occupation, the area was thriving but soon after fell into neglect. Vijayabahu IV had to lead people to renovate the neglected reservoirs but the enthusiasm did not last long. Why? Didn t the massive irrigation schemes become too much of a burden for the local communities under local leadership to maintain without state support? Magha s destruction of Kulinas, the aristocracy which supported the rulers in maintaining the irrigation net work could have been one reason. The Vanniya system of local administration which was introduced with the shift of the Capital to the south was capable of maintaining only minor and perhaps, medium sized works. As the illustration which was quoted above shows, even King Vijayabahu IV found it difficult to take people back to Polonnaruwa which city had been neglected. The Mahavamsa gives the following description of the state of irrigation works around Polonnaruva at that time: King Vijayabahu, happy at heart, had the water system tanks, ponds, pools and the like in which the embankments had given way, and which were deprived of water, dammed up as before, fi lled with deep water, covered with divers lotus blossoms and stocked with all kinds of fish. Then he had many valuable fi elds which had always been ground on which grew every kind of corn, newly planted, had all kinds of crops grown here and there and made the whole fair land prosperous.. (Geiger: Culavamsa Tr. V 88; ). Damage to Irrigation Systems Natural calamities are listed among the reasons for destruction of some of the major reservoirs. This has been specially mentioned by early British engineers in respect of the Giant Tank. The dry zone then, as it is today, would have been visited by cyclones, as in more recent times bringing heavy downpours which the system could not sustain. A single breach could have damaged the whole net work. The inadequacy of the spillage system to meet such eventualities was noted by early engineers in respect of a number of larger reservoirs. 153

183 Some historical Facts Chronicled accounts of the island (compiled between 4 th and 6 th centuries) and continued to date, point to a Rajarata centred polity and irrigation based dry zone settlement patterns in the northern, eastern areas and south eastern areas; but at the same time, there is another settlement pattern supported not only by chronicles but also lithic records pointing to an extensive irrigation based settlement pattern in the dry zone of south eastern parts of Sri Lanka, known as Digha- Mandala. This was obviously, as the name indicates, a territorial division to which the island had been divided. The evidence which records the names of rulers and sub-rulers points to a 1 st century B.C.E. When the Gal Oya scheme was opened up, many of the lithic records were bulldozed but a few which were saved make prolific reference to Lajaka Tisa (Lajji Tissa), son of Saddha Tissa, thereby confirming the story in the Chronicle of the involvement both father and son in the development of this area. The impression is that it was the granary of the island. In the Rajarata area, major hydraulic works commenced in the reign of Vasabha, ( CE) who had consolidated his political authority over all parts of the island including the dry Jaffna peninsula. This seems to be a land - mark in the evolution from `cascading small reservoirs and village tanks to larger reservoirs which were further expanded during the time Mahasen, the builder of Minnerriya reservoir and 15 other tanks, and in the 12 th century by Parakramabahu the Great, the builder of many large works. Mahasena was `deified by the people and is propitiated even today. Conclusion Was the Sri Lankan experiment a success or failure? The accolades paid by 18 th century Dutch and 19 th century British engineers on the skills displayed by early Sinhalese builders of hydraulic works, leave no room for questioning their wisdom on the water management system to meet the climatic variables. Even where the wisdom behind some of the works like the Alavakka canal which carried water to the Giant s Tank was questioned by a few, later examination of these works showed that the criticism had been based on paltry evidence and the builders made no mistake. (Brohier). The evidence that the system endured for over two millennia, and a reservoir like Minneriya continued to hold water till it was rediscovered in the 19 th century, itself is sufficient to show that the construction of irrigation works was based on sound engineering principles. The final collapse of the system could be due to the builders not providing sufficient spillage to meet unexpected contingencies like very heavy rainfall resulting from cyclonic factors and consequent overflow of an abundance of water down the drainage system. Evidently, the community organizations under local leadership was sufficiently geared to meet situations of limited dimensions, with the collapse of the social organization which maintained the system resulting from disturbance of settlement patterns after wars with invading forces, and loss of state patronage could be the reason why the system could not be maintained in its pristine condition after the 13 th century. The problems that Vijayabahu IV faced in mustering the population illustrates the situation caused by the collapse of the social organization. The organization of the Vanniya system of administration in the Tank country itself points to some feeble attempt to restore the social organization which was needed to maintain the reservoirs and canals. Western colonial intrusions from the beginning of the 16 th century delivered the final blow to the social system. The major irrigation schemes which had been working even after the arrival of the colonial powers, collapsed consequently. This is no reflection on the wisdom behind the ancient works. 154

184 Mineral Resources of Sri Lanka* Professor C B Dissanayake Science and Civilisation in Sri Lanka is truly an idea whose time has come. My lecture today is on Mineral Resources in the context of this project. Sri Lanka, in relation to its size, is reasonably well endowed with mineral resources, particularly of the non-metallic type such as gems, graphite, phosphate and clay. The uniqueness of Sri Lanka s mineral wealth is that some of the minerals rank as possibly the best in the world. The gemstones of Sri Lanka, for example, have earned a reputation for their sheer quality and value. Gem mining has been carried out for over 2000 years in Sri Lanka and the ancient travelers and historians have commented on these truly exquisite creations of nature. Sri Lanka indeed was justly termed the Island of gems. The graphite of Sri Lanka also ranks among the best in the world for their purity. It has a carbon content of over 99% and interestingly Sri Lanka graphite is used as the standard in high precision physics experiments in some of the advanced laboratories of the world. The beach mineral sands of Sri Lanka have the minerals ilmenite, While, monazite, zircon, garnet, thorianite, and baddelyite, among others, and their quality is also very high. The richness of the Pulmoddai deposit north of Trincomalee is shown by the fact that the mineral content in the sand is 40-70%, whereas in Australia even sands with only 5% heavy minerals are mined. The potential for new mineral deposits in Sri Lanka is indeed high. Geological investigations have revealed that the tectonic boundary between the central Highland Complex and the Vijayan Complex located in the east, and which runs from Trincomalee to Ussangoda is a major mineralized belt. Apart from the 11 hot springs, all lying along the 300 km boundary, there is evidence for base metal deposits, sulphides, gems, nickel-bearing serpentinites, massive magnetites and even diamonds. This mineralized belt runs into the sea at Trincomalee where there is a very deep submarine canyon suitable for even Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC). Similarly at Ussangoda, there appears to be evidence fora small subduction zone. Sri Lanka has had a thriving mineral industry spanning for thousands of years and from among them, iron-smelting and gold mining are of great significance. There is ample evidence that the ancient Sri Lankans possessed a mineral technology that was way ahead of its time. The gold industry in ancient Sri Lanka as recorded in the great historical chronicles such as Mahavansa and Culawansa certainly thrived during the periods of the great kings of Sri Lanka. The Yudaganawa area in the North Central province, prominent during King Dutugemunu s time, is an example. The village names beginning with Ran (gold in Sinhala), quite interestingly, lie in the Central Highland Complex. What is unique is that modern geological surveys also indicate gold occurrences in many of these areas. The archaeological evidence clearly points to a truly amazing clay industry and rock masonry. The giant stupas bear sufficient testimony to this. Even at present, the age hardening of clay in bricks used in the construction of stupas and buildings, is not properly understood to any degree of certainty. The ancient mining industry of Sri Lanka had sociological importance as well. The treasury of the King to which all valuable mineral commodities were brought, had a controlling influence on the mining fraternities as depicted in the ancient caste system of the country. There was no slave labour and all mining groups (gold, iron, copper, clay etc) belonged to different heirarchies, but all were treated equally well by the king. The Eppawala phosphate deposit is unique in its geology and mineral value. However, it is located in an area of great cultural and environmental value to Sri Lanka. This leads us to the monetary versus cultural conflict associated with mineral resources, and the confrontation goes on. While one could very easily attach a price tag on any mineral resource, the cultural heritage and environmental value can never be assessed in monetary terms. We are a nation with over 2000 years of recorded history and our children are heirs to a cultural legacy jealously guarded by our great forefathers. Let us get our priorities right! * Lecture at the Organization of Professional Associations, October

185 55 th International Pugwash Conference, Hiroshima, Japan, July 22-27,2005 Sustainable Development and Non- Military Threats to Security Impact of the Tsunami of December on Matara district, Sri Lanka Mrs S K (Agnes) Mendis The tsunami that was triggered by a sub-ocean earthquake near hdonesia reached the eastern sea coast of Sri Lanka (around 9.15 am) on December 26, 2005, and hit Matara district in the Southern province about 2 hours later. The earthquake was later reckoned to have been of magnitude 9.3 on the Richter scale. This was by far the biggest natural disaster in living memory in Sri Lanka. The historical chronicle Mahavamsa has documented a similar occurrence in the 3 rd century BC, when the sea had swept in to the kingdom of Kelaniya, near the present capital Colombo. That occurrence thought by some to be a legend, is now seen as a historical event. Immediately following the tsunami, a number of foreign governments and international aid agencies and non-government organizations responded to the Sri Lanka government s call for assistance. Aid which flooded in included medical supplies, dry rations, a variety of equipment including tents for temporary housing, and trained personnel, to assist Sri Lanka state officers and volunteers. The immediate rescue, rehabilitation, and restoration program was handled by the district administration in the nine coastal districts that were directly impacted by the tsunami. Following a joint ADB, World Bank, and Japan Bank Preliminary Joint Tsunami Damage Assessment report, a Task Force for Rebuilding the Nation, TAFREN, was set up by President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunge, which includes personnel from private and public sectors, and international organizations. TAFREN appointed nine Committees to study the situation in these nine districts and report on remedial measures taken, and the present situation, with recommendations for further action to achieve normalcy. These Committees started their work on March 10, 2005, and were expected to complete and submit their reports by April 15, This author was appointed as Team Leader of the TAFREN team to Matara district, with a land area of 1,282.5 sq km and a coast line of 55 km. Most of the physical damage was confined to 74 of 263 coastal Grama-Niladhari Administrative Divisions where the impact spread up to about 1 km inland in some places. The area covers 297 of 438 Census blocks where 16,255 censushousing units were registered. Matara town, the main urban, commercial and administrative center of the district had a pre-tsunami estimated population of 43,456 with a population density of approx. 600 persons per sq km. As at 10 1h March 2005, 82,067 persons from 20,675 families are affected. The official death toll is 1,321, and 601 persons are reported missing. There are 9491 displaced persons from 2,235 families. These are the result of maybe a half hour of tsunami impact. 3,086 displaced persons were in 22 camps, whilst 6405 were with host families, mainly relatives and friends. A total of 257 children have lost either one parent or both. A false tsunami alarm was given around midnight on March 25, in Matara, which gave a closeup of early alarm systems already in place, and the impact on the already traumatized population in camps, which we experienced directly. 156

186 The TAFREN study and report to the President is under the following sub-heads: Main priorities for recovery Economy and Livelihoods Education Health Socio-political tensions Local capacity of governance structures Gender Impact on the environment Land tenure and access to land Infrastructure needs Housing Water and sanitation Transport: Roads and Railways Power and energy Telecommunications Fisheries Tourism The Sectoral Financing Needs for Matara District ($ Million) are estimated as follows: Education 3.76 Health 3.24 Housing Power 5.83 Water & Sanitation 8.66 Fisheries Tourism 8.00 Roads Railways 10.5 Total % of country Total 7.8 Source: ADB, JBIC and World Bank, Sri Lanka 2005 Preliminary Joint Tsunami Damage Assessment The TAFREN team consisted of the following: Agnes Mendis (Team Leader, CIDA), Sumith Pilapitiya (World Bank), Yudhish Omprasadam (TAFREN), D.L. O. Mendis (Civil Society), Nuwan Jayawardena (CEA, Galle) L.K. Priyantha Kumara (Civil Society) and Sampat Mallavaarachchi (Asst. Director, Planning, Matara), in consultation with Dayantha Abhayaratna (Chamber of Commerce J. Pathirana (Asst. Director, Planning, Matara), and M. C Dhammika (Asst. Director, Planning, Matara) Agnes Mendis, April 5,

187 Nature of Commons and its Challenges Aiichiro Mogi* Introduction These days the concept of commons 1 has been reconsidered from several points of view. One of the view points is how to apply this concept to establish a sustainable local resource management. Others are to seek to get clues from commons experiences for addressing global climate change, a sort of global commons management problem. Recently new commons, such as digital intellectual property areas relating to information technologies is in pursuit. Commons is becoming a buzzword now. However, commons as an institution is not easy rather complicated. One should take a cautious approach. The term seems to be getting ahead of itself. To start with the reason why such interest in commons came in is described. Then the tragedy of the commons dispute is reviewed. Through portraying the dispute the original paper s provocative nature and its impacts are examined and true understanding of commons is to be pursued. Finally in order to activate commons situations in real practical fields some workable principles are discussed. The commons concept becoming a focal point today In the world there are lots of examples of commons 2 whose resources are collectively or communally used. They are pastures, grazing lands, swidden fallows, inland and coastal fisheries, seashores, rivers and lakes, woodlands, forests, village tanks, ponds, and other irrigation systems. Since grass, firewood, fish, water are renewable resources, they do not perish as far as they are hunted, cultivated, and used appropriately. However, as decline of rainforests, for example, which is a representative case, facing the threat of extinction of lots of commons is the phenomenon of the world today. If people s activities in the commons are compared with those in the market economy, decline of commons is not necessarily recognized as a critical matter. Common property system mostly characterised in the commons does not seem to be fitted by nature to the system in the market economy. Looking back at history, lots of commons perished through the process of division, privatisation, notably enclosures in England. If we take a measuring rod of performance on the basis of market economy, decline of commons should be inevitable. Therefore from that point of view most of such records of decline in the modernisation process did not matter and actually people felt them negligible until fairly recently. Renaissance of the commons concept coming to the present scene reflects the recent great change of recognition about environmental and resource problems as a global issue. The report called Our Common Future prepared by Brundtland Commission in 1987 and the declaration at Bergen Conference held in 1990 proposed the concept sustainable development as a keyword influencing public opinions and later policy-makings in the world. Following this course of policy actions, at the UN Conference on Environment and Development held at Rio de Janeiro in 1992 the Statement on Forestry Management 3 together with Rio Declaration and Agenda 21 was adopted. Because forestry is quite a related area of commons, we are going to look at more closely. The basic message of the statement is the promotion of sustainable management of the forests. At the same time the statement includes that state policy should not take biased toward central control but should make much account of the role of forest dwellers. The statement says: National forest policies should recognize and duly support the identity, culture and the rights of indigenous people, their communities and other communities and forest dwellers. Appropriate conditions should be promoted for these groups to enable them to have an economic stake in * President of Keio Academic Enterprise Co Ltd, an affiliate of Keio University in Japan and Former Director of Research Institute of Capital Formation, Development Bank of Japan. Also a member of the International Association for the Study of the Commons. 158

188 forest use, perform economic activities, and achieve and maintain cultural identity and social organization, as well as adequate levels of livelihood and well-being, through, inter alia, those land tenure arrangements which serve as incentives for the sustainable management of forests. Commons is about to become an effective concept for forest management, which was recognised not as an outmoded model but the one promoted to a good example and institution for sustainable use of forests. As mentioned above the commons concept has been closed-up as an institutional mechanism in terms of sustainable use of resources and conservation of global environment. But until recently Garrett Hardin s challenging article called the Tragedy of the Commons in Science magazine in 1968 arguing that commons inevitably ruin because of common property regime caused enormous impacts in terms of propagating negative image of the commons and influences on economists, policy-makers, and practitioners of economic development. The tragedy of the commons dispute In the article the tragedy of the commons Hardin asks the reader to envision a pasture open to all in suppositional medieval England. He then examines the structure of this situation from the perspective of a rational herdsman. Each herdsman receives a direct benefit from his own animals and suffers delayed costs from the deterioration of the commons when his and others cattle overgraze. Each herdsman is motivated to add more and more animals because he receives the direct benefits of his own animals and bears only a share of the costs resulting from overgrazing. Hardin concludes: Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit - in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all. (Hardin 1968, Science ) Hardin tries to derive a lesson that when common property resources are involved, the rational behaviour of each individual implies the irrationality for the whole group. He argues the necessity of break-up of common property into either state-control or private ownership. He does not believe in the existence of the common approach shared by people. Hardin s contentious arguments caused numerous reflections. Most economists with few exceptions 4 found right time to propagate a school of thought, supported by Demsetz (1967) having written an article almost in parallel with Hardin s, insisting that the tragedy of the commons is necessarily caused by the absence of the private property arrangements for the ownership and use of the commons and that the dilemma can be resolved only by privatisation that internalises costs and benefits, reduces uncertainty, eliminates free-riders, and results in the prudent management of the natural environment and a rational use of its resources. On the other hand political scientists led by Ostrom, sociologists and cultural anthropologists felt uneasy about this arguments from their findings at real fields of the study 5 and the accumulations of past theoretical thoughts in their disciplines. Discussing common property resources, it is important to grasp the characteristics held by these resources and to distinguish between the resource and the property rights regime in which the resource is held. Common property resources share two important characteristics: difficulty in excludability and a high degree of subtractability. The first one, excludability, the physical nature of the resource, is such that controlling access by potential users may be costly and in extreme virtually impossible. Migratory resources such as fish, wildlife, and groundwater pose apparent problems for regulating access. Similarly pasture and forest lands typically pose problem of exclusion. For large bodies of water, the global atmosphere, exclusion is more difficult. 159

189 The second one, subtractability means: Each user is capable of subtracting from the welfare of other users. The level of exploitation by one user adversely affects the ability of another user to exploit the resource. Subtractability (or rivalry or congestion) is the source of the potential divergence between individual and collective rationality. If one user harvests fish, the catch per unit of fishing effort of other fishermen declines. Hence common property resource is a group of resources for which exclusion is difficult and joint use involves subtractability. For another point, regarding classification by ownership we define four categories of property rights in which resources are held: 1) open-access, 2) state property, 3) communal property, and 4) private property. Full and longer definitions are as follows. 1) Open access: The absence of well-defined property right. Access to the resource is unregulated and free and open to everyone; Many offshore ocean fisheries before the 20 th century or the global atmosphere so far provide few examples. 2) State property: Rights to the resource are vested exclusively in government which makes decisions concerning access to the resource and the level and nature of exploitation; Public resources also included to which use-rights and access have not been specified; Nature of the state property regime has coercive powers of enforcement. 3) Communal property: Use-rights for the resource are controlled by an identifiable group and are not privately owned or managed by governments; the rights of the group may be legally recognised; there exist rules concerning who may use the resource, who is excluded from using the resource, and how the resource should be used; more customary names are common property, a common, commons. 4) Private property: Individuals have right to undertake socially acceptable uses, and have duty to refrain from socially unacceptable uses. Others have duty to refrain from preventing socially acceptable uses, and have a right to expect that only socially acceptable uses will occur. Ostrom and her camp of commons study define a class of resources as common-pool resource 6 in order to avoid misunderstanding of widespread use of common property, particularly at Hardin s sense. In this article a short and popular term commons is used for the meaning of resource management system under the communal property regime, which is almost the same as Ostrom s common-pool resources or CPRs. The pasture on which Hardin makes a metaphor of the tragedy of the commons is no equivalent of English medieval common of pasture in history. Hardin s pasture should be classified as open space in the above definition. In the historical real common of pasture there existed rules which restricted members who had rights of access to the resource and stipulated/customary regulations of use, such as levant and couchant 7 limiting the number of grazing cattle for the member in the field. Hardin s conclusion of unavoidable tragedy follows from his assumptions of open access, lack of constraints on individual behaviour, conditions in which demand exceeds supply, and resource users who are incapable of changing rules. What does commons really mean? Hardin takes for instance pastures, lakes, oceans, national parks as common property. In reality they are at least not private and seem to be an outer space located outside the private sphere. In such space everyone can do anything without any restraints. If we suppose the private sphere be a positive space, the space allocated in such condition is a residual and deserves to be called a negative space, more or less a wasteland. If this is the case, the term commons labelled for such space should be a misnomer. Historically commons is created among people because it is needed. Commons is usually located outside of a private space physically but becomes an inner space 160

190 for relevant people at the level of consciousness. Hardin s discussion starts with commons, an empty wasteland; rivalry and congestion among peer herders happen as more herders come to commons ; then the tragedy proceeds and the commons eventually ruins. That commons is not commons. The commons never becomes commons but stays as a wasteland. Dasgupta (1993, 2007) suggests dividing commons concept into two types; local commons and global commons. Also his statement cited below is worth reading. Because what are problems for the global commons are by no means problems for the local commons, however, it is the global commons that have shaped popular images of all common-property resources. Such image-making has been unfortunate, because, unlike global commons, the images that are invoked by the tragedy of the commons are mostly not the right ones when applied to local commons. The background of the such commons is that local commons (such as village ponds and tanks, pastures and threshing-grounds, watershed drainage and riverbeds, and sources of firewood, medicinal herbs, bamboo, palm products, resin, gum, and so forth) are in no society open to use to all. They are open only to those having historical rights, through kinship ties, community membership, and so forth. Here comes the most important part of Dasgupta s passage: those having historical rights-of-use tend, not surprisingly, to be protective of these resources. Since it is a usual situation that local commons are easy enough to monitor, and so their use is often regulated in great detail by the community either through the practice and enforcement of norms, or through deliberate allocation of use, the source of the problems associated with the management of local commons is often not the users, but other agencies. Dividing commons into local and global commons may be functional. Again, regarding attributes of the commons whether right of access to the common resource is open or closed is also plausible in terms of taxonomic thinking. The atmosphere over the globe and outer oceans accessible by everybody are quite different from those commons such as pastures, forests, and coastal fisheries. Because so called global commons are freely accessible, pollution of the air, increase of the density of carbon dioxide, and decrease of marine resources happen. But expressing these states of things as the tragedy of the commons is again a misuse of that term. As far as the atmosphere or the oceans were inexhaustible resources, human beings did not recognize that they were commons. They resided outside of human beings in the residual space for human activities. Once humans realized that congestion, pollution, and overfishing happened, these outer space became the commons. In other words when people start thinking that we should do something because of having awareness of the crisis, the atmosphere and the oceans become inner space or commons for humans. Examples of local commons today such as village tanks and pastures might have been global commons when people could freely use those resources. Commons is a system which functions as a boundary between the human social system and the natural system; both systems are a part of the whole eco-systems. 8 Seashore or beach is an example. At seashore the sea and the land meet. It has both attributes of the sea and the land. Seashores have been the locations of good number of commons at many places. In Japan fishery commons has been created for fishing associations. One type of fishery commons for the seashore has rules and stipulations including gathering rights for seaweeds, shellfishes, and bottom clinging aquatic animals etc. Seashores are also a good repository of natural lives. As commons constructs the boundary between the human system and the natural system, humans inevitably conform to natural laws on the one hand, nature also has to be influenced by human activities on the other. 9 The eco-system operates under the natural laws. If a development project is carried out in a manner disregarding those natural laws, the natural system suffers damage and negative impacts on both human and social systems are caused. Ordinary economic development often infringes the natural system; on the contrary commons operates under the way observing the law of natural system. In other words, commons operates on the principle of sustainability, because sustainability only holds obeying the natural laws. 161

191 Geographically commons are often located on the boundary of two systems, such as the human system and the natural system. Seashore and coastal fishery are the cases; because they are positioned on the boundary between the land (dominated by human activities) and the sea (dominated by nature). In Japan forest commons are found at village forests near populated area. Such a village forest is located on the boundary between a village (under the human system) and a distant mountain (controlled by the natural system). In towns and cities empty spaces function as commons. Village greens and town greens are really commons in England; the legal status of them is usually communal. The meaning of the boundary, rather in abstractive sense, is a border sharing with the inner space (inside of buildings) and outer space (outside of buildings). In other words it is the boundary between private or quasi private space and public or quasi public space. The surface of the earth in the globe might be recognised as commons because it is the boundary between the atmosphere and the earth. According to an architect, Christopher Alexander, intentional re-creation of commons, once located in the cities, is badly needed in order to rejuvenate cities. He argues that such commons should be designed as a positive space in the city rather than a negative space, as such that location has been treated once the commons in the city in decline. Making commons to be a positive space means that such space once located at the outer space become internalized within the city s living space. 10 This is no coincidence that both maladies of the environment and the city occur by the artificial disconnection of systems and spaces. If we put positive emphasis on a border or boundary connecting neighbouring spaces, we might be able to cure such diseases. Hardin s message that ruin is the destination for commons seems to be a thought experiment. Rather than destiny of demise the essence of commons is its sustainability. However, it is very regrettable that these commons tend to be diminishing. Tropical forests are vulnerable to destructive logging. The atmosphere as a commons counteracts against the human system through rising of temperature most allegedly by accumulation of greenhouse effect gas caused by human activities in the past two centuries. It is plausible to say that these phenomena are not the tragedy of the commons in Hardin s sense. But in reality they are the result of violation by forces from outside of the commons. This is the same observation just as Dasgupta s mentioned above. Among pressing forces coming from outside of the commons the marketisation of society or the market principle is fair to say the main culprit in recent history. Rules and customs protecting commons in the past has been replaced by the market principle. Commons, market, and social common capital Along the progress of marketisation and capitalisation there were many evidences in European history where modernisation started that decline of commons proceeded quickly. In England two great waves of enclosure movements affected the society drastically, that resulted in diminishing many types of commons. Enclosure movements changed ways of farming from human activities for living to businesses of landowners and agricultural capitalists. The principles of commons and markets may contradict with each other. The difference of assumptions that commons presumes communal ownership whereas the market presumes private one is typical. At the same time they contradict at the ways of activities. Using Thorstein Veblen s terms, the activities in the commons are those of industry, but the activities in the market are those of business. Industry is an undertaking to cultivate things for living on the one hand, business is also an undertaking but to make a profit on the other. 11 Business does not matter with where it goes, either in forests or in fisheries; either in villages or in the cities. The incentive to preserve commons from business point of view is much weaker than the one for the case of industry. Because the rules of commons are embodied in people s works in practice, commons can only survive through people s actual activities and conducts. 12 Agricultural commons does not last unless farming continues. If a tropical forest becomes under the control of the state and swidden 162

192 cultivation which has been carried out in the forest is restricted, there will be more possibility to ruin the forest rather than to maintain it, because without people in swidden the extent of caring the forests will diminish. If opposing to marketisation is the only strategy to preserve commons, resource and environmental problems charge too much pressure and responsibility on people who rely on, use, and maintain commons. Is it fair that when developing countries try to put in practice the modern evangelical benefits which western industrial countries once preached as colonial powers, they now preach against such benefits but advocate anti-modern benefits to those countries in order to alleviate problems which western countries originally caused? 13 If industrialised countries insist that let themselves seek market opportunities on the one hand, let developing countries go back and keep commons principles on the other, it should be blamed for their self-centred way. 14 Although the principles of the commons and those of the market are different, keeping and using commons at a sustainable manner is not necessarily incompatible with economic activities in the markets. If we acknowledge the fact that the market economy itself is basically supported by such workings of commons from the bottom, the principles of commons and the market could complement with each other. Today the atmosphere and the oceans are facing a crisis of deprivation. It should be given higher priority to re-position global environment as really a new commons. Although it is almost impossible to assign the same living content as what historical commons have, new commons should be equipped with appropriate explicable foundations and management legitimacy. As discussed above, only looking back to daily lives and making much account of human living will lead to prepare the notion of preserving global environment in public both in industrialised and developing countries and then it will be possible to create international co-operations. Uzawa (1999, 2005) proposes an innovative idea for economics, the theory of social common capital in which commons plays an invaluable role. That capital is generally classified into three categories: natural capital, social infrastructure, and institutional capital. They illustrate the nature of functions performed by social common capital and the social perspectives associated with them. Natural capital consists of natural resources such as forests, rivers, lakes, wetlands, coastal seas, oceans, water, soil, and above all the earth s atmosphere. They all share the common feature of being regenerative, subject to intricate and subtle forces of the ecological and biological mechanisms. They provide all living organisms, particularly human beings, with the environment in which it is possible to sustain their lives and to regenerate themselves. However, rapid economic development and population growth in the last several decades, with the accompanying vast changes in social conditions, have altered the delicate ecological balance of natural capital to such a significant extent that its effectiveness has been lost in many parts of the world. Social infrastructure is another important component of social common capital. It consists of indispensable physical infrastructure such as roads, bridges, sewage, public utilities, among others. Social common capital also includes institutional capital, essential institutions for the society, such as healthcare, education, judicial and police system, public services, financial and monetary institutions etc. Social common capital provides members of society with services crucial in maintaining human and cultural lives. Social common capital is in principle not appropriated by individual members of the society, but held as common property. Unique nature of social common capital is that the basis of selecting those categories as capital is that they have the same characteristic as irreplaceable attributes for the human living. 15 Uzawa accomplishes analytical aspects of social common capital particularly in theoretical economics terms such as formulating intertemporal optimal resource allocation etc. What is relevant to the commons discussion is that the theory incorporates attributes of commons and gives foundations to the commons concept 163

193 from economics perspectives. However, remaining challenge for the working of social common capital is how to devise institutional frameworks compatible with the theory. According to Uzawa (2005) the management of social common capital is entrusted, on a fiduciary basis to maintain autonomous social institutions, to provide the environmental framework within which all human activities are conducted and the allocation mechanism through which market institutions work. We should make much account of these principles. What we need is how to design such institutions in practice. Aspect of Commons management in practice In the development policy arena, participatory resource management, particularly for forestry in the developing countries, has been introduced and struggling through as the policy response to the failures of state-management and commercialized schemes. Public-or-private dispute is a bit theological argument without viewing the reality in the field, where common interest should be catered for and rooms for necessary collaboration are plenty. In the urban front participatory management of forestry has been developed recently in industrialised countries including Japan. People living in the city become involved with the management in terms of volunteering forest works, acquiring part of forest grounds and footing the bills of forest maintenance costs. At any participatory process, not as straight private nor public but common approach, either for forestry or irrigation works etc, consensus building for decision making is crucial. Who participates the meeting of decision making in representing village people? Who is responsible for the matter? Who relates with the project? How is the legitimacy of the programme protected and nurtured? They are all aspects of activities generating in the commons related fields. Universal principles like equitable treatment of all stakeholders do not necessarily protect local people s interest which directly relates with the resource conditions. On the other hand the idea that the resource only benefits the inhabitants in the locality should be blamed for its parochial localism under today s context, such as globally connected interest and diversified features of resources. Forests, for example, having diversified functions from timber use to provision of recreation and biodiversity, involve various people concerned globally. Therefore open-minded localism 16 which intentionally opens to the outside of the commons boundary is the key feature for sustainable resource management in which collaborative works between inside commoners and outside stakeholders. In other words collaborative governance of the resource management should be in place. Regarding involvement of outsiders including professionals, even academics, what condition makes it legitimate? We think that the principle of commitment 17 would contribute to the legitimacy of their participation. Commitment means that one should take responsibility in any involvement with certain projects as long as one participates or relates with. Commitment should be borne by outsiders such as experts but also by insiders. As practice of such local governance leads to lowering the fence of insider/outsider consciousness created in the human mind and resolving rigid nested 18 structure of administrative strata and layers, collaborations between stakeholders over the layers could be realised. Regarding nested structure of top-bottom relations in order to activate real empowerment and resolve rigid nested structure, subsidiarity principle 19 should be adopted in order to hold legitimacy for progressing the reform process. Introducing such local governance can connect commons management usually confined in the local community with more universal values, such as publicness and democracy from the bottom-up. In other words these practices being carried out at the development frontier or at civic activities based on such principles will complement the working of commons and also fill the institutional void of the theory of social common capital. 164

194 Conclusion In this article we take a slightly different route to position the important role of commons in the society away from the usual type of commons discussions. This article might be understood as fragments of thought. Hardin was a great teacher by negative example. However, everyone returns to Hardin then starts to think again. We owe Hardin very much. What most we are disappointed with Hardin s contentions is that he missed the need of commons or communal needs in people as far as they live in a society, not in a wasteland. Maybe he would deny the existence of communal values and albeit its effectiveness. We intend to deepen the concept of commons. Following Mamiya (2002) s insightful and thought out interpretation, commons is a system which functions as a boundary between the human social system and natural system. Commons does not work unless it accommodates to the law of nature. This characteristic has potential for applying to the conservation front. Apart from local/global commons discussion we dig narrowly into the meaning of commons because nature of commons should hold at any scale. Therefore, unless we think commons one step further, humans will not be able to establish such accordance on abating global environmental issues. The theory of social common capital is formulated based on the recognition that there is a capital whose services provide irreplaceable attributes for the human living. Because the principles are shared with commons concept, the theory could help provide theoretical underpinning for commons. In the development front importance of commons has become shared among professionals. As more practitioners equipped with considerations of commons, real fields of development may perform better. However management of commons is still a big task. New ideas and practices are devised on the new approach of grass-roots democracy, public participation, and local-level planning. Communities of resource users are no longer isolated and resources often have multiple uses. Proposals of open-minded localism for the stance of communities on the one hand and the principle of commitment for stakeholders and advisers from the outside on the other are worth consideration. Lastly I should quote Professor Uzawa s remark on commons: To be simple the concept of commons is based on the notion preserving things as dear as life itself. 20 Acknowledgements The author acknowledges Professor Hirofumi Uzawa (Professor Emeritus of the University of Tokyo) and Professor Yousuke Mamiya (Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University). Professor Mamiya s articles on commons are always insightful and Mamiya (2002) is the direct source of ideas that this paper based upon. Regarding Professor Uzawa he recommended me to start the study of commons in the early 1990s and has given continuous inspirations. Lastly the best gratitude goes to Mr DLO Mendis who invited me for the colloquium and gave the opportunity to take up this topic. References Alexander, C., Ishikawa, S., and Silverstein, M. (1977). A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. Oxford University Press, New York. Berkes, F., and Farvar, M.T. (1989). Introduction and Overview. In Berkes, F. (ed.), Common Property Resources. Belhaven, London, pp BIIC (British Institute of International and Comparative Laws). (2003). Susidiarity: A preliminary discussion paper. Paper presented at Lisbon International Symposium on Global Drug Policy, October, Lisbon. Bromley, D. (1991). Environment and Economy. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford. Dasgupta, P. (1982). The Control of Resources. Basil Blackwell, Oxford. 165

195 Dasgupta, P. (1993). An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Demsetz, H. (1967). Toward a Theory of Property Rights. American Economic Review 57 (2): Hardin, G. (1968). The tragedy of the commons. Science 162: Inoue, M. (2004). In Search of Commons Philosophy. (in Japanese), Iwanami-Shoten, Tokyo. Mamiya, Y. (2002). Commons and Resource/Environmental Problems. In Sawa, T., and Ueta, K. (eds). Economic Theory of Environment. Vol.1 Environmental Economics and Public Policy. (in Japanese), Iwanami-Shoten, Tokyo, pp McCay, B.J., and Acheson, J.M. (eds) (1987). The Question of the Commons. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Mogi, A. (2004). Commons in the world. In Uzawa, H., and Mogi, A. (eds). Social Overhead Capital, Cities and the Commons. (in Japanese), University of Tokyo Press, Tokyo, pp Ostrom, E. (1986). Issues of definition and theory: Some conclusions and hypothesis. National Research Council, Proceedings of the Conference on Common Property Resource Management, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C.,pp Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons. Cambridge University Press. New York. Uzawa, H. (1999). Toward a general theory of social overhead capital. In Chichilnisky (ed.). Markets, information, and uncertainty. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. End Notes 1 Commons is an awkward word in English language. The same word is used for both the singular and plural terms. 2 The following list is representative examples of commons in the world, although not exhaustive, in which research works are well-developed by social scientists. Fishery: fishing lands(subarctic, Canada), valli(italy), acadja(west Africa), iriai(japan) Water resources: village tanks (South India, Sri Lanka), subak(indonesia), zanjera(philippines), boneh (Iran), huerta (Spain) Grazing land: common of pasture(england), alp(switzerland), agdal(morocco), hema(middle- East), dina(mali) Agricultural land: open field(medieval time in England), highland farming(the Andes, South America), wetland farming(kalimantan, Indonesia), jhum(swidden, North-East India) Forestry: panchayart(nepal), jhum(india), lading(malyasia), kaingin(philippines), iriai-rin (Japan). 3 The formal title is Non-legally binding authoritative statement of principles for a global consensus on the management, conservation, and sustainable development of all types of forests. 4 Notably Partha Dasgupta made critical comments in the Control of the Resources (1982), saying that It would be difficult to locate another passage of comparable length and fame containing as many errors as Hardin s message in the Tragedy of the Commons. 5 In the commons in the real fields the following attributes for sustenance are found. : 1) limited number of members who can access the resource, 2) explicit and/or implicit rules which administer use of resource, 3) recognition and agreement on rules and customs inside/outside the regime. 6 Cited in Ostrom, E.(1986) 7 The legal term which literally means rising and lying down. In law, it denotes that space of time which cattle have been on the land in which they have had time to lie down and rise again over winter. 8 Mamiya, Y. (2002). Professor Mamiya s original interpretation and positioning of commons. 166

196 9 Ibid. 10 Mamiya, Y. (2002). Professor Mamiya s original interpretation and positioning of commons. 11 Cited in Mamiya, Y. (2002). 12 Mamiya, Y. (2002). Professor Mamiya s original interpretation and positioning of commons. 13 Cited in Mamiya, Y. (2002). 14 Ibid. 15 Mamiya, Y. (2002). Professor Mamiya s paraphrase and interpretation of Uzawa s social common capital. 16 The term is coined by Professor Makoto Inoue; Inoue (2004) and his other writings. 17 Ibid. 18 To nest means to house a smaller group within a larger group in order to alleviate free-riding at collective actions by easier trust building at the smaller group. Take administrative example, a chain of layers exists: hamlet-village-county-city-state. However, multi-layered nested structure causes different problem of top-bottom consciousness and conservatism which obstructs reforming minds in the members. 19 The word means that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed effectively at a more immediate or local level. The word is originally derived from the Latin word subsidiarius and has its origins in Catholic social teaching. The justification for this principle is moral, stemming from a conviction that each human individual is endowed with an inherent and inalienable worth, or dignity, and accordingly that all social groupings should ultimately be at the service of the individual (BIIC 2003). 20 The ending words of Uzawa s lecture at the symposium on Questioning civic society, corporations, and ownership from the perspective of social common capital held at Waseda University in Tokyo in September

197 A Missing Link: Transfer of Hydraulic Civilizations from Sri Lanka to Japan Aiichiro Mogi* Introduction Sri Lanka has a highly developed hydraulic engineering heritage in the shape of reservoir tanks and several derivatives of water channels still being used today in order to accommodate water and soil conservation ecosystems from ancient times. In Japan at relatively drier area corresponding reservoir tank structures were also built in ancient times and have been maintained over the centuries. One notable example of such tank named Mannou-Ike, exists in Kagawa Prefecture near the Inland Sea of Seto, which was first built in the early eighth century, then restored in the ninth century in the similar design as that of Sri Lanka under the command of an eminent Buddhist monk, Kukai, who was once was sent as a student to China where he mainly studied Buddhism, esoteric doctrine, also scientific knowledge and presumably civil engineering as well. He might bring such knowledge and technology back to Japan and might apply such skills to Mannou-Ike restoring works. As far as ancient documents tell us that interchange of knowledge and information took place between Sri Lanka and China, particularly visits of Chinese Buddhist monks to Sri Lanka for the purpose of studying the authentic Theravada Buddhism. One representative figure was Fa-Hsien who traveled to Sri Lanka in the early fifth century. One can fairly expect that those monks not only studied Buddhism but also science and technology either indigenously developed in Sri Lanka or imported from India or the Middle East and then brought them back to China. This article is still one conjecture but the author contemplates that this discussion creates sound and good imagination of important relationship between countries in terms of mainly technological transfers but also socio-cultural implications. Main features of the ancient Sri Lankan irrigation system In the survey of world civilizations, Arnold Toynbee described the ancient irrigation system of Sri Lanka as an amazing system of waterworks where hill streams were tapped and their water guided into giant storage tanks from which ran channels into other large tanks. Below each tank were hundreds of little tanks. The irrigation system has been sustained since before the third century BC. 1 The reason why this peculiar system evolves is partly the climate and the geography. The south-west of Sri Lanka has ample water and is known as the wet-zone. The rest of the island is referred to as the dry-zone. Intercepting these zones is a mountainous region from which rivers flow out. The dry-zone is prone to droughts, and irrigation works to regulate, transport, and conserve water are essential to support agriculture. Until the eleventh century large-scale irrigation networks of reservoirs and canals with over 20,000 village tanks, and a compatible social system with such environment evolved. In Sri Lanka successive kings and monarchs unmistakenly took the initiative of supervising the construction of massive tanks and canals. The purpose and conviction of building the irrigation systems are depicted by the words of King Parakrama Baru ( AD): Let not even a small quantity of water obtained by the rain, go to the sea, without benefiting man. 2 Karl Wittfogel argued that the political economy of oriental hydraulic societies engendered centralization of power in a despot, with bureaucracy and unpaid labour. Such despotism is unlikely * President of Keio Academic Enterprise Co Ltd, an affiliate of Keio University in Japan and Former Director of Research Institute of Capital Formation, Development Bank of Japan. Also a member of the International Association for the Study of the Commons. 168

198 to have sustained the irrigation system for long as the political system is overly dependent on the sagacity and skills of the rulers. 3 Contrary to Wittfogel s contentions, Edmund Leach showed that the villages in Sri Lanka were highly decentralised in a manner that was the very antithesis of the state control. 4 This aspect of hydraulic civilisation in Sri Lanka is very unique. Regarding technology used for irrigation system in Sri Lanka hydraulic control through weirs, anicuts, sluices and valve pits testifies to indigenous technological expertise. The valve pit or bisokotuwa is a pivotal invention in the construction of tanks. There is evidence for substantial indigenous innovation and skill in the construction of irrigation works. Yoda-Ela canal, which is over 54 miles long, has one stretch of over 17 miles with an altitude difference of only 6 inches per mile, such an astonishingly easy gradient, testifying to sophisticated surveying skill. 5 The village tanks along with the ancient large-scale irrigation works are a salient legacy that has sustained inhabitants over many centuries. However this ancient irrigation system reached its peak in the north-centre of the island: in Anuradhapura in the tenth century and in neighbouring Polonnaruwa in the eleventh century. Although the aftermath of Sri Lanka s hydraulic society under the colonial rule and the post-independence regime is very important to pursue and interesting, so far we would like to ascertain that such great hydraulic civilization was evolving in Sri Lanka in the relevant period when Chinese and Japanese monks encountered Indo-Sri Lankan civilizations over Buddhism. Travel of ideas Along so-called the Silk Road an extensive interconnected network of trade routes had been developed across the Asian continent connecting East, South and Western Asia with the Mediterranean world, including North Africa and Europe. The Silk Road was not only conduits for silk, but for many other products and was also very important paths for cultural and technological transmission by linking traders, merchants, pilgrims, monks, soldiers, nomads and urban dwellers from China to the west or the other way round for thousands of years. Europeans in the medieval period saw major technological advances taken place in China, such as movable type printing, gunpowder, the astrolabe, and the compass. Also the sea-routes via Southeast Asia, India, and the Muslim world were developed for merchants and travelers. 169

199 Regarding Sri Lanka, India, and China, according to the ancient documents the transfer/ interchange of knowledge and information took place fairly constantly, particularly through visits of Chinese Buddhist monks to Sri Lanka for the purpose of studying authentic theravada Buddhism. (See the attached Figure 1). One representative figure was Fa-Hsien 6 who traveled to Sri Lanka in the early fifth century extending his journey in search of Buddhist texts particularly those of the vinaya 7 in India. One can fairly expect that those monks not only studied Buddhism but also science and technology either indigenously developed in Sri Lanka or imported from India or Middle East and then brought them back to China. However what we miss in Fa-Hsien s book of travel is that although he mentioned prosperity (including jewels and pearls) and the beauty of Anuradhapura and environs, and the flourishing monasteries, he did not leave the descriptions of landscapes, tanks (no mention about the huge Tissa Wewa! ), and streams of the country in his book of travel. After Fa-Hsien several Chinese monks visited India to get access to Buddhism. Representative people were Hui-Seng and Sung Yun who stayed in India from 518 to 522, and the greatest of all the Buddhist pilgrim-scholar-diplomats was Hsuan-Tsang (or Xuanzang), who was in India between 629 and 645. The fifth important name is I-Ching, studying and travelling in India between 671 and 695. There was little evidence but other monks might visit Sri Lanka other than Fa-Hsien. On the other way round Kumarajiva, a monk, whose father was an Indian visited China in 386 to powerfully propagate Mahayanist doctrine. Again Amoghavajra whose father was a Brahmin from North India went to Sri Lanka then to China and taught Buddhism. His disciple Huiguo eventually taught Kukai early ninth century in Chang an, the Tang capital city. There were also many embassies from Sri Lanka during the fifth century. The interval between the fourth to the end of the seventh century may be the great Chinese-Indian-Sri Lankan period. Rice cultivation and China Although the dryland cultivation of rice went back 8,000 to 10,000 years in China, the wetland cultivation started at the latest 5,000 to 7,000 years ago. According to A. L. Buck, an American agronomist, Chinese arable part of the whole country could be divided into 9 agricultural areas: 1) Maize-millet-soybean area, 2) Spring wheat area, 3) Winter wheat-millet area, 4) Winter wheat-sorghum area, 5) Yangtze rice-wheat area, 6) Rice-tea area, 7) Szechwan rice area, 8) Double-cropping rice area, 9) Southwestern rice area. 8 People grow rice in five areas out of nine. In China the distinction between the rice-growing south and the wheat-or-millet growing north is fundamental and enduring. Therefore irrigation matters when the wet-rice cultivation is concerned. 9 Wet-rice cultivation is staple in the south of the line drawn between the north part of Szechwan basin and the north part of Yantze River. In terms of technical concept water control covers three interlinked categories: irrigation, drainage, and flood control. Irrigation, the supplementing of an insufficient water supply, may be carried out on almost any scale from the individual household to a whole province or nation. Drainage, the removal of excess water, tends to require greater investments of labour and other resources, and cannot usually be carried out without the cooperation of a relatively large community. Flood control along the great rivers requires enormous investments in construction and maintenance, but since it is literally a matter of life and death for thousands if not millions of their subjects, and often a matter of national survival as well, Chinese monarchs have made it a primary concern since very early times. 10 Typical irrigation methods which are utilized in the wet rice cultivation areas are: 1) gravityfed irrigation networks, 2) ponds, tanks, and reservoirs, 3) contour canals, 4) creek irrigation. All four types are quite prevalent at rice paddy fields in China. If there was a possibility to have information exchanges on construction works and management of water control, we presume 170

200 technology transfer of these methods of irrigation including tank related techniques. Historically the irrigation facilities using reservoirs and village tanks can be found in the Yangtze river-basin and much in the south and southwest of the country. Irrigation works in Japan Tanks and small reservoirs are the most ancient type of irrigation supply in Japan. They were probably introduced from Korea in about the fifth century AD. We call this span of time Kofun 11 period (the third to sixth centuries AD) in Japan. Many smaller tanks are identified as built in this period archeologically. Also technological base for building Kofun and the tank is said to be shared. Later in this country as feudal warrior class started building up their local bases and expanding the area of cultivated land under their control at least after the tenth century, larger irrigation networks based on small rivers and derivation canals became increasingly common. The proportion of land in Japan irrigated by tanks fell steadily. Before focusing on Kukai s works we should mention Gyouki 12 ( ) as his great predecessor of irrigation works. Gyouki was also a Buddhist monk and during his earlier days formed a strong religious group to help the poor. Because of its revolutionary nature the group was oppressed by the government. However, he was recognized later and became positioned as a higher rank in the main Buddhist order. At the same time he directed in constructing and restoring several irrigation works in Osaka area, of which Sayama-Ike is the most notable one, carried out in 731. In the process of excavation during recent restoration 13 of this reservoir many findings revealed how the inner structure of the bund, sluice, and spillways etc are. One feature to be noted is the way of using grasses and shrubs as reinforcing material for the bund building. Such adopted technique is also identified in some Chinese 14 and Korean 15 cases in the field. Kukai and Mannou-Ike works Along the progress of irrigation development in Japan we propose a symbolic example of the works involving one eminent Buddhist monk, Kukai ( ) (See Figure 4). He was born in Zentsu-ji, in Sanuki (the present Kagawa Prefecture in Shikoku Island. See Figure 5.) where this irrigation works is located. At the age of 31 He was sent to China (in the Thang Dynasty) as a student studying Buddhism, particularly esoteric (later tantrism) doctrines. Perhaps because he had accomplished the main subject, Buddhism, he is presumed to have studied other scientific disciplines including civil engineering in a relatively short two-year stay in China. Amongst 171

201 Japanese historical figures Kukai is thought to be a real genius. After coming home he eventually became involved in this fateful irrigation project.. Sanuki area has a comparatively drier climate even in the rainy season and few affluent rivers. 16 Plains in the region are little steeper than average and have few marshes and only rapid streams. Therefore historically tanks and reservoirs were developed for the irrigation purpose. In Sanuki approximately 16,300 tanks are now located the most densely in Japan (See Figure 6). Mannou-Ike was built in 702 by the local governor of Sanuki, which is still the largest irrigation tank (the present water storing capacity: 15,400 thousand tons) in Japan. In 821, it was heavily destroyed by a flood and the governor of Sanuki presented the petition to the Imperial Court saying that Kukai be commissioned as the person responsible for the repair work on the reservoir. The reason why the governor chose Kukai was that Sanuki was Kukai s homebase and he knew 172

202 that Kukai had been anxious about the rural living conditions and he had been respected by the native people. The incumbent emperor Saga appointed him as a superintendent of the restoration work of the reservoir. Main technical features 17 at the restoration work by Kukai are summarized as follows. 1. An arch-shaped bund was first designed for reservoir tank systems in Japan. 2. A spillway was introduced. 3. Renewal of the sluiceway. 4. A rock bed under the bund was made (protecting the bund from pressure at the time of discharging water). (Regarding these findings we very much owe to the reproduced works carried out by the staff of Obayashi Corporation, a civil engineering and construction company in Japan. Their estimation of original Kukai s plan and diagams are very much valuable.) The size and scale of Mannou-Ike (see the Box below) is far greater than other cases in Japan. Mannou-Ike is four to five times as large as Gyouki s Sayama-Ike. As far as an arch-shaped bund is concerned, it is quite unique to adopt such design in antiquity and the medieval period throughout the world. Nagata, a Japanese civil engineer, proposes the supposition that Kukai devised that idea through his observations of many arch-shaped stone bridges along the travel in China. 18 He might apply the principle of arch using the vertical gravity force to the water pressure to the bund horizontally. Introduction of the spillway and the rock bed, and improvement of the sluiceway structure might be influenced by or borrowed from the Chinese or imported technology from the other countries. 173

203 Later he became a very high priest of Shin-gon School (esoteric doctrine). We should also mention his another profile. In 828 he started a school named Shugei-Shuchi-In for the general public (first in Japanese history) in educating not only religion/philosophy but science, engineering, and other subjects. According to George Sarton 19, a Belgian-American scientific historian, Kukai should be ranked at the first place as a scientist in the ninth century from the point of human scientific history because of his contributions to restoring Mannou-Ike in such a technological accomplishment and also creating the school, Shugei-Shuchi-In, based on a creative principle on education. Box: Mannou-Ike (See attached Figures 7-16) Size: 138.5ha (the largest in Japan) Circumference: 20km Capacity: 15,400 thousand tons Command Area: 4,600ha History: First built: late or early 8th century Ku-Kai s restoration: 821 Restoration in the feudal period: 1631 Modern rebuilt: late 19th century and

204 Water usage: custom and practices In Mannou-Ike several rules of usage of water are in practice. In terms of remained documents we could only track back such custom to the medieval time, but such custom might have been used at the time of Kukai. As the case like the common resource such as irrigation water in the reservoir tanks, there are certain specific rules/regulations 20 to be observed by stakeholders of the resource in order to preserve such resource. The following are the features in Mannou-Ike case. (See also attached Figures 13 and 14) 1. Ordering of priority in using water; the crucial rule at the time of drought 2. Right of receiving water 21 at the first priority is retained by irrigators with written contracts (Shomon). 3. So-called Incense stick water : a way of controlling appropriation of water resources by way of firing time of a stick of incense for each irrigated paddy. 4. Annual celebration of the start of discharge of water (June) Such rules/regulations are quite prevalent in the commons situation in the world. The commons is a term used in environmental sociology and economics as a type of resource management 175

205 system under the communal property regime. In the historical commons there existed rules which restricted members who had rights of access to the resource and stipulated/customary regulations of use. 22 Ending words In Sri Lanka village tanks were built and maintained by villagers for keeping their living complemented by larger irrigation networks including huge reservoir tanks once built by kings and monarchs in the country. Those systems contributed to keeping eco-systems of the country far back centuries, being disrupted by the colonial rule but discovered by the same hand with Sri Lankan collaboration. Today people begin to reconsider the past development concept and look back to the importance of village tanks and their management, realising eco-friendly undertaking of irrigation systems in history. According to D.L.O.Mendis, the Kalaweva-Jayaganga ecosystem, a representative socio-hydraulic complex in the country, which houses the Yoda- Ela canal mentioned earlier, is a living system, a cultural landscape that is as functional and productive as was originally intended. 23 In Japan although the reservoir tank system has relatively smaller role in the agricultural irrigation from the point of all the country, it has a crucially important role in drier area in the country. Owing to Kukai s contributions in the old days Manou-Ike still works and keeps the traditional custom even if the ownership and control rests in the public authority, however in cooperation with private farmers at stake. The scale of Mannou-Ike is exceptional in Japan. Dominant part of irrigation tanks is owned and managed either by hamlets or mutually agreed cooperatives. Such tanks are often susceptible to natural decay, earthquakes and others. Proper management is essential for tanks to be free from disasters like floods. Irrigation tanks cannot be maintained without human cares, and such cares are taken by local people in each community. Dr Joseph Needham, author of Science and Civilization in China, specially mentioned the development of hydraulic engineering in Sri Lanka from ancient times in Civil Engineering section of that book. 24 At the same time in the introduction volume he acknowledged the travel 176

206 of ideas and techniques in terms of Chinese-Indian cultural and scientific contacts. 25 But he reservedly stated just comparison of technological developments of hydraulic engineering in both countries, and he did not mention direct influences from Sri Lankan technology towards Chinese one respectively. However, what we try to do here is to propose one conjecture. Do not these similarundertakings between countries inspire a sound and good imagination of important relationship in terms of technological transfers from Sri Lanka to Japan via China? The author believes that there are plenty of circumstantial evidences but yet exists a solid proof to support this conjecture. In addition to the researches based on documents, the comparative civil engineering and archeological approaches might be recommendable. This area of studies is very much worth trying and investigating, then establishing the proof in order to connect the missing link of civilizations. References Buck, J. L. (1937). Land Utilisation in China. Commercial Press, Shanghai. (Cited in the following Bray s book.) Bray, Francesca. (1986). The Rice Economies - Technology and Development in Asian Countries, Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Legge, James. (1886). A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms: Being an Account by the Chinese Monk Fa-Hsien of Travels in India and Ceylon (A.D ) in search of the Buddhist Books of Discipline, originally published by Clarendon Press, Oxford, reprinted by Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, New Delhi (1998). Leach, E. A. (1959). Hydraulic Society of Ceylon. Past and Present, 15, pp Leach, E. A. (1961). Pul Eliya: Village in Ceylon. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Mendis, D.L.O. (1999). Eppawala - Destruction of Cultural Heritage in the Name of Development, Sri Lanka Pugwash Group, Colombo. Mendis, D.L.O. (2002). Water Heritage in Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka Pugwash Group, Colombo. Mogi, Aiichiro. (2008). Nature of Commons and its Challenges. Edited in this proceedings. Nagata, Keisuke. (2006). Transferring the Design of Arch, (in Japanese). Henshu-Kobo Noah, Osaka. National Astronomical Observatory (ed.). (2008). Chronological Scientifi c Tables 2008, Maruzen, Tokyo. Needham, Joseph et al. (1954) Science and Civilization in China, Vol.1, Introductory Orientations, Cambridge University Press, pp Needham, Joseph et al. (1971) Science and Civilization in China, Vol.4, Part 3, Civil Engineering, Cambridge University Press. pp Obayashi Corporation. (1995) Mannou-Ike, Kikan Obayashi (Obayashi Quarterly Journal of Construction), No.40, Information Office, Obayashi Corporation, Tokyo. Sarton, George. (1927). Introduction to the History of Science, Vol.1, Carnegie Institution of Washington Publication, Washington. Seneviratna, Anuradha. (1989). The Springs of Sinhala Civilization - An illustrated survey of the ancient irrigation system of Sri Lanka. Navrang, New Delhi. STEC (Sanuki-no-Tameike-Shi Editing Committee). (2000). The Topographic History of Reservoir Systems in Sanuki-area, (in Japanese), Gyousei, Tokyo. Toynbee, A. J. (1934). A Study of History, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Weerasinghe, S.G.M. (1995). A History of the Cultural Relations between Sri Lanka and China - an Aspect of the Silk Route-, The Central Cultural Fund, The Ministry of Cultural Affairs, Colombo. Wittfogel, K. A. (1957). Oriental Despotism. Yale University Press, New Haven. 177

207 1 Toynbee (1934) [vol.1]: p81. Major irrigation schemes date back to the fourth to the third century BC, as evident from the earliest written records in the Mahavamsa (Seneviratna (1989)). 2 Brohier (1934) [vol.1]: p5. 3 Wittfogel (1957). 4 Leach (1959). 5 Brohier (1935) [vol.2]: p8, Mendis (1999) pp Chinese Buddhist monk born in 337 AD, died in 442, travelled to India and Sri Lanka between 399 and 414. In Sri Lanka he stayed for 2 years ( 411 to 412) mainly in Anuradhapura. 7 A word in Pali (literally leading out, education, discipline) means the regulatory framework for the Buddhist monastic community based on the canonical text book called Vinaya Pitaka. 8 Buck (1937), See Figure 2. 9 See Figure Because the flood control of the Yellow River was crucially important, historically great river improvement and canal works have been undertaken by centralized powers in China. 11 The word means a large tomb of local lords and monarchs. Its building technology, the period attached this word represents a piece of time period in history when many tombs of Kofun are excavated later. 12 Gyoki thought to be a decendant of immigrants from Baekje in the Korean Peninsular. People emigrated from the Korean Peninsular and China, mostly technicians and professionals in several disciplines, contributed to Japanese technology and culture in those days. Particularly after the collapse of Baekje in the late 7 th century many escaped from the country and immigrated into Japan. 13 The restoration and excavation work were carried out from 1989 until Later Han dynasty (the 1st to the 3rd century) 15 In the 4th century. 16 The annual precipitation in this area is 1,123mm (at Takamatsu, centre of this area, the annual average amount between ). National Astronomical Observatory (2008). 17 STEC (2000) and Obayashi Corporation (1995). 18 Nagata (2006). 19 Sarton (1927) 20 STEC (2000) 21 Such portion of water is called Shomon-Sui (supply of water protected by the deed ) in Japanese 22 Mogi (2008), The commons concept are discussed at this separate article enclosed in this proceedings. 23 DLO Mendis (1999), p Needham et al. (1971). 25 Needham et al. (1954). 178

208 Ancient Hydraulic Civilizations to Combat Climate Change Professor Dr. R. S. Morwanchikar It was rightly pointed out by late J. F. Kennedy, late President of America that he who will solve the water problem should be rewarded by double Nobel Prize, one for his due efforts towards solving the water crisis, and another for avoidance of the water war in near future. We are at the juncture of severe water crisis and as pointed out by the experts we are heading towards water wars. The brunt of this will be felt by 2020 onwards. Therefore, I think it is the proper time to look back and find out if we can get something valuable from our traditional wisdom in water conservation. With this intention, when I tried to search into the treasure of Indian water culture as well as its traditional wisdom, I came across large number of solutions so as to minimize this crisis. The gist of some of them is presented here in a nutshell. Both India and Sri Lanka are tropical countries and the monsoon down pour is the chief source of their water wealth. Since the dawn of civilization - over their regimes, monsoon is known for its fickle nature. As a result of this changing behavior of monsoons they evolved somewhat similar life styles suitable to their built environment. Thus they have rich heritage of water culture to their credit. Change in climate or change in the cycles of monsoon is a known phenomenon to these civilizations from ages together. Both countries are well acquainted with changes. However, due to some radical changes in the faculty of water conservation in the bygone decades they have forgotten the traditional wisdom as preached and practiced by their distant ancestors. Hence, the present crises appear to be somewhat dreadful. Then how to combat it or to face it, is a big challenge of 21 st century? Water culture means looking at life through water i.e. design your life style based on the quantity of available water. During the pursuit of imaginary happiness, we are after excess of everything i.e. extra industrial produce, extra agricultural yield, excess of westernization and urbanization, extra material pleasures etc not taking our water potential or environmental carrying capacity into consideration. As a result everything seems to be over burdened including the school bags of nursery going kids, to their age-old wrinkled grand parents bag of packed food. There is a cut-throat competition in every field. This should not have been the fate of India as well as Sri Lanka because they are supposed to be lights of Asia. They have given Mantra (Gospel) of prosperity through Peace. Happiness of mankind remained their motto for last few millennia. But it became history now. It is evident from the study of Indian water culture that the Indians have successfully established relationship with water at all possible levels, such as material, emotional, spiritual, cultural etc. The nature of this relationship depends upon the source of water i.e. perennial or transient. If the source is perennial like a river or a lake having abundant water then in their lifestyles river or lake will command more respect than any other water source. They will naturally develop a riverine (Nadi-matrika culture) life style. If it is a monsoon or any transient water body (i.e. monsoon fed water source) naturally their life style will be more fatalistic where god plays a dominating role in shaping their culture. This type of culture is called Deva-Mantrika culture. There is a third category of life style, which stands in between these two. Sometimes they will seek the shelter near the river and at other times they will prefer to be under the umbrella of the nature. Though the life styles differ apparently their faith in the supernaturalism of water remains the same, which has taught them the following lessons. 179

209 1. Water remained the source of being since the inception of life, as there is no alternative for water. Though it is a chemical compound of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen no scientist, however great, is able to create water by adding these two; moreover, though man lived in the close proximity of ocean he is unable to cultivate the habit of surviving on sea-water like other aqua bodies. Thus water is a sheer gift of nature and is source of life including vegetation. If man preserves and takes care of water the water will reciprocate the same, hence water is honored as nectar. With this consideration, maintain its neutrality i.e. maintain the eco-balance by restoring the ground water levels, and maintaining the balance of flora and fauna. 2. Water nurtures the spirit of co-existence and we are working exactly against this spirit by innovating large number of anti-nature devices endangering large number of species of biodiversity (flora and fauna). This over-interference is very sad as species of animals along with vegetables are dying very fast. One day men will also become a rare species because of irreparable damage to the environment. 3. India could achieve and sustain the material prosperity for centuries together, on the strength of efficient water management. People participation was the main pillar of the super structure of the traditional water management. The local and regional people were involved in it, since the initiation of the scheme. Their participation in each and every concerned field helped to promote the emotional undertaking. The creators were well aware of the socio-cultural background of the stakeholders as well as the beneficiaries. Hence they have provided wider scope to their involvement at every possible stage. The construction of the lake of Ghodsisar in Rajastan is the best example of this, and brief review of the scheme at Ghadsisar. 4. The most significant fact of Indian water culture is that it was based on democratic principles or on the principle of equitable distribution of water. The Phad system (block system) still functioning in Khandesh serves the best example of this (i) Brief History of Phad system, (ii) Inscriptional evidences. 5. Since the dawn of the civilization, water is regarded as holy and having divine power. It is the belief that water can liberate from the cycle of birth and death. Hence every society or community, which endeavoured to conserve water, had a great respect towards water. They were very punctual in nourishing this concept of holiness of water from Father to Son, and thus from generation to generation. This concept helped to keep water unpolluted, to avoid its misuse and more over to protect it from commercialization. In our history or culture there is hardly any evidence of selling the water as it is regarded as a divine gift (Tirtha) even in times of emergency (i) History of Deva-rai and Brahma Sarovara, (ii) water deities and their role in shaping Indian Water-Culture. 6. The unpredictable behavior of monsoon gave birth to number of faculties like Folk-hydrology, folk engineering, astronomy, meteorology, science of water divination etc. In course of time each faculty contributed a lot under the able guidance of respective Rishis (scientists) hailing from different regions of the country and at different periods. (i) Brief survey of the works of Varahmihir, Arya-Chanakya, etc. (ii) supported by inscriptions. 7. We have lost our relationship with the sources of water hence the relationship between water and society, water and community. Water and family, water and individual etc. has deteriorated very fast. Thus, water is being detached from our culture day by day. Water is the base of any civilization or culture. No culture survives without water. Hence, it is the urgent need of the time to restore the cultural relationship with water and give maximum scope to traditional wisdom for water management in future. 8. Frequency of increasing number of droughts, famines and climate changes has remained the special feature of Indian Monsoon. Hence, to fight against famine or climatic change 180

210 becomes a biological factor as well as in-built component of the bygone hydro-cultures. At times the whole population had to suffer from a prolonged drought of more than a decade s duration. Hence, to overcome this frequency of climatic changes, people were prepared to fight at three different levels. For that they used to have arrangements like reserve water storages, called Brahma Sarovar, reserve forests, pastures, meadows, called Deva-Rais and reserve storages of food grains as Dev-Bhandaras. We have ample records of the heroic fight given by those societies. A brief survey of famines - After Independence, though we have constructed large number of dams, we are lagging far behind in achieving the desired results. Moreover, these dams have yet to create a niche either in the folk culture or in the minds of the stakeholders. Hence, it is an appeal to refine the traditional wisdom with the help of modern technology in the context of modernization and make it available to the farmer, the most neglected man in the modern society. 181

211 Synopsis Small Tank Heritage of Raiarata and-ruhuna Dr. C R Panabokke 1. Past Background and Some Relevant Statements Although a number of recognized studies had been reported during the first half of the last century in respect of the ancient major irrigation works, notably by scholars such as Parker, Brohier, Nicholas and Paranavitana, hardly- any studies of similar scope had been reported in respect of the smaller tank systems or village tanks of this country. A single exception however, was an address to the Institution of Engineers in 1936 by a former Director of Irrigation J.S. Kennedy on the Evolution of Scientific Development of Village Irrigation Works, Two statements by Kennedy stand out in his address which are of relevance to my presentation today. These are (a) Every village irrigation work has an individuality of its own, and when located on the 1 inch topo sheet, the engineer has next to acquire the sense and substance of that individuality. (b) It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance to the engineer concerned with minor irrigation works of the 1 inch to 1 mile topo sheet produced by the Survey Department. Similarly, from historical texts I would single out the following two extracts by C.W. Nicholas (1959)* as two key benchmark statements that are relevant to my address today. These are (a) The village tank was a well established feature of the dry zone by the first century B.C. By the beginning of the second century B.C. if not earlier, the entire dry zone was populated, more thickly in the north central region; and the construction of tanks and other irrigation works had begun. (b) The eighth and ninth centuries were, on the whole, a period of affluence and progress for the Sinhalese people. 2. Recent Studies The past twenty years have, however, witnessed a greater interest in the study of small tank systems. Better known among these recent studies are those of C.M. Madduma Bandara, M.U.A. Tennakoon, D.L.O. Mendis and S. Somasiri. One of the more significant outcomes of the studies done by both Madduma Bandara and Tennakoon, was their recognition of the cascade mode of occurrence of the traditional village tanks as commonly found in the North Central Province regions. This new perspective marks a watershed in our understanding of the real nature and occurrence of the small village tank in Sri Lanka. In a series of three lectures from 1995 to 1998 to the SLAAS, IFS, and RAS respectively, I have further developed on the setting, typology, distribution patterns and hydrography of the various small tank cascade systems cf the Rajarata, and also delivered a lecture on the abandoned tanks of the Rajarata and Ruhuna in 1997 to the SLAAS. * Nicholas and Paranavitana (1959) History of Ceylon Pt. 1 U.O.P. 182

212 3 Field and Associated Studies Conducted from 1994 An IFAD funded study for the Anuradhapura Participatory Rural Development Project (PROP) in 1994 enabled the then International Irrigation Management Institute (IM) to study the small tank cascade systems of the Anuradhapura district in a wider interdisciplinary setting. This provided the first opportunity in this country for a systematic field study of the small tank cascade systems in their natural setting across an entire agro-ecological region covering an extent of around 3000 sq. miles. Subsequently in 1997 the Mahaweli Authority of Sri Lanka (MASL) supported the extension of the above study to cover all nine river basins that make up the traditional Rajarata area. This covers a total extent of 4,350 sq. miles, and the results of this study was published as a monograph in 1999, titled The Small Tank Cascade Systems of the Rajarata under IIM1- MASL auspices. This showed that the nine river basins that make up the Rajarata is made up of 50 sub-watersheds and 457 cascades of small tanks. This, in a systematic manner, characterizes the form and order of the small tank systems of the Rajarata. MASL also supported a more general study of the cascade systems of four river basins in the Ruhuna, and three river basins in the Wanni Hathpattu. Under the auspices of CARE International, studies were conducted from April 2001 to December 2002 on Identification of Small Tanks for Project Intervention Within a Cascade System in selected D.S. Divisions of the Hambantota, Puttalam and Anuradhapura districts. These studies helped to give us a deeper insight into the workings of these cascade systems. Today s presentation is based mainly on the outcomes from the foregoing field studies that have been conducted progressively from 1994 onwards. 4. Structure and Content of Today s Address Today s address will deal with the evolution, expansion, and peak attainments up to the ninth century A.D. of the small tank systems in both the ancient Rajarata and Ruhuna regions; and also the subsequent decline that took place up to the period of western colonial interventions. The presentation will be made under the following subject matter headings. i. Form and order of small tank cascades and their distribution patterns. ii. Genesis and evolution of the small village tank 400 BC to 300 AD. iii. Expansion along with major tank construction for wetland rice cultivation, and increasing state control and intervention. iv. Status as of the eighth and ninth centuries A.D. v. Special characteristics of Rajarata and Ruhuna tank irrigation systems. vi. Period of decline and contributory causes (visit of Robert Knox around 1675). vii. Colonial interventions and their impact (If time permits). Knox (1681) where there are no springs or rivers to furnish them with water they supply this defect by saving rain water in ponds. Every town (village) has one of these ponds (tanks) of which there is a great number, the banks of which, being some one, some two, some three fathoms in height, and in length some above a mile, some less, not all of a size. 183

213 Sakwala Chakraya from Lanka Dr. Kavan Ratnatunga One of the most ancient diagrams from the Ancient Hydraulic Civilization is the large Chakra 6 feet in diameter and inscribed on bare granite in the Ran Masu Uyana of Anuradhapura. (see <image Sakwela Chakraya >) Details of it were first published in the 1901 Annual Report Archaeological Survey of Ceylon by H. C. P. Bell, Archaeological Commissioner, The diagram above and description below is extracted from that old Report on the Tisavewa Ruins. The Royal Pleasure Gardens (Ran Masu Uyana (10th Century CE) is just beyond the northern confines of Isurumuniya rock temple (2nd Century BCE) and adjacent to the bund of the Tissa Wewa. The portion of the granite ridge, much smaller than the Isurumuniya boulders, lies at the very foot of the embankment of the tank. In a small cave, in incised on the bare rock, is a 6 foot diameter Chakraya which may claim to be an old-time cosmographical chart illustrating in naivest simplicity the Buddhist notions of the universe? The concentric circles with their inter-spaces at the center of the chakra can assuredly mean only the Sakvala. Sun and moon (in the second strips) lie on either side of the Sakvala: round about in space are scattered innumerable other worlds represented by quadrisected circles. Below and around is the world of waters (i.e., the circular band) in which swarm gigantic uncouth denizens-fish, turtle, crab, chank, and other marine fauna. This ancient map of the universe - perhaps the oldest in existence is of quite extraordinary interest. The of ancient Anuradhapura, testifies to the antiquity of that astronomical lore pursued in Lanka In more recent years there have been a few publications on what it represents which is a stretch of imagination to pure fantasy. It is clearly a interesting diagram around which to write Science Fiction. One must be very careful when interpreting ancient inscriptions to ensure that the translation does not include recent knowledge. For example, one should not claim the concentric circles in center represent a Heliocentric Solar System, however tempting it is to do so. The second system of concentric circles and the multiple earth signs on the chakra, however indicate that the ancient civilization in Lanka probably did have the concept of multiple world systems, which in stark contrast to the geocentric beliefs of contemporary western civilization. For more details and color photographs of the site, please visit website

214 Long Term climate changes and global Warming Dr. Kavan Ratnatunga To learn from the ancient Hydraulic civilizations to combat climate change it is useful to look at what Science now understands of long term changes in global temperature of Earth. Over the geological time scale of the last 80 million years the Earth has cooled by about 6 C. The first Antarctic Ice sheets formed when the earth was 4 C warmer 35 million years ago. Persistent Antarctic ice sheets developed 15 million years ago when the Earth was 2 C warmer. The Northern Ice sheets 5 million years ago when 1 C warmer. These changes have happened over the long time scale of tens millions of years. Changes in the Earth s precession, obliquity, eccentricity and Solar variability creates climate changes known as Milankovitch cycles causing stages of glaciations i.e. ice-ages, with a most dominant period of about 100,000 years. After the end of the last Ice Age 14,000 years ago, the melting of the ice covered northern hemisphere rose the sea level by 120 meters over a period of 7000 years. Therefore for the period of human habitation before about 10,000 years ago, Lanka would not have been an island, and just the southern tip of the Indian land mass. Over the short time scale of the last 10 thousand years of Human civilization there has been small fluctuations in the mean global temperature of about 1 C. It is important to note that civilization progressed more rapidly during the warmer periods both in the West and well as in Lanka. Anuradhapura was at it s peak just over two thousand during what has been labeled the Roman climate optimum. Polonnaruwa flourished during the Medieval warm period. These older warm periods were not caused by Human activity. Over the timescale of the last one hundred years the mean global temperature has increased by about 1 C, climbing out of a minimum Labeled the Little ice age. There has been a rapid increase in the fraction of Carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere from amounting to 22% over the last 50 years, as measured in the remote high altitude observatory of Mauna Loa in Hawaii. There is a strong correlation between CO2 in atmosphere as measured in air bubbles trapped in ice cores and mean global temperature, as inferred by Deuterium content. The various contributors to global warming can be modeled to match the observed trend in mean global temperature. Over 70% of the current temperature increase can be directly modeled to be from Human activity and the rest from Natural causes. As a result of this increase in temperature the polar ice caps are seen to be melting significantly. Direct measurements from satellite observations show that the mean global sea level has increased over the last 15 years on average by 3.2 mm per year. At this rate the sea level can be expected to rise by about a foot in this century. The small increase in sea level is however not uniform over the globe. For example There is a larger increase in sea level in the western pacific than in the Indian Ocean. The increase in mean annual surface temperature is also not uniform over the globe. Larger increases are seen in the Northern Hemisphere than in the Southern. Over the last decade there is been a lot of discussion about global warming and the urgent need to slow down the increase in carbon dioxide caused by Human activity: i.e. burning of fossil Fuels. Al Gore s film The inconvenient Truth made a strong case. However that film failed to admit that about 30% of the changes in global temperature is natural, and that will cause some of the observed increase in CO2 in atmosphere. For industrial economic reasons, these omissions are highlighted by the opponents. They show data from locations on Earth where the sea level rise or the temperature increase has been minimum and try to argue that all of the increase is natural, 185

215 when it is not. Both of these extreme views are non-scientific. I have been told that biased views are needed to argue for political action or inaction. If the global temperature increases by 1 C we can expect the Greenland ice cap was to melt and the Sea Level will rise by 7 meters. A 4 C increase will cause the Antarctic ice sheet to melt, and then the sea level will rise by another 73 meters. A proper understanding of Global warming and a minimization of the human contribution is important to ensure that sea level doesn t rise too rapidly over the next few centuries, and cause a lot of land loss and property damage to coastal regions. Clearly a Hydraulic civilization, less dependent on burning fossil fuels will minimize Carbon dioxide emission and help combat climate change. Please visit website for a copy of this paper fully illustrated with color graphs. I have compiled those diagrams from the Internet, mostly from the rapidly growing on-line encyclopedia known as the Wikipedia. 186

216 Climate change Learning from the past K D G Kulathunga and H Sriyananda Introduction The hallmark of modern civilisation is its attitude to nature and natural resources. Nature is to be conquered and subjugated, and natural resources are there to be exploited. This we believe is a philosophical concept. The philosophy behind long-enduring ancient civilisations was entirely different. Man had a place, albeit a very special place, but alongside the rest of a co-operating ecosystem. Where can we start building a new, stable world, among co-operating species? After air and water, the next most essential requirement for life is food. Agriculture, in a stable ecosystem, is the activity that can produce not only food, but also energy (fuel), fodder, fibre, and most importantly, social interaction and a sense of community and belonging. Modern industrial agriculture does no such thing, and in addition, pollutes the essential air and water, and also the soil. It is possible to start this experiment of learning from the past from this point onwards, for communities that have retained the art and the science of sustainable agriculture still exist. An important part of the new approach would be to accommodate people not as mere productive units of labour but as human potential, with intrinsic worth. Two major characteristics Two of the major characteristics of such communities are Communal ownership (The idea of the Commons ), and Participatory democracy. These are both essential for the practice of the above philosophy. It is not possible to discuss the two phenomena (commons and participatory democracy) separately, for they are closely interlinked. Commons Traditionally, commons referred to land which, irrespective of ownership, was available to all as a common resource. The English word Commons naturally refer to the practices in England where land was owned by the aristocracy but the commoners enjoyed certain rights such as the right to graze cattle. There were other practices in other societies for example, in ancient Sri Lanka, land tenure was communal [Hewege et al]. However, the main features of commons were universal. It can only survive in an environment where all members of the community share a common belief in the welfare of all. In modern society, Commons would refer not only to land but all other resources, and most importantly, knowledge. In a world dominated by greed, it is heartening to find developments of new commons such as the Wikimedia Commons, which is a media file repository making available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips) to all. Another example is Open Source Software [Kogut & Metiu, 2001; von Hippel & von Krogh, 2003]. These are the very antithesis of TRIPS; the World Trade Organisation sponsored Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights. There has been a lot of criticism of the idea of the Commons [Hardin, 1968], but it is a real tragedy that the paper by Hardin, who is a biologist, has been extensively quoted to discredit the concept of the Commons, for its main thrust is that there is no technological fix for the problem of exploding population. He in fact, unwittingly, discredits not the Commons, but the ideas behind modern capitalism continuing expansion of consumption, and hints that the solution lies in a change in lifestyles. Without such a change, the world as we know it will collapse under the weight of environmental degradation. Climate change which has been credited with the increasing instability of the earths wind, water and temperature regimes [NASA, 1997; Rohde, 2007], is directly attributable to human activity. 187

217 Participatory democracy The other leg of sustainable civilizations is participatory democracy, in contrast to what we call representative democracy. The shortcomings of representative democracy are well known, with only half the population participating in even the occasional elections that take place in the major democracies. The reasons for the decline in participation are many, but a major contribution is attributable to the declining belief in government responsiveness [Abramson & Aldrich, 1982]. This of course calls into question whether representative democracy is at all democracy. Participatory democracy [Baiocchi, 2005; Bachrach & Botwinick, 1992 ] on the other hand is enjoying a limited revival in two particular applications - workplace democracy[mason, Ronald M., 1982] and urban planning [Moote, McClaran & Chickering, 1997]. In Argentina, after the collapse of 2001, a movement for the Recuperation of failed enterprises by direct takeover by the workers gained ground. This resulted in hundreds of factories being run under the democratic control of the workers and neighbours living around the factory. This even led to the redesign of the products of the factories, away from exports, to meeting the requirements of the neighbourhood [Trigona, 2006]. In Sri Lanka, the victims of the 2004 Boxing day Tsunami set up a Peoples Planning Commission, which despite many shortcomings, did submit a report [People s Planning Commission for Recovery after the Tsunami, 2006] based on its deliberations to the government. This exercise led to recommendations that the people of New Orleans should follow their example and set up a Peoples Commission for the reconstruction after Hurricane Katrina [Klein, 2008 ] However, perhaps the best example of participatory democracy in contemporary society comes from Porto Alegre, Brazil [Baiocchi, 2005] where decisions regarding not only the workplace and the environment, but all aspects of urban life were made by direct participation of the citizens.. This demonstrates that under suitable conditions, participatory democracy is feasible in modern society and is not confined to the ancient world. Examples We will now look at a few case studies to try to elicit the circumstances under which commons thrive, and when they collapse. Two examples of communities that lived collectively, emanating from two different backgrounds and of different time frames, are the Buddhist Sangha and the Kibbutzniks [Spiro, 1956; Spiro, 2004]. The Sangha has a history of over two millennia that comprised of a community of monks and nuns whose property ownership was limited to their personal belongings such as the alms bowl and the clothing in the form of three robes. In the Kibbutz, the principle of equality was taken extremely seriously up until the 1970s. Kibbutzniks did not individually own livestock, tools, or even clothing. Among the Sangha, the concepts of I and mine are considered sources of error, but serial individuality and moral responsibility were based on volitional acts and causal correlations. Any gifts bestowed upon them were treated as common property belonging to the universal Sangha not limited to the particular community of monks. Knowledge too was shared communally by way of collective recital of the teaching so that everyone in the community had access to it. In the Kibbutz, too, gifts were kept in a common treasury accessible to all. The attempts to rear children communally ran into some difficulties. In the Sangha this did not arise as they were all celibates. Both these communities have now collapsed, the collective nature of the Sangha being retained theoretically within the Buddhist discourse, but individual ownership taking over in practice under secular legislation. The high ideals of the Kibbutz have been a victim of the military-political situation in Israel and its neighbours. 188

218 A more recent experiment in sharing and realizing the unity of all was the hippy movement [Stone, Skip, 1994] that was based on universal beliefs that transcend social, political and moral norms. The movement arose under the condition of too many people trying to share diminishing resources based on human greed and rampant consumption under the guise of development. The movement had a strong flavour of free living and use of mind expanding drugs. The drugs induced a fleeting glimpse of the true nature of reality and of an eternal present that diminished the distinction between self and non-self. A cosmic feeling of unity common to many religious experiences coming from sensory deprivation through prayer and concentration were encountered. It was the time of many creative acts from song writing to computer development. But unfortunately, the predominant culture of consumerism and fornication took over the movement. Possible models The possibility of emergence of new models, to face the challenges posed by depletion of conventional energy and dangers of pollution if unabated development of the present model continues, is very strong. Small communities collectively producing, consuming and disposing their waste, without much reliance on external input, are a strong possibility. This model is already tried out under schemes such as Zero Emissions Research and Initiatives (ZERI) founded by business entrepreneur Gunter Pauli in the early 1990s. Pauli introduced the notion of industrial clustering by promoting principle of zero emissions and making it the very core of ZERI concept. Zero emission means zero waste. Taking nature as its model and mentor, ZERI strives to eliminate the very idea of waste. Glenn Murcutt an Australian architect promoted building dwellings taking some of nature s models as exemplified by the following: Use Simple Materials Forget the polished marble, imported tropical wood, and costly brass and pewter. A Glenn Murcutt home is unpretentious, comfortable, and economical. He uses inexpensive materials that are readily available in his native Australian landscape. Touch the Earth Lightly Glenn Murcutt is fond of quoting the Aboriginal proverb touch the earth lightly because it expresses his concern for nature. Building in the Murcutt way means taking special measures to safeguard the surrounding landscape.. Follow the Sun Prized for their energy efficiency, Glenn Murcutt s houses capitalize on natural light. Their shape is long and low, and they often feature verandas, skylights, adjustable louvres, and movable screens. Listen to the Wind Even in the hot, tropical climate of Australia s Northern Territory, houses by Glenn Murcutt do not need air conditioning. Ingenious systems for ventilation assure that cooling breezes circulate through open rooms. At the same time, these houses are insulated from the heat and protected from strong cyclone winds. To learn from other cultures and to live in harmony with nature and other living beings needs a different approach to what we are pursuing now. The answer to the moral problem lies in treating all life with respect, and killing, with real reluctance, only which is necessary for survival. But the present indications are quite contrary as depicted in Clash of Civilization by Samuel P. Huntington that has become the policy base for US intervention in other countries. Tariq Ali calls it a Clash of Fundamentalism based on Orientalism as described by Edward Said. 189

219 Antonio Gramsci says that cultural hegemony is used as a means of maintaining capitalist states. Hegemonic culture, namely the bourgeoisie, becomes the common sense value of all. The new understanding has to emerge with an education based on thinking rather than following. Collective living and respect of all culture will become the most needed input for survival and the present education may not be equipped to achieve this as it is based on maximizing individual advantage and progress. Conclusions Various attempts have been made, some successful, some not so, to create modern societies based on the principles of sustainability and human values in recent times. Some of the traditional societies that believed in these values still survive to this day. The most general characteristics of such societies are communal ownership and life style, participatory democracy and the light touch upon nature. This is the way forward if we are not to destroy our planet by greedy exploitation and individuality. References Abramson, Paul R. & Aldrich, John H., 1982: The decline of electoral participation in America, The American Political Science Review, Volume 76, Issue 3, pp Bachrach, Peter & Botwinick, Aryeh, 1992: Power and Empowerment: A Radical Theory, Temple University Press, ISBN , Baiocchi, Gianpaolo, 2005: Militants and Citizens: The Politics of Participatory Democracy in Porto Alegre, Stanford University Press.Garrett Hardin, The Tragedy of the Commons, Science, Vol. 162, No (December 13, 1968), pp cgi/content/full/162/3859/1243 Hewege, Chandana R., Teicher, Julian, Alam, Quamrul and VanGramberg, Bernadine: Postmortem of Post liberalisation SOE Governance in Sri Lanka: The Duality of Rational-Legal and Feudal-Patrimonial, Hewege Postmortem Post liberalisation governance. Klein, Naomi, 2008: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Macmillan. Kogut, Bruce M. & Metiu, Anca, 2001: Open Source Software Development and Distributed Innovation, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Vol. 17, Issue 2, pp , Mason, Ronald M., 1982: Participatory and Workplace Democracy: A Theoretical Development in Critique of Liberalism, Southern Illinois University Press. Moote, Margaret A., McClaran, Mitchel P. and Chickering, Donna K, 1997: Theory in Practice: Applying Participatory Democracy Theory to Public Land Planning, Environmental Management, Vol 21, No. 6, pp , Springer-Verlag, New York. NASA: IGBP Task Force for Global Analysis, Interpretation and Modelling, Volume One, Number One, Winter 1997 People s Planning Commission for Recovery after the Tsunami: Report 2006, Presented to the Government of Sri Lanka. Rohde, Robert A., 2007: Global temperatures, Global Warming Art.. Stone, Skip, 1994 Hippies From A to Z: Their Sex, Drugs, Music and Impact on Society From the Sixties to the Present, V. W. Norton & Company, Inc.. Trigona, Marie, 2006: Recuperated Enterprises in Argentina: Reversing the Logic of Capitalism, Citizen Action in the Americas, No. 19 March 2006, Americas Program, International Relations Center (IRC). Spiro, Melford E., 2004: Utopia and Its Discontents: The Kibbutz and Its Historical Vicissitudes, American Anthropologist, Volume 106 Issue 3, Pages Spiro Melford E., 1956: KIBBUTZ Venture in Utopia, Harvard von Hippel, Eric & von Krogh, Geor g, 2003: Open Source Software and the Private-Collective Innovation Model: Issues for Organization Science, Organization Science/Vol. 14, No. 2, March April 2003, pp

220 55 th International Pugwash Conference, Hiroshima, 2005 Working Group 6 Sustainable Development and Non- Military Threats to Security 1. WHAT DID WE DO? Batticaloa Medical Team Dr. T Sundaresan, MD 1. Medical Camp: We treated nearly 800 patients in 4 camps in Kattankudy and Kallar. We didn t see any major illnesses except few cases of Diarrhea. Most of the cases are with mild respiratory tract infections. Thanks to the NGOs and other medical team for preventing the waterborne diseases. 2. Visiting Navalady: One of the badly affected areas: I used to go to beach whenever I go to Batticaloa. I was very surprised to see the damaged houses, schools, temples and churches. We can not imagine the massive force created by the Tsunami waves. There were nearly 20 orphans killed. 3. Collecting Information: Our team was able to collect information continuously during this visit. We were able to find the problems in the refugee camps. Incidentally we met a MP (Member of Parliament) and a Deputy Minister of Rehabilitation. I was able meet some GS (Government Servant) and two DSs (Divisional Secretary). I also met the president of Batticaloa Medical association. 2. PEOPLE WE MET 1. The Refugees: They are always unsatisfied! except for food and cloth. I think they are generally being looked after well. Here are the few complaints they made * we do not have good toilet. It is a true statement. Making a temporary toilet is not that difficult. It costs nearly Rs2000/=. But maintenance is difficult. The wastages should be emptied regularly. For this we need more Gully emptier. Or we should have a new ways of disposing! I am sure this problem will be solved soon with the reduction of number of camps. * we want temporary shelter. We saw hundreds of tents donated by several countries. I think this is not suitable for the people in our country. It is very hot inside the tents in the day time. Temporary huts will not cost much. * there are unwanted things in the lagoon which makes difficult for fishing. This is a good season to catch fish/prawn. If we have boat and proper lagoon we can start doing our job. 2. Volunteers at the health centre: Our coordinator was Dr Navalojithan. He with a NGO (Handicap International) is doing a well organized job. I saw several volunteers working actively in the health centre. They had good data of the refugee camps and health problems. Daily they were updating the data. They send several medical teams with medicines, Nurses, coordinator with lunch packets in a vehicle. 191

221 3. Minister of Parliament: Hon. Hisbulla. He visited a camp (Kattankudy) which we went. He took photo asking one of our doctors to hold the stethoscope examining a patient! 4. Deputy Minister of Rehabilitation: We met him in other camp in Kallar. We complained that the refugees are suffering with bad toilet. He asked his secretary to look into this matter. I am sure this is just a show! 5. President of Batticaloa Medical Association Dr Rudra VOG: He showed his enthusiasm in participating the rehabilitation. He told that they also have a plan to build few houses. 6. DS of Manmunai north: My wife and I met him at his office. We were disappointed by the way he responded to our requirements. We are unfortunate to have this kind ofpeople to look after the refugees. 3. NOW AND THE FUTURE 1. Shelter: Initially there were 103 camps in Batticaloa. It has been reduced to 63. Most of them are in schools and other public buildings. Tents have been given to some camps. There are limited numbers of toilets. In the future the government is going to build 2500 houses for the Navalady people according the information given by the DS Manmunai north. We also heard that the TRO plan to build 1500 houses (flats) in Sathurukondan. The Ramakrishna Mission Batticaloa Swann also stated that they may build 50 houses (each worth 5 lakhs). They may need further (Financial) support. Anyone who is interested in joining with them can contact me to get more details. 2. Food: According to the media the Govt has enough food for the next six months. Refugees are satisfied with the food. 3. Health * Physical health: There were no major illnesses so far. The UNICEF is satisfied with health care. Not a single death has been reported due to a communicable disease. Most of the diseases we came across were Respiratory tract infection. Few cases of watery diarrhea Scabies Asthma * Mental Health: There were few cases of anxiety. Doctors have realized the importance of mental health particularly among children. There were two foreign volunteers who came with us dealing with this problem. It was nice to see the children playing with them happily. Dr Ganeshan (Consultant Psychiatrist) is interested in this field. One reason why these people are not depressed as expected is that due to the indirect support by not being alone but be with others in the camp. When they get the houses they might feel the loss. * Occupation: Most ofthe people depend on the sea and lagoon for their living. So far nothing has been done for their occupation. In some part of the country boat has been donated. I think it is a good idea to encourage and support these people to do their work soon. So they can earn. They can think of their future and forget their worries. Generally the boat these people use will cost nearly 20,000 to 1.5 lakhs in rupees depending on the size. 192

222 4. Education: The school going children have lost their books. We met few GCE (A/ L) students who are studying in the refugee camps for the exam in April this year. In that we met a girl who lost everything except her elder brother. We tried to help these students by getting notes and books from other students. It would be a good idea to keep these students in a separate place mainly for the studying purpose. The Eastern university student union can support these students by giving free classes. 4. REQUESTS OF NAVALADY PEOPLE: They have sent a letter to us. I will try to scan it and send it to my friends. 5. MY VIEWS AND SUGGESTIONS 1. To those who want to send things from abroad: I think sending things may not be a good idea. But keeping money for the long term plan is advisable. You can wait until the rehabilitation plan. has been formed. It may take few weeks. 2. To those who have funds: All are thinking about building houses. Other area to be considered are: supporting them to stand on their own feet by giving boat, net etc. 3. Modern Village : What about building a village with basic facilities? 4. Concerning the children and orphans 5. Education 6. Let them work hard to build there own village! It is sad to say people are not ready to work for their own benefit. They expect everything to be done by others. I feel that whatever work done should be done with the help of the affected people. 7. Why does the government delaying in constructing the road? I think before the rehabilitation, the road to Batticaloa should be constructed well. It took 2 hours to travel 40 km during our visit (rainy day). 193

223 Lessons from Civilization Principle of Wewa for the world peace policy Eng. S K S H K Suriyaarachchi 1. Until very recent times it was clearly understood and accepted by most people in general that water was the most precious though commonest natural resource which enriches the life of the universe. (It is now seen that the present day human generation unfortunately lacks the sense of importance and the ability in sustainable management of water, compared to their ancestors.) 2. Except for a few occurrences of drought years even according to historical records Sri Lanka had been blessed with a adequate supply of water all over the island almost throughout the year, received predominantly from seasonal rain. 3. The abundance in water and fertile soil of the country along with the tropical climate, had paved the way, far earlier than in most other places on the globe, for emergence of life and early evolution of human civilization The historical and archeological findings have revealed an advanced civilization in the country way back in about 10,000 years BC. Linguistic researches have revealed an existence of a world language with roots to Sinhala language during that era. Geometric microliths did not appear in Europe until ca. 12,000 BP, which was 18,000 years after their appearance in Sri Lanka. - Dr. Siran Deraniyagala Wewa 6-8. Wewa is a reservoir or Village tank as inappropriately referred to in the English language. In its Sinhala meaning Wewa is far more than just a water storing reservoir; it s rather an eco-system (DLO Mendis.). By virtue of its concept ecosystem itself, Wewa is neither an isolated reservoir nor a number of reservoirs linked together in a cascade but a composite ecosystem comprising of a cascade of reservoirs associated with its own catchment, supporting human life and livelihoods such as paddy or other cultivation, people and animals associating with it, the soil and ground water table, and an altogether pleasant environment around it One cannot count the number of individual village tanks dispersed in all parts of Sri Lanka. The topographical surveys done a few decades back hints at about 65,000 village tanks of which a few thousands are still functioning. This paper intends to discuss the Wewa in somewhat an unusual approach. The important aspect discussed here extends beyond its physical parameters to the benefits the environment receives and its continuous existence as an integral part of both the physical and social environment of Sri Lanka. In other words, the sustainability and the long term existence of these people-made structures some of which have survived for several thousands of years. 194

224 Lessons for World peace 11. The Wewa has no owners. All it has is its users and protectors. Everybody protected the Wewa (the eco system) so that the system remained for several thousands of years. Users and non-users were all guardians of the wewa Then again the guardians protected the Wewa for all - for man and animal, trees and soil, atmosphere and ground water table, seen and unseen, known and unknown, born and most importantly unborn. 13.The guardians protected the wewa not for themselves or their own glory either. They who protected a wewa protected the eco-system and the environment and were therefore its inadvertent beneficiaries too. To repeat, the people who protect the Wewa automatically become its beneficiaries... Abandoning a Wewa could mean not just destroying it alone, but also destroying a whole ecosystem.. 14.The Wev (Plural form of the word Wewa) in Sri Lanka date back to more than five thousand years. Wew paved the way for these communities and society as a whole to lead peaceful lives with a sustained supply of water, which they managed as best as they could for their livelihoods - irrigate their cultivated land and provide water for their animals whilst storing water for periods of drought. Indirectly the wew eco-system also ensured the protection of its catchment areas comprising of natural vegetative and animal life. Repeated use of water and other resources In the Wew system the water from the rains is used again and again before it flowed down to the sea. In this nature based re-cycling system there may be some drops of water being used several hundred times and remain in the system for long years without endangering the system in anyway. 195

225 Work with Nature technological aspect 15. Storing water happens in several ways in Wew Ecosystems. Short term and direct storing is keeping water within the capacity of the reservoir (for this part the word reservoir is appropriate, as a reservoir is also defined as a large natural or artificial tank that is used for storing water for human consumption or agricultural activity). This storage is generally sufficient to sustain for one to few dry periods. In Sri Lanka the dry zone receives little or no rain for about four to seven months a year, depending on the location. Long term and direct storing is slow permeation of water into the earth in the Wew system. Still depending very much on the locality, this storage can be as large as several hundreds of times the volume of the reservoir. Indirect storages are the portions absorbed by the trees and environmental constituents, including atmospheric moisture. Both these direct and indirect storages are then used by the system (people, other living creatures, trees, soil, atmosphere etc), most importantly without disturbing, leave alone damaging, the system itself. Beneficiaries The right to use the water of the system is not limited only to the system. Any living creature anywhere in the universe can come to the system and use it for its direct basic needs without permission from anyone. All what one cannot do is to disturb or damage the system. For that matter protectors are also not limited to within the system. Protection is collaborative The present day economics and education do not pay heed to the long term benefits as the forefathers of our Wew system did. The longest project horizon in the present context is 100 years, the average time span of benefit of the wew system had been few thousands of years. Sri Lanka may perhaps be the only country in the world today which has both dynamic and static structures maintained for a couple of thousands of years and are still being used for the same purpose which those were built for. This longevity of the Sri Lankan engineering persisted even amidst the continuous destructive efforts by the unending invaders and looters from outside the country from very early times of the country s history. It is not an intention of this paper to offer the idea that in the past the Wewa had been sustainable simply because there were no self-oriented people who were inconsiderate of the environment, in the Wew system, misusing (or destroying) it.. They too may have been there. However during the past the effort of the protectors of the system outclassed that of the others significantly. The present day picture is unfortunately very different. However the brighter prospect is that since Sri Lanka has been nurturing quite an unbroken civilization for a much longer period than most of other civilizations, the possibility is that the people themselves may awake again by virtue of latent talent hidden in their genes through generations. The catalyst for such an unexpected revolutionary change may perhaps be this workshop. Path to world peace More importantly, can we learn the lesson for world peace from the sustainability of Sri Lanka s Wewa!! 196

226 Wewa Correct Notion - an echo system Improper Notion - a Reservoir - a Village Tank Water Nature & People Our forefathers - understood the Nature Not thoughtful of others - Adjusted with the nature Making a profit from water Our forefathers - understood the nature Adjusted with the nature Unlimited Any Body Concern about others rights Protectors of Wawa Self assigned Selfless Work with Nature Planned for far ahead future Using the system does not harm anyboday Repeated use Wawa - Sustainability Right to benefit from Wewa More controls introduced Competition for water Privatisation Water Serves all Dominitation nature Thoughtless of the future Protectors of World Peace Self assigned Selfless Work with Nature Planned for far ahead future Using the system shall not harm anyboday Repeated Use 197

227 Background Papers Authors of Background Papers Page Robert S. McNamara 199 D L O Mendis 205 D L O Mendis 222 D L O Mendis 232 D L O Mendis 237 D L O Mendis 248 D L O Mendis 258 D L O Mendis 284 D L O Mendis 291 D L O Mendis 302 D L O Mendis 305 D L O Mendis 309 Harold Pinter 319 Ph. B Smith and Samuel E. Okoye 328 V Tharumaratnam 335 C G Uragoda

228 Apocalypse Soon* Robert S. McNamara Message to the Pugwash Community from Eric Ferguson Pugwashnet Administrator. I am posting this message, which came to me via David Krieger and INESnet, as Robert McNamara has been active within Pugwash on these issues, and his opinion will interest many - Eric Ferguson. Robert McNamara is worried. He knows how close we ve come. His counsel helped the Kennedy administration avert nuclear catastrophe during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Today, he believes the United States must no longer rely on nuclear weapons as a foreign-policy tool. To do so is immoral, illegal and dreadfully dangerous. It is time - well past time, in my view - for the United States to cease its Cold War-style reliance on nuclear weapons as a foreign-policy tool. At the risk of appearing simplistic and provocative, I would characterize current US nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary, and dreadfully dangerous. The risk of an accidental or inadvertent nuclear launch is unacceptably high. Far from reducing these risks, the Bush administration has signaled that it is committed to keeping the US nuclear arsenal as a mainstay of its military power - a commitment that is simultaneously eroding the international norms that have limited the spread of nuclear weapons and fissile materials for 50 years. Much of the current US nuclear policy has been in place since before I was Secretary of Defense, and it has only grown more dangerous and diplomatically destructive in the intervening years. Today, the United States has deployed approximately 4,500 strategic, offensive nuclear warheads. Russia has roughly 3,800. The strategic forces of Britain, France, and China are considerably smaller, with nuclear weapons in each state s arsenal. The new nuclear states of Pakistan and India have fewer than 100 weapons each. North Korea now claims to have developed nuclear weapons, and US intelligence agencies estimate that Pyongyang has enough fissile material for 2-8 bombs. How destructive are these weapons? The average US warhead has a destructive power 20 times that of the Hiroshima bomb. Of the 8,000 active or operational US warheads, 2,000 are on hair-trigger alert, ready to be launched on 15 minutes warning. How are these weapons to be used? The United States has never endorsed the policy of no first use, not during my seven years as secretary or since. We have been and remain prepared to initiate the use of nuclear weapons - by the decision of one person, the President - against either a nuclear or non nuclear enemy whenever we believe it is in our interest to do so. For decades, US nuclear forces have been sufficiently strong to absorb a first strike and then inflict unacceptable damage on an opponent. This has been and (so long as we face a nuclear-armed, potential adversary) must continue to be the foundation of our nuclear deterrent. In my time as Secretary of Defense, the commander of the US Strategic Air Command (SAC) carried with him a secure telephone, no matter where he went, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. The telephone of the commander, whose headquarters were in Omaha, Nebraska, was linked to the underground command post of the North, American Defense Command, deep inside Cheyenne Mountain, in Colorado, and to the US President, wherever he happened to be. The President always had at hand nuclear release codes in the so-called football, a briefcase carried for the President at all times by a US military officer. * From Foreign Policy May/June 2005 Issue 199

229 The SAC commander s orders were to answer the telephone by no later than the end of the third ring. If it rang, and he was informed that a nuclear attack of enemy ballistic missiles appeared to be under way, he was allowed 2 to 3 minutes to decide whether the warning was valid (over the years, the United States has received many false warnings), and if so, how the United States should respond. He was then given approximately 10 minutes to determine what to recommend, to locate and advise the President, permit the President to discuss the situation with two or three close advisors (presumably the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), and to receive the President s decision and pass it immediately, along with the codes, to the launch sites. The President essentially had two options: He could decide to ride out the attack and defer until later any decision to launch a retaliatory strike. Or, he could order an immediate retaliatory strike, from a menu of options, thereby launching US weapons that were targeted on the opponent s military-industrial assets. Our opponents in Moscow presumably had and have similar arrangements. The whole situation seems so bizarre as to be beyond belief. On any given day, as we go about our business, the President is prepared to make a decision within 20 minutes that could launch one of the most devastating weapons in the world. To declare war requires an act of congress, but to launch a nuclear holocaust requires 20 minutes deliberation by the President and his advisors. But that is what we have lived with for 40 years. With very few changes, this system remains largely intact, including the football, the President s constant companion. I was able to change some of these dangerous policies and procedures. My colleagues and I started arms control talks; we installed safeguards to reduce the risk of unauthorized launches; we added options to the nuclear war plans so that the president did not have to choose between an all-or-nothing response, and we eliminated the vulnerable and provocative nuclear missiles in Turkey. I wish I had done more, but we were in the midst of the Cold War, and our options were limited. The United States and our NATO allies faced a strong Soviet and Warsaw Pact conventional threat. Many of the allies (and some in Washington as well) felt strongly that preserving the US option of launching a first strike was necessary for the sake of keeping the Soviets at bay. What is shocking is that today, more than a decade after the end of the Cold War, the basic US nuclear policy is unchanged. It has not adapted to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Plans and procedures have not been revised to make the United States or other countries less likely to push the button. At a minimum, we should remove all strategic nuclear weapons from hair-trigger alert, as others have recommended, including Gen. George Lee Butler, the last commander of SAC. That simple change would greatly reduce the risk of an accidental nuclear launch. It would also signal to other states that the United States is taking steps to end its reliance on nuclear weapons. We pledged to work in good faith toward the eventual elimination of nuclear arsenals when we negotiated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in In May, diplomats from more than 180 nations are meeting in New York City to review the NPT and assess whether members are living up to the agreement. The United States is focused, for understandable reasons, on persuading North Korea to rejoin the treaty and on negotiating deeper constraints on Iran s nuclear ambitions. Those states must be convinced to keep the promises they made when they originally signed the NPT - that they would not build nuclear weapons in return for access to peaceful uses of nuclear energy. But the attention of many nations, including some potential new nuclear weapons states, is also on the United States. Keeping such large numbers of weapons, and maintaining them on hair-trigger alert, are potent signs that the United States is not seriously working toward the elimination of its arsenal and raises troubling questions as to why any other state should restrain its nuclear ambitions. 200

230 A Preview of the Apocalypse The destructive power of nuclear weapons is well known, but given the United States continued reliance on them, it s worth remembering the danger they present. A 2000 report by the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War describes the likely effects of a single 1 megaton weapon - dozens of which are contained in the Russian and US inventories. At ground zero, the explosion creates a crater 300 feet deep and 1,200 feet in diameter. Within one second, the atmosphere itself ignites into a fireball more than a half-mile in diameter. The surface of the fireball radiates nearly three times the light and heat df a comparable area of the surface of the sun, extinguishing in seconds all life below and radiating outward at the speed of light, causing instantaneous severe burns to people within one to three miles. A blast wave of compressed air reaches a distance of three miles in about 12 seconds, flattening factories and commercial buildings. Debris carried by winds of 250 mph inflicts lethal injuries throughout the area. At least 50 percent of people in the area die immediately, prior to any injuries from radiation or the developing firestorm. Of course, our knowledge of these effects is not entirely hypothetical. Nuclear weapons, with roughly one seventieth of the power of the 1 megaton bomb just described, were twice used by the United States in August One atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Around 80,000 people died immediately, approximately 200,000 died eventually. Later, a similar size bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. On Nov. 7, 1995, the mayor of Nagasaki recalled his memory of the attack in testimony to the International Court of Justice: Nagasaki became a city of death where not even the sound of insects could be heard. After a while, countless men, women and children began to gather for a drink of water at the banks of nearby Urakami River, their hair and clothing scorched and their burnt skin hanging off in sheets like rags. Begging for help they died one after another in the water or in heaps on the banks. Four months after the atomic bombing, 74,000 people were dead, and 75,000 had suffered injuries, that is, two-thirds of the city population had fallen victim to this calamity that came upon Nagasaki like a preview of the Apocalypse. Why did so many civilians have to die? Because the civilians, who made up nearly 100 percent of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were unfortunately co-located with Japanese military and industrial targets. Their annihilation, though not the objective of those dropping the bombs, was an inevitable result of the choice of those targets. It is worth noting that during the Cold War, the United States reportedly had dozens of nuclear warheads targeted on Moscow alone, because it contained so many military targets and so much industrial capacity. Presumably, the Soviets similarly targeted many US cities. The statement that our nuclear weapons do not target populations per se was and remains totally misleading in the sense that the so-called collateral damage of large nuclear strikes would include tens of millions of innocent civilian dead. This in a nutshell is what nuclear weapons do: They indiscriminately blast, burn, and irradiate with a speed and finality that are almost incomprehensible. This is exactly what countries like the United States and Russia, with nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert, continue to threaten every minute of every day in this new 21st century. No Way to Win I have worked on issues relating to US and NATO nuclear strategy and war plans for more than 40 years. During that time, I have never seen a piece of paper that outlined a plan for the United States or NATO to initiate the use of nuclear weapons with any benefit for the United States or NATO. I have made this statement in front of audiences, including NATO defense ministers and senior military leaders, many times. No one has ever refuted it. To launch weapons against a 201

231 nuclear-equipped opponent would be suicidal. To do so against a non nuclear enemy would be militarily unnecessary, morally repugnant, and politically indefensible. I reached these conclusions very soon after becoming Secretary of Defense. Although I believe Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson shared my view, it was impossible for any of us to make such statements publicly because they were totally contrary to established NATO policy. After leaving the Defense Department, I became President of the World Bank. During my 13- year tenure, from 1968 to 1981, I was prohibited, as an employee of an international institution, from commenting publicly on issues of US national security. After my retirement from the bank, I began to reflect on how I, with seven years experience as secretary of defense, might contribute to an understanding of the issues with which I began my public service career. At that time, much was being said and written regarding how the United States could, and why it should, be able to fight and win a nuclear war with the Soviets. This view implied, of course, that nuclear weapons did have military utility; that they could be used in battle with ultimate gain to whoever had the largest force or used them with the greatest acumen. Having studied these views, I decided to go public with some information that I knew would be controversial, but that I felt was needed to inject reality into these increasingly unreal discussions about the military utility of nuclear weapons. In articles and speeches, I criticized the fundamentally flawed assumption that nuclear weapons could be used in some limited way. There is no way to effectively contain a nuclear strike - to keep it from inflicting enormous destruction on civilian life and property, and there is no guarantee against unlimited escalation once the first nuclear strike occurs. We cannot avoid the serious and unacceptable risk of nuclear war until we recognize these facts and base our military plans and policies upon this recognition. I hold these views even more strongly today than I did when I first spoke out against the nuclear dangers our policies were creating. I know from direct experience that US nuclear policy today creates unacceptable risks to other nations and to our own. What Castro Taught Us Among the costs of maintaining nuclear weapons is the risk -tome an unacceptable risk - of use of the weapons either by accident or as a result ofmisjudgment or miscalculation in times of crisis. The Cuban Missile Crisis demonstrated that the United States and the Soviet Union - and indeed the rest of the world - came within a hair s breadth of nuclear disaster in October Indeed, according to former Soviet military leaders, at the height of the crisis, Soviet forces in Cuba possessed 162 nuclear warheads, including at least 90 tactical warheads. At about the same time, Cuban President Fidel Castro asked the Soviet ambassador-to Cuba to send a cable to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev stating that Castro urged him to counter a US attack with a nuclear response. Clearly, there was a high risk that in the face of a US attack, which many in the US government were prepared to recommend to President Kennedy, the Soviet forces in Cuba would have decided to use their nuclear weapons rather than lose them. Only a few years ago did we learn that the four Soviet submarines trailing the US Naval vessels near Cuba each carried torpedoes with nuclear warheads. Each of the sub commanders had the authority to launch his torpedoes. The situation was even more frightening because, as the lead commander recounted to me, the subs were out of communication with their Soviet bases, and they continued their patrols for four days after Khrushchev announced the withdrawal of the missiles from Cuba. The lesson, if it had not been clear before, was made so at a conference on the crisis held in Havana in 1992, when we first began to learn from former Soviet officials about their preparations for nuclear war in the event of a US invasion. Near the end of that meeting, I asked Castro whether he would have recommended that Khrushchev use the weapons in the face of a US invasion, and if so, how he thought the United States would respond. We started from the assumption that if there was an invasion of Cuba, nuclear war would erupt, Castro replied. We were certain of that. 202

232 [W]e would be forced to pay the price that we would disappear. He continued, Would I have been ready to use nuclear weapons? Yes, I would have agreed to the use of nuclear weapons. And he added, If Mr. McNamara or Mr. Kennedy had been in our place, and had their country been invaded, or their country was going to be occupied. I believe they would have used tactical nuclear weapons. I hope that President Kennedy and I would not have behaved as Castro suggested we would have. His decision would have destroyed his country. Had we responded in a similar way the damage to the United States would have been unthinkable. But human beings are fallible. In conventional war, mistakes cost lives, sometimes thousands of lives. However, if mistakes were to affect decisions relating to the use of nuclear forces, there would be no learning curve. They would result in the destruction of nations. The indefinite combination ofhuman fallibility and nuclear weapons carries a very high risk of nuclear catastrophe. There is no way to reduce the risk to acceptable levels, other than to first eliminate the hair-trigger alert policy and later to eliminate or nearly eliminate nuclear weapons. The United States should move immediately to institute these actions, in cooperation with Russia. That is the lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis. A Dangerous Obsession On Nov. 13, 2001, President George W. Bush announced that he had told Russian President Vladimir Putin that the United States would reduce operationally deployed nuclear warheads from approximately 5,300 to a level between 1,700 and 2,200 over the next decade. This scaling back would approach the 1,500 to 2,200 range that Putin had proposed for Russia. However, the Bush administration s Nuclear Posture Review, mandated by the US Congress and issued in January 2002, presents quite a different story. It assumes that strategic offensive nuclear weapons in much larger numbers than 1,700 to 2,200 will be part of US military forces for the next several decades. Although the number of deployed warheads will be reduced to 3,800 in 2007 and to between 1,700 and 2,200 by 2012, the warheads and many of the launch vehicles taken off deployment will be maintained in a responsive reserve from which they could be moved back to the operationally deployed force. The Nuclear Posture Review received little attention from the media. But its emphasis on strategic offensive nuclear weapons deserves vigorous public scrutiny. Although any proposed reduction is welcome, it is doubtful that survivors - if there were any - of an exchange of 3,200 warheads (the US and Russian numbers projected for 2012), with a destructive power approximately 65,000 times that of the Hiroshima bomb, could detect a difference between the effects of such an exchange and one that would result from the launch of the current US and Russian forces totaling about 12,000 warheads. In addition to projecting the deployment of large numbers of strategic nuclear weapons far into the future, the Bush administration is planning an extensive and expensive series of programs to sustain and modernize the existing nuclear force and to begin studies for new launch vehicles, as well as new warheads for all of the launch platforms. Some members of the administration have called for new nuclear weapons that could be used as bunker busters against underground shelters (such as the shelters Saddam Hussein used in Baghdad). New production facilities for fissile materials would need to be built to support the expanded force. The plans provide for integrating a national ballistic missile defense into the new triad of offensive weapons to enhance the nation s ability to use its power projection forces by improving our ability to counterattack an enemy. The Bush administration also announced that it has no intention to ask congress to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), and, though no decision to test has been made, the administration has ordered the national laboratories to begin research on new nuclear weapons designs and to prepare the underground test sites in Nevada for nuclear tests if necessary in the future. Clearly, the Bush administration assumes that nuclear weapons will be part of US military forces for at least the next several decades. 203

233 Good faith participation in international negotiation on nuclear disarmament - including participation in the CTBT - is a legal and political obligation of all parties to the NPT that entered into force in 1970 and was extended indefinitely in The Bush administration s nuclear program, alongside its refusal to ratify the CTBT, will be viewed, with reason, by many nations as equivalent to a US break from the treaty. It says to the non nuclear weapons nations, We, with the strongest conventional military force in the world, require nuclear weapons in perpetuity, but you, facing potentially well-armed opponents, are never to be allowed even one nuclear weapon. If the United States continues its current nuclear stance, over time, substantial proliferation of nuclear weapons will almost surely follow. Some, or all, of such nations as Egypt, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Taiwan will very likely initiate nuclear weapons programs, increasing both the risk of use of the weapons and the diversion of weapons and fissile materials into the hands ofrogue states or terrorists. Diplomats and intelligence agencies believe Osama bin Laden has made several attempts to acquire nuclear weapons or fissile materials. It has been widely reported that Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, former director of Pakistan s nuclear reactor complex, met with bin Laden several times. Were al Qaeda to acquire fissile materials, especially enriched uranium, its ability to produce nuclear weapons would be great. The knowledge of how to construct a simple gun-type nuclear device, like the one we dropped on Hiroshima, is now widespread. Experts have little doubt that terrorists could construct such a primitive device if they acquired the requisite enriched uranium material. Indeed, just last summer, at a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences, former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry said, I have never been more fearful of a nuclear detonation than now. There is a greater than 50 percent probability of a nuclear strike on US targets within a decade. I share his fears. A Moment of Decision We are at a critical moment in human history - perhaps not as dramatic as that of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but a moment no less crucial. Neither the Bush administration, the congress, the American people, nor the people of other nations have debated the merits of alternative, longrange nuclear weapons policies for their countries or the world. They have not examined the military utility of the weapons; the risk of inadvertent or accidental use; the moral and legal considerations relating to the use or threat of use of the weapons; or the impact of current policies on proliferation. Such debates are long overdue. If they are held, I believe they will conclude, as have I and an increasing number of senior military leaders, politicians, and civilian security experts: We must move promptly toward the elimination - or near elimination - of all nuclear weapons. For many, there is a strong temptation to cling to the strategies of the past 40 years. But to do so would be a serious mistake leading to unacceptable risks for all nations. Editor s End Notes This article from the journal Foreign Policy May/June 2005 issue was brought to the attention of Pugwash shortly after publication. Today, three years later its importance is further heightened by the unique Presidential election in the USA. The whole world heard how the US President may be asked in the middle of the night weather to launch a Nuclear strike. McNamara says To declare war requires an act of congress, but to launch a nuclear holocaust requires 20 minutes. Final voting in the US Presidential election is scheduled for November 4, 2008, concidentaly the birth centenary of Sir Joseph Rotblat, the founding father figure of the Pugwash Movement. This book will be launched at a public meeting at the Institute of Physics University of Peradeniya on that day, when Jayantha Dhanapala, President of Pugwash will give a lecture on The significance of nuclear disarmament for Sri Lanka. 204

234 Second Prof. E. O. E. Perera Comermoration Lecture, 1989 Institution Engineers, of Sri Lanka Hydraulic Civilizations, Irrigation Ecosystems and the Modern State D.L.O. Mendis [Adapted from the Second Professor E.O.E. Pereira Commemoration Lecture, September 13, 1989, at the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka. Professor Pereira was the fi rst Dean of Engineering, appointed by Sir Ivor Jennings, Vice Chancellor of the University of Ceylon (Sri Lanka), in 1948, who set up the Faculty of Engineering in Colombo in Both E O E Pereira and Ivor Jennings were Cambridge alumni and Professor Pereira encouraged his best students to pursue graduate studies in Cambridge. When Professor Pereira became Vice Chancellor of the University of Peradeniya in 1969, he was succeeded as Dean of Engineering by his favourite student Professor Alagaiah Thurairajah, who had already become world renowned for his work in soil mechanics as a graduate student with Professor Roscoe in Cambridge University. After Professor Pereira passed away in 1988, there was an Obituary appreciation in the London Times. Professor Thurairajah delivered the fi rst Professor E.O.E. Pereira Commemoration Lecture in 1988.] Hydraulic Civilizations and Irrigation Ecosystems Karl Wittfogel claimed that all ancient hydraulic civilizations in the East had evolved and developed on account of what he described as Oriental Despotism - Marx s term to distinguish it from the rather better known occidental variety (Wittfogel, 1957). E R Leach a Cambridge don, refuted this in his famous essay Hydraulic Society in Ceylon (Leach, 1959). There are many studies of ancient hydraulic civilizations that developed in river valleys in the arid and semi-arid tropics after the neolithic revolution in pre-historic times. The best known of these ancient civilizations were in the river valleys of the Tigris-Euphrates in ancient Mesopotamia, the Nile in Egypt, the Indus in India, and the rivers in China. The best known and certainly the most exhaustive study by far is the work of Joseph Needham and his associates, Science and Civilization in China, at the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge England. The relevant volume in this monumental work of scholarship, Volume 4, Part 3, has some fourteen pages devoted to the ancient irrigation works in Ceylon. The title of that volume, Hydraulic Engineering, conveys the popular association between hydraulics, irrigation, and ancient civilizations. Hydraulic Engineering From a hydraulic engineering perspective, the evolution and development of irrigation systems in ancient Sri Lanka took place in the following four stages according to R.L. Brohier (Brohier, 1956, Needham, 1971). (Figure 1 see Overview page 8) 1. Rain fed tanks from which water was baled out at leisure 2. Small village tanks from which water was let out by cutting temporary outlets at the ends of the earth embankments. 3. Large storage reservoirs (built after the invention of the sluice) each of which submerged a number of small village tanks. 4. A river diversion weir, and a diversion channel that diverted water from a flowing river to augment the large reservoir. The emphasis in this 4 stage hypothesis is on the development of storage reservoirs. Its origin has been traced to a statement made by J.S. Kennedy, in 1933, in a historic paper presented to the Engineering Association of Ceylon, the predecessor of this Institution: `The small tanks, like the village cattle, are too numerous for efficiency. (Kennedy, 1934). 205

235 Irrigation Ecosystems The term irrigation ecosystems was arrived at in the course of research into the origins, sustainability, and decline of the ancient irrigation systems in Sri Lanka (Mendis, 1984 etc). The irrigation ecosystems approach has to be explained from first principles as it were. Ecology is essentially the study of interactions between organisms among themselves, and between organisms and their environment, viewed from a holistic perspective. An ecological system or ecosystem may be defined at any convenient scale to suit the needs of a particular study. Our planet earth is the largest ecosystem. The biosphere is a smaller ecosystem than earth;. and so on. From an ecosystems perspective, the evolution and development of irrigation systems in Sri Lanka is seen as follows (Mendis, 1984): 1. Rain fed agriculture. 2. Seasonal or temporary river diversion, and flood or inundation irrigation on river banks. 3. Development of permanent diversion structures on rivers, and channel systems on river banks. 4. Construction and operation of spillways. 5. Invention of the sorowwa (sluice), with its bisokotuwa (access tower). 6. Construction of storage reservoirs equipped with sluices. 7. Damming a perennial river, using a sluice for temporary river diversion during river closure, or the twin-tank method. The following 6 types of irrigation ecosystems have been identified from this 7 stage hypothesis: 1. Rain fed agriculture: (a) Seasonal cultivation - haen govithan, slash and burn, or swidden agriculture. (b) Permanent highland plantations like the Kandyan forest garden, or the Dry zone forest garden. 2. Flood or inundation irrigation by seasonal river diversion. 3. Permanent river diversion and irrigation through a channel system 4. A micro irrigation ecosystem based on a small village tank 5. A macro irrigation ecosystem based on a large storage reservoir with one or more micro irrigation ecosystems of types 2, 3, 4, in its command area. 6. A complex of macro irrigation ecosystems based on interconnected large reservoirs and channels, as in the ancient Rajarata. All these six types are recognizable in Sri Lanka, and it has been shown that the man-made ancient irrigation systems consisted of the above five types, excluding the first which is natural. They co-existed from ancient times to the present day. Irrigation Ecosystems vs. Hydraulic Engineering By analogy with Amory Lovins Soft energy and Hard energy Paths, (Lovins, 1977), the irrigation ecosystems approach corresponds to a soft energy or soft technology type of analysis, and the hydraulic engineering approach corresponds to a hard energy or hard technology type of analysis. In the irrigation ecosystems soft technology approach, water is seen as the vehicle for the conveyance of nutrients in nature s biogeochemical cycles. In the hydraulic engineering hard technology approach, water is seen as the principal agent or active factor in land preparation for crop production under irrigated agriculture. In the former, water is an active agent in a biological process, and in the latter it is an inanimate agent in an engineering function. 206

236 Biogeochemical cycles in nature consist of gaseous cycles and sedimentary cycles. Energy from solar radiation is used for the continuing and endless cycling of the elements necessary for life, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium etc. through the lithosphere, the hydrosphere and the atmosphere, which together constitute the biosphere, the region of the earth in which all living organisms live and reproduce. Each of the five irrigation ecosystems identified in the ancient irrigation systems mentioned above, has boundaries within the biosphere, and each has its own component part of the lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere. The differences between these irrigation ecosystems lies in the manner in which nutrients are cycled with the aid of water as the means of conveyance. To best appreciate the advantages of the irrigation ecosystems approach over the hydraulic engineering approach to understand the ancient systems in Sri Lanka, a glimpse into the history of irrigation, is necessary. This takes us to an analogy, in the field of epistemology. Kuhn s Contribution to Epistemology Thomas S Kuhn s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1960), has been described as a landmark in intellectual history that has attracted attention far beyond its own immediate field. Kuhn advanced the view that, in any particular field of science, there would be a number of competing theories, from among which one theory would eventually emerge as a paradigm, by virtue of being accepted by a majority of scientists in that field. Thereafter, according to Kuhn, there would be a period when what he called normal science would develop, this being science based on the paradigm. This paradigm-based normal science would eventually reach a crisis on account of inadequacies in the paradigm that became revealed as the paradigmbased science progressed. The crisis would intensify until it was finally resolved by what Kuhn described as a scientific revolution, namely the arrival of a new paradigm. The new paradigm would accommodate the old, so that the progress of science is continuous and consistent. Kuhn illustrated this with a number of well-known examples from the history of science. History of Irrigation in Sri Lanka: Theory, Paradigm, Crisis and Revolution A sequence of stages similar to Kuhn s stages in the progress of knowledge has been experienced in our understanding of the history of irrigation systems in Sri Lanka (Mendis, 1988a). Theory The pre-paradigm stage commenced with Kennedy s 1934 paper titled Evolution of Scientific Development of Village Irrigation Works in Ceylon. His historic remark quoted above, was interpreted by irrigation engineers to mean that the small village tank was only a stage in the evolution and development of irrigation systems, and small tanks had to be replaced by large reservoirs in due course. Evaporation losses are greater from a number of small tanks than from one large reservoir that held an equivalent volume of water. Also, the area of land submerged by the collection of small tanks is greater than the area submerged by one large equivalent reservoir. Ergo, the large reservoir is more efficient than the small tank - from a hydraulic engineering perspective. From an irrigation ecosystems perspective however, hydraulic engineering efficiency is important but not all-important. Water is treated as the vehicle for the conveyance of nutrients in nature s biogeochemical cycles. Evaporation, like seepage, is a part of the hydrological cycle. It is desirable to try to reduce both evaporation and seepage losses in an irrigation ecosystem, but to attempt to do so on the basis on a narrow hydraulic engineering perspective, rather than from a broad irrigation ecosystems perspective, can be disastrous - as will be shown. 207

237 Paradigm The paradigm in understanding the history of irrigation systems in Sri Lanka was Brohier s 4 stage theory, published in Paradigm-based engineering began with the publication in 1959 of a map described as the Water Resources Development Plan of Ceylon. A number of sites suitable for construction of large reservoirs are shown on this map, identified on the basis of a hydraulic engineering perspective. The first application of paradigm-based engineering was the construction of Uda Walawe reservoir in the middle basin of the Walawe ganga in During construction of headworks, it was realized and immediately pointed out that the better location for a large reservoir was a site about ten miles upstream (Mendis,1968, 158). Uda Walawe reservoir submerged a number of minor irrigation works, now recognized as micro irrigation ecosystems, under its 9000 acre water spread. Most of these were abandoned at the time, so that displacement of people did not present such a serious problem at the time of construction. (Figure 2 see page 13). Crisis In the downstream development area, a large number of functioning micro irrigation ecosystems, existed. It had been intended to acquire all existing private lands, and block them out together with crown lands, under the new settlement program. However, this was not achieved as intended due to resistance of local people as described below: In fact the official land distribution never occurred. Once the land had been leveled and prepared purana villagers, infuriated by the coming of outsiders, forcefully and disorderly occupied the land. (DeVroey and (Shanmugaratnam, 1984, 85) These two authors are saying that the official land acquisition and blocking out was forcefully resisted by the old villagers in a disorderly manner, because they were infuriated by the coming of outsiders. The first part is a factual report of events, the second part is the authors supposition as to the reasons behind the observed facts. A different explanation for their resistance will be presented below, in terms of irrigation ecosystems. The next big project identified from the Water Resources Development Plan, 1959, to be taken up for full investigation and feasibility studies was the Lower Kirindi oya reservoir or Lunuganvehera weva, also in southern Sri Lanka, part of the ancient Ruhunu rata. This was taken up for study in the early 1970 s by the Irrigation department. Even though the concept of irrigation ecosystems was not known at the time, it was pointed out that Lunuganvehera was not a suitable site for such a large reservoir in the Kirindi oya basin, being too close to the sea. A far better site was available at Hurathgamuva, about 10 niles upstream. Lunuganvehera weva submerged under its 5000 acre water-spread, a number of ancient micro irrigation ecosystems, some abandoned, others working and supporting as many as 1500 families. If Hurathgamuva reservoir had been built instead, a new macro irrigation ecosystem would have been created, consisting of the large Hurathgamuva reservoir with a number of already existing micro irrigation ecosystems within its command area. Ancient irrigation ecosystems in the Kirindi oya basin have been destabilized and destroyed by the impact of hydraulic engineering (Mendis, 1989). The Crisis that had begun in the Walawe downstream development area in the 1970s, spread to Kirindi oya in the 1980s. By analogy with Kuhn s analysis the stages of Theory, Paradigm, and Crisis had been experienced in the progress of irrigation engineering, and the final stage of Revolution was around the corner. Revolution: the New Paradigm A Kuhn type revolution is the arrival of a new paradigm. In 1984 a paradigm candidate was announced in the form of the 7 stage theory for the evolution and development of irrigation systems given above (Mendis, 1984). A special claim for the new paradigm is that it will facilitate study of the origins of complex societies in terms of irrigation as a primary cause for the evolution 208

238 of cultural complexity. This was the basis for Wittfogel s study of ancient China, but Wittfogel treated irrigation essentially from a hard technology perspective of hydraulic engineering. Coincidentally, his conclusion was also a hard one - that development of complex irrigation systems necessarily coincided with the growth of despotic states. Hydraulic Civilization in Ancient Sri Lanka The past, in classical terms consists of prehistoric, proto-his toric and historic periods. In the most general terms, prehistory covers the stone age and the bronze age; proto-history begins with the use of iron, and the historic period begins when there is a system of writing. In Sri Lanka, there is no-evidence of a bronze age, and the stone age yields to the iron age around the 8th century BC. (Seneviratne, 1988, 129). The earliest inscriptions date from about the 2nd century BC. The historic period is taken to begin around the 3rd century BC. The protohistoric period occupies approximately the period between the 8th and 3rd centuries BC, and the prehistoric period ends in the 8th century BC. Ecosystems of types 1 to 6 have existed in Sri Lanka throughout the historic period. However, at present, prehistoric archaeological evidence for a local origin of rain fed agriculture, seasonal river diversion and flood irrigation, and permanent river diversion and channel irrigation, does not seem to be available. This suggests that the archaeological record is still incomplete, or that types 1,2, and 3 of the ecosystems were brought in to the island by a transfer of technology in ancient times. There is evidence that irrigation ecosystems of types 4, 5, and 6, all based on storage reservoir, developed in Sri Lanka. Henry Parker who spent more than 30 years in the island towards the end of the 19th century, held that the irrigation sluice was invented in about the 3rd century BC in Sri Lanka. He wrote: Since about the middle of the last century, open wells, called `valve-pits when they stand clear of the embankment, and valve towers when they are on it, have been built on numerous reservoirs in Europe. Their duty is to hold the valves, and the lifting gear for working them, by means of which the outward fl ow of the water is regulated or totally stopped. Such also was the function of the bisokotuwa of the Sinhalese engineers: they were the first inventors of the valve-pit, more than 2100 years ago. (Parker,1909, 379). Construction of storage reservoirs of all sizes became possible after the invention of the sluice or sorowwa, with its access tower or bisokotuwa, the precursor of the modern valve tower. Hydraulic Civilisations in the Ancient World Thus did man-made irrigation ecosystems of types 4, 5and 6 come into existence in ancient Sri Lanka. On account of lack of information concerning a local origin for ecosystems of types 1, 2, and 3, it is necessary to examine the great hydraulic civilisations in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, or China. However, although an abundance of information is available, interpretation of this evidence in terms of successive changes in the use of water as the means of agricultural production, has not so far been done. It is such an approach that results in the identification of ecosystem types 1, 2, and 3, in the ancient civilisations. A preliminary interpretation of some evidence from ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus valley will now be presented to illustrate this. Evidence from China, comprehensively documented in the Needham study, will not be discussed. Rain fed Agriculture ecosystems This is the first ecosystem associated with the Neolithic revolution, the beginning of sedentary agriculture. In ancient Mesopotamia, domestication of plants and animals appears to have taken place for the first time, around 9000 BC. Pastoralists and nomads had succeeded hunters and gatherers in a semi-mountainous region in the Fertile Crescent, fringing the lower plain. This region which 209

239 includes the Zagros and Taurus mountains, covers part of present day Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Israel. These earliest settlers lived on rain-fed cultivation of wheat and barley, and the milk and meat of domesticated animals. The earliest villages were within sight of each other, or at most, within a day s walk of each other. (Wenke, 1980) Around about 6000 BC a similar development was taking place in the foothills of the high mountains above the Indus plain in India. Again it was the wandering nomads and pastoralists, who subsisted on domesticated animals and some plant species, who began these earliest settlements in the Indus valley. Interestingly, to this day there are nomadic tribesmen in these regions of the Baluch Mountains, who live in the mountains for half the year, and come down to the plains to escape the winter. The domesticated animals of these nomads feed on rain fed upland pasture, and convert this vegetation to milk and meat for human consumption, to this day (Ibid). Seasonal River Diversion and Flood Irrigation Ecosystems This is the first of the irrigation ecosystems, of which there are five in all. One of the best known of this type is in the Nile basin. The ancient Egyptian civilisation developed on account of the annual flooding of this great river, caused by rain in its upper catchment. These seasonal floods deposit loads of nutrient-bearing silt on the river banks each year. The ancient Egyptians discovered that they could gather a rich harvest of grain annually with comparatively little effort for irrigation or land preparation. From the ecological perspective, a concise description of this type of seasonal river diversion and flood irrigation ecosystem is as follows: River floods bring nutrients, water, and new soils for a new crop. Dry periods in between the wet periods help to control wild vegetation, which otherwise would create too much competition. These changes also control insects. (Odum and Odum, 1976, 140) The beginnings of this type of irrigation ecosystem in the Nile basin date from about 4500 BC, which was a millennium and a half after this type had developed in Mesopotamia. However there is no conclusive evidence of a transfer of technology from ancient Mesopotamia to Egypt of this seasonal river diversion and flood irrigation ecosystem. In modern Iran, Prickett has investigated some sites dating back to the fifth millennium BC. She says: The system as a whole would have functioned through the use of temporary dams, generally of impermanent materials like brush, earth, and boulders across major natural fl ood channels. These dams diverted the fl ood into the slightly higher, generally dry secondary fl ood channels and distributory channels. (Prickett, 1986, 242) In the Indus river basin, the earliest evidence of river diversion and flood irrigation ecosystems appears to date to about 3000 BC. However, settlements had been developed on the Indus alluvium even earlier, by nomads and pastoralists, and the beginnings of this type of irrigation ecosystem may possibly go back even earlier than 3000 BC. Unfortunately, a high water table in the area has prevented archaeologists from unearthing evidence that may prove the existence of flood irrigation ecosystems in earlier times. (Werike, 1980). The great Indus valley civilisation began around 2500 BC after a few hundred years of settled agriculture dependent on seasonal or temporary river diversion and flood inundation irrigation. It is remarkable that without permanent river diversion dams built across the river, or any significant diversion and distribution channels constructed on the river banks, a large surplus was garnered annually, which enabled the Harappan civilisation to flourish for over 500 years. Despite the absence of such features as diversion dams and channels, irrigation ecosystems were man-made to some extent, on account of the construction of stone revetments called garbabands. (Mortimer Wheeler, 1968). 210

240 Kossambi has an explanation for the lack of change and non-development of permanent river diversion and channel irrigation ecosystems in the Indus valley civilisation. He says: The lack of change on the Indus was not due to mere sloth or conservatism but to much deeper causes. It was a deliberate refusal to learn when innovation would have greatly improved matters. The merchants surely knew about canal irrigation in Babylon and Sumeria. No canals are discernible in any of the air photographs of the Indus region, apart from modern irrigation works. No Indus records have survived. Of course it is a puzzle why the Indus merchants did not adopt writing upon clay tablets from their Iraq counterparts with whom they traded. Why did they not take over the better foreign tools? Why not use canal irrigation and deep ploughing for their agriculture? Some of them must have seen the heavy crop thus yielded on the Euphrates. The answer would be that the Indus merchant could not profi t from these improvements. It follows that the land as a whole must have been the property of, and directly administered by, the great temple and its priesthood. Once established, they would insist in the way of most ancient priesthoods upon preventing all innovation. For them change was not necessary; for the merchants change was not profi table. (Kossambi, 106.) Another explanation is implied in Wheeler s reference to tectonic movements that may have caused catastrophic floods in the Indus plain. (Wheeler, 1968, 8). This could have effectively inhibited change from the seasonal river diversion irrigation ecosystem to the permanent river diversion ecosystem, as well. Whatever the reasons, the famed Harappan civilization was built on the surplus from rain-fed and seasonal river diversion irrigation alone, as in Mesopotamia. Kossambi poses and answers another question: The Nile river does not exceed 30 miles in width between barren stone clifts; the cultivable soil is never more than 10 miles or so of alluvial deposit. But the deposit is renewed each year by the terrific annual fl ood of the Nile, with virtually no rain in Egypt proper to supplement it. In Mesopotamia, the agriculture of the late third millennium was based on canal irrigation. In a smaller area, and one not more fertile than that covered by the Indus basin, there were over a dozen prominent cities... why were there just two large Indus cities, without the grandiose monuments of the Pharaohs or the numerous city mounds of Mesopotamia? The answer seems to be that the Indus people did not practice canal irrigation, nor did they have the heavy plough. These two modern features make agriculture in Sind and the Panjab what it is today. With fl ood irrigation alone, not much can be cultivated, though the yield on the soil where the fl oods have deposited rich silt is excellent without deep ploughing. The natural fl ooding of the Indus continues to this day. The fl ood-irrigated lands are still the most productive, though the deposit is shallower and less fertile than in Egypt. The Indus people seem to have increased the fl ooded area, not by canals but by dams that impeded the fl ood fl ow. These dams were at times seasonal. (Kossambi, 1965, 62) Permanent River Diversion and Channel Irrigation Ecosystems This type of irrigation ecosystem differs from the previous type, and is also an improvement on it, in that man makes a bigger contribution towards establishing the system. He does this by building a permanent river diversion structure across a flowing stream or river, and by building a channel system on the river bank for diversion and distribution of water, or both. The garbabands in the Indus valley are not permanent diversion dams of this type. The benefits of a seasonal diversion system described above, are retained, while the reliability of the system is increased. As a result there will be a consolidation of human settlements, with an almost inevitable increase in population. This would result in concentration of populations and the development of cities. Finally, as the archaeological record has shown, city-states would arise. 211

241 This may have been the sequence in ancient Mesopotamia, where thousands of village settlements had developed between about 6000 and 3000 BC, dependant on seasonal river diversion irrigation ecosystems. One of these was Uruk which had grown into a city of about 10,000 people by about 3000 BC. About eight centuries later, in about 3000 BC, this city had grown rapidly and had a population of about 50,000 people. Moreover, the surrounding small village settlements had also been abandoned at about this time, and the people had apparently moved en masse to the city, which soon emerged as a City-state, behind fortified defensive walls. Wenke has commented on this in the following terms: Because of the defensive considerations and the cost of transporting labour and products, agricultural land nearest the urban areas would have been most intensively exploited and this may have stimulated the construction of large irrigation works. (Wenke, 1980, 403) The suggestion here is that conflicts between cities led to the rise of city-states, and the development of large irrigation systems. However, long before the emergence of city-states, there had been a comparatively sudden growth of cities in the southern alluvium of Mesopotamia, just after 4500 BC. That period of rapid growth is described by the term Ubaid Culture. Wenke comments: By 4500 BC the Ubaid culture was remarkably uniform over most of the alluvium: all the settlements seem to have been located on reliable water courses and almost all were less than ten hectares in size (most of them only one or two). (Ibid, 399) Wittofogel had suggested that irrigation was the primary cause of emerging cultural complexity, but Wenke says:... at least as conceived by Wittfogel, irrigation cannot be said to be the primary cause of early southwest Asian cultural complexity. Activity specialisation, monumental architecture, changes in settlement spacing and size of hierarchies, architectural variability, mortuary stratifi cation - in short, the whole range of physical evidence of cultural complexity - appears before evidence of significant extensions of irrigation systems. (Ibid, 424) In Mesopotamia, the sudden growth of the city of Uruk around 3000 BC seems to confirm Kossambi s statement that the agriculture of the third millenium was based on canal irrigation. This then is the time when permanent river diversion and channel irrigation ecosystems began to be developed, giving greater yields than from seasonal river diversion and flood irrigation ecosystems as described by Prickett. Uruk was the foremost of some 13 city-states in southern Mesopotamia where the Sumerian civilization flourished in the third millenium BC. Around 2350 BC one of these city-states, Akkad, under the leadership of Sargon, captured power over all the rest. Sargon s Akkad empire held sway over the region for a few centuries, but internal strife as well as invasions between about 2000 and 1000 BC led to fragmentation of this empire. The development of channel systems reached a new high under the ancient Babylonian empire, established by Hamurabi in the southern alluvium in Mesopotamia. For this reason, channel irrigation systems have been associated with Babylon, in as much as inundation irrigation is associated with Egypt and the Nile river basin. (Needham, 1971, 374). As mentioned previously, this is essentially a hydraulic engineering perspective, where the emphasis is on water as an inanimate agent, and channels have other important uses than irrigation alone. For example, channels were an important, even vital means of transport, especially in ancient China. From the ecosystems perspective, where the emphasis is on water as an animate agent, Babylon represents the first example of permanent river diversion and channel irrigation ecosystems from the ancient world. 212

242 The best examples of irrigation ecosystems of type 4, 5, and 6, are to be found in the ancient hydraulic civilization in Sri Lanka, and these will now be discussed. Micro Irrigation Ecosystems Based on Small village Tanks Small village tanks were an unique feature of the ancient hydraulic civilisation in Sri Lanka. Some 30,000 of them are said to have been constructed in the dry zone, about 15,000 square miles in extent. From a hydraulic engineering perspective, many of them are undoubtedly redundant, as implied in Kennedy s previously quoted observation, concerning their inefficiency. There is reference to the existence of 20,000 village settlements in the ancient Ruhunu rata alone, at one time, which implies the existence of at least 20,000 small tanks (Geiger, 1960). About 17,000 of these small tanks are shown numbered on the modern topographical survey sheets, about 8000 of them being described as in working condition, the rest as abandoned. Odum described this type of irrigation ecosystem as follows: It is the whole drainage basin, not just the body of water, that must be considered as the minimum ecosystem unit, when it comes to man s interests. (Odum, 1971, 16). (Emphasis in original) From a hydraulic engineering perspective, then, a village tank is just an inanimate body of water; but from the ecosystems perspective, catchment area, village tank and irrigable area (fields) together constitute a micro irrigation ecosystem. Macro Irrigation Ecosystems based on Large Reservoirs Large storage reservoirs, equipped with the famous sorowwa with the bisokotuwa, were another notable feature of the ancient hydraulic civilization in Sri Lanka, that flourished from perhaps the 4th century BC, till its final decline after the 12th century. The earliest identified reservoir is the Abhayawewa said to have been built in the 3rd century BC. (Needham, 1971, 370). A macro irrigation ecosystem was invariably created with the construction of a large reservoir, because a number of micro irrigation ecosystems of types 2, 3, or 4, existed in its command area. These existing micro irrigation ecosystems were strengthened by the drought resisting capability of the large reservoir, and together they made up the macro irrigation ecosystem. From the ecosystems perspective, then, far from submerging a number of small tanks, a large reservoir was necessarily located to command them. From the hydraulic engineering perspective, a large reservoir was built submerging a number of small village tanks (Figure 1). In late 1957, unprecedented heavy rain in the dry zone resulted in the breaching of almost all the major ancient reservoirs, and their beds stood exposed to view. There was no evidence to support the theory that these large reservoirs when constructed had submerged a number of small village tanks, but this fact escaped notice and went unremarked at the time. A Complex of Inter-connected Macro Irrigation Ecosystems R.L. Brohier, in a historic lecture to the Royal Asiatic Society, Ceylon Branch in 1935, described the extraordinary complex of inter-connected large reservoirs and channels in the ancient Rajarata of Sri Lanka, built over an extensive period of about 12 centuries, commencing in the 2nd or 3rd century BC. (Brohier, 1937). (Figures 3, 4 see page 294). Each of these large reservoirs represents a macro irrigation ecosystem. None of them was built in isolation, and together they represent an unique complex of inter-connected macro irrigation ecosystems. It would appear that the channels connecting these large reservoirs were constructed before the reservoirs themselves, so that each reservoir, when built, fitted into an inter-connected system of reservoirs and channels. In time, these systems themselves became interconnected, so that what began as a separate system later became part of a more complex system, or just a sub-system. 213

243 Each large reservoir when first constructed was located either at the head end or at the tail end of a channel. However as a system grew as a result of new inter-connections the relative position of a reservoir could change, so that it now appeared to be in the middle of a larger system of interconnected reservoirs and channels. The extremely complex system that finally evolved in the ancient Rajarata, is shown in Figure 5, (see p. 295) described as the Ancient Irrigation System of Raja rata, (Paranavitana and Nicholas, A Concise History of Ceylon, 1961). There is a campaign in the developed world against the social and environmental effects of large dams. (Goldsmith and Hildeyard, 1983). It is of course clear that what is referred to are large reservoirs. However, careful study of these criticisms will show that they are applicable and true only for hydraulic engineering projects, and not for irrigation ecosystems. They have no validly against macro irrigation ecosystems, either singly or in a complex, as in the ancient Rajarata of Sri Lanka. From Organic Society to Modern State In studying the evolution of the modern state, many possible causes for the development of cultural complexity have been adduced, of which irrigation is just one, although perhaps the most interesting one. Wittfogel thought that the evolution and development of a complex irrigation system depended on simultaneous development of a complex bureaucratic administration; and this necessarily led to the development of a centralised, totalitarian state. He described this as Oriental Despotism and explained that it was best suited for operation and maintenance, and further development of complex irrigation systems. Leach of course, effectively discounted this theory, with the example of hydraulic society in ancient Sri Lanka (Leach, 1959) Murray Bookchin has pointed out that ancient societies were organic in a way that modern society is not, despite the centralised and hierarchical nature of the administration in some ancient states. He said: The centralised states that emerged in the near east and Asia were not as invasive of community life at the base of society as is the modern state, with its mass media, highly sophisticated surveillance systems, and its authority to supervise almost every aspect of personal life. The State in the authentically finished, historically complete form we find today, could have emerged only after traditional societies, customs and sensibilities were so thoroughly reworked to accord with domination that humanity lost all sense of contact with the organic society from which it originated (Bookchin, 1982, 95). This statement lends support to the soft technology, irrigation ecosystems perspective in analysing the ancient hydraulic civilisations. It suggests that Wittfogel s hard technology approach is more appropriate for an analysis of the modern state. In that sense it confirms the view that hydraulic engineering has a certain totalitarian potential, and this can perhaps explain destabilisation and destruction of ecosystems that has occurred in the modern Uda Wilawe and Lunugamvehera projects. (Mendis, 1989). Bookchin s view also supports Wenke s observation concerning the ancient Achaemenid empire that began in the highlands of present day Iran, around the sixth century BC. Wenke says: So well ordered was the Achaemenid state at its peak in the fourth and fifth centuries BC, that it was said that a virgin with a sack of gold could walk unmolested through the empire. (Wenke, 1980, 422). Interestingly, a rock inscription at Dambulla states that in the reign of Parakrama Bahu, from 1164 to 1186: Even a woman might traverse the island with a precious jewel and not be asked what it is. (Coomaraswamy, 1956, 8) 214

244 Contrast all this with the modern state where the elected representatives of the people are driven through the cities in armed convoys, and police stations are like armed garrisons, virtually inaccessible to the people. When and how, we should ask, has humanity lost all sense of contact with the organic society from which it originated? The Modern State The roots of change from organic society to the modern state maybe traced back to European colonial expansion, the birth of capitalist production, and the first industrial revolution. It was after these seminal events that the modern state really emerged, and grew steadily to its present hideous form. Along the way, European colonial expansion caused destabilisation and destruction of ecosystems in North America and in Australia in the 19th century. In both these continents, indigenous people were decimated, introduced to debilitating social habits like drinking, and finally confined in reservations, while the natural habitat which they had conserved and lived on, was all but destroyed. In more recent times, large-scale exploitation of the Amazon rain forest, and other tropical rain forests in Africa and Asia, and large-scale mining for minerals in these continents, are further examples of this type of destructive exploitation. Extensive destruction of rain forests by commercial scale exploitation has led to signs of global changes in climate and weather. At the 39th International Pugwash conference in Dagomys, USSR, in 1988, the Soviet Union s Nobel Laureate for Peace, Academician Andrei Sakharov spoke about:... the problem of tropical forests in South America, Equatorial Africa, Southeast Asia and tropical islands. It is suggested (this idea belongs to my wife Elena Bonner) that a special international foundation should be set up (probably at the UN) with the view of encouraging those countries which would stop felling forests and would plant trees in their territories. It is also important that these countries should receive oil products etc. to cook food and for other purposes. The foundation should be composed of mandatory donations of a certain percentage of national income of all countries the amount of which should lavishly compensate for the refusal to fell forests. This foundation could be a model for international solution of other ecological problems. (Pugwash Newsletter, 1988, 26, 2, 51). This is a good proposal, but it falls short of meeting the problem of the destruction of rain forests by big business interests, in Brazil, Indonesia, etc. and even logging by the State Timber Corporation in our own Sinharaja and other rain forests. The Military - Industrial Complex First and second world countries are engaged in competition to win the hearts and minds, as well as the raw material resources and markets for their manufactured products, in third world countries. The former have a head start on account of their previous empire building activities, followed by neo-colonial exploitation mainly through the drive and enterprise of multinational corporations. Today many multinationals are engaged in very profitable weapons production, and sadly, most of these weapons are used in third world countries, where wars, revolts, and ethnic conflicts, are quite common. Any conflict means good arms business, and pacifists like Bertrand Russell are always suspicious of arms merchants who wield tremendous power in their own countries as well as in international forums. Russell made a scathing comment on the situation, in his Autobiography, many years ago: The word freedom, which is a favourite word of Western war-mongers, has to be understood in a somewhat peculiar sense. It means freedom for warmongers and prison for those who oppose them. A freedom scarcely distinguishable from this exists in Soviet Russia. (Russell, 1967, 644). 215

245 Russell was referring to the attitude of a small group of extremists who even at that time were advocating what President Reagan was to later describe as limited nuclear war surely one of the most extraordinary examples of a contradiction in terms! These warmongers even at that time wanted to prepare for a war in space: we must utilise US space technology in the international power equation (Ibid, 645). This was their response to a call by Pugwash and other scientists for nuclear disarmament. Russell commented:... it represents the enormous economic power of the armament industry, which is reinforced in the public mind by the cleverly instilled fear that disarmament would bring a new depression... the armament fi rms exploit patriotism and anticommunism as means of transferring the taxpayers money into their own pockets. (Ibid, 645). Earlier, no less a person than President Eisenhower, in his farewell State of the Union message to the American people in 1961, had warned about the dangerous concentration of economic power in the U.S. military-industrial complex, a term he coined, which others have used thereafter: In the councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted infl uence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. In a later essay on How to Control the Military in the USA, Professor John Kenneth Galbraith made the following shrewd observation: This warning was to become by a wide margin the most quoted of all Eisenhower statements. This was principally for the fl ank protection it provided for all who wanted to agree. For many years thereafter, anyone (myself included) who spoke to the problem of the military power took the thoughtful precaution of first quoting President Eisenhower He had shown that there were impeccably conservative precedents for our concern. (Galbraith, 1969, 49). Senator Fulbright in a Congress speech, also said: I do not think the military-industrial complex is the conspiratorial invention of a band of merchants of death. I almost wish it were, because conspiracies can be exposed and dealt with. But the components of the new American militarism are too diverse, independent, and complex for it to be the product of a centrally directed conspiracy. It is rather the inevitable result of the creation of a huge permanent military establishment, whose needs have given rise to a vast private defense industry tied to the Armed Forces by a natural bond of common interest (Fulbright, 1967, 36181). And, in her concluding remarks when handing over the Presidency of Pugwash to Joseph Rotblat, at the 38th international Pugwash conference in 1988, Nobel Laureate Dorothy Hodgkin said: In the USA alone it has been estimated that the arms race represents a fantastic enterprise that awards contracts worth 150 billion dollars annually, and employs about 3.5 million workers. It is enormously profi table and here lies the major diffi culties. (Pugwash Newsletter, 55) The Rule of Law The Rule of Law is the achievement of the English people, who engaged in the late middle ages in numerous revolts and rebellions against the monarchy, (culminating in a civil war which ended with the beheading of the King), to achieve it. In the simplest terms it means that no person is above the law of the land, and that the law applies equally to all citizens. It follows that every citizen has the right to personal freedom, freedom of expression, and the right of public meeting. (Dicey, 1959, ). These rights have been established by judicial decree over the past five hundred years in Britain, which does not have a written constitution. In other sovereign countries the Rule of Law is enshrined in their written Constitutions. 216

246 An aspect of the Rule of Law is the Separation of Powers, in the Legislature, the Executive, and the Judiciary. This is best seen in the so-called Westminster model of parliamentary democracy in which the Sovereignty of Parliament is something like a corollary to the Rule of Law. (Ibid, ). Until recently, this model was followed in Sri Lanka. Totalitarianism Back in 1945, Winston Churchill first used the term Iron Curtain to describe the ideological barrier separating communist countries of Eastern Europe from the west. Later, the term Bamboo Curtain was used to describe China s self-imposed isolation after the 1949 Chinese Revolution. Today some countries behind the iron curtain, like Poland and Hungary, have moved towards a multi-party system, while the once closed Soviet Union is trying out a policy of glasnost or openness, and perestroika or restructuring of the economy. In 1980, the militant Trade Union movement in Sri Lanka that had defied even the might of the British Raj, was given a lethal blow with the sacking of some 50,000 strikers, at a time when Solidarity was struggling to come into existence in totalitarian Poland. Today, Trade Unions in Sri Lanka are quite powerless, while strikes and work stoppages that virtually bring the economy to a halt, are being called by unseen and unknown forces. There must be lessons in this experience that we must face courageously. In doing so, let us remind ourselves of what Bertrand Russell said of the USA: In this country the decent people are terrifyingly powerless and very often naive. Ibid, 476). Later, Professor Langdon Winner of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology seemed to develop this view further. He said:... writers like Theodore Roszak, Herbert Marcuse and Lewis Mumford are not unaware of the existence of multinational corporations, the Pentagon, the CIA, A.T & T, and other bodies that wield power in our time. It is not naivete they show towards such institutions, but rather total contempt informed by a sense of powerlessness. (Winner, 1980) One is reminded of a meeting convened in Colombo in 1982, to be addressed by an intellectual, Professor Ediriweera Sarachchandra, which was broken up by thugs, who were never apprehended. Thereafter, decent people were terrifyingly powerless and powerfully terrified, for decent people are not accustomed to violence, and can only protest non-violently. But non violence in certain circumstances as Russell said has no relevance: It certainly has an important sphere; as against the British in India, Gandhi led it to triumph. But it depends on the existence of certain virtues in those against whom it is employed. When Indians lay down on railways, and challenged the authorities to crush them under trains, the British found such cruelty intolerable. But the, Nazis had no scruples in analogous situations. (Russell, 1907, 432). We should also recall what Louis Fischer wrote in 1942, after posing the question: How did Hitler come to power in Germany? He said: This peaceful death of German democracy is one of the strangest chapters in history, and it is of special interest because the suicidal propensities of democracy are not uniquely German. German democracy marched to its grave with its eyes wide open, and singing, Beware of Adolf Hitler... Soviet Russia pays a high price for its one party system. Republican Germany paid a heavy price for its many party system The abuses of proportional representation allowed small groups of voters, representing small regional or economic interests, to send parliamentarians to the Reichstag. And since the existence of German cabinets was sometimes a matter of a few parliamentary votes, these parties could individually or in combination overthrow a ministry or blackmail it by threatening overthrow. When minorities frustrate a majority, faith in majority 217

247 rule is shattered and the road is cleared for dictatorship. This was one diffi culty. But greater diffi culties harassed German democracy. Democracy is temperate. Its foe is extremism. In Germany, extremism was the thermometer of a sick social system and an ailing economy. The two extremes in Germany were the communists and the Hitlerian National Socialists - the Nazis. Both fought democracy and urged dictatorships. (Fischer, 1941, 141). Fischer continued in this strain, describing the alternatives available: In times of turmoil people turn to the parties of despair which aver that they have the only solution and that it lies in new men, new methods, new institutions. This seems logical to those who are suffering from the failure of the old. Mounting difficulties thus proved to be wind in the sails of the Communist and Nazi extremists. (Ibid. 163) The Communists did not have arms and were unfriendly to the army and police who had them. The only conceivable communist weapon was the general strike which, however, depends for success on its being general. (Ibid, 164) Nazi violence stirred the country. Nazi rowdies intimidated villages and towns. The police were either afraid to suppress them, or closed an eye out of sympathy. Nazi violence was deliberate. The Nazis applied it on principle, for its effect, not out of necessity. They believe that violence impresses the timid, and suppresses the brave. In any nation the timid outnumber the brave (Ibid, 170). The Nazis had this advantage: the Communists summoned citizens to rise and fi ght on the barricades against ruling cliques and mighty groups of business magnates. They anticipated bloody civil war sacrifices, death, and initial chaos and poverty. Hitler, on the other hand, announced blandly that he would perform the task for them. If they believed in him they would be saved. He promised salvation without participation, and cure by faith. He was wise enough to insist that he would attain power by legal means. Actually the Nazis established their regime not by revolution or big pitched battles as in Russia. They were peacefully inducted into offi ce by the last blind abdicating politicians of democracy, and before and after this startling event there was just enough murder and loot to please the sadists and frighten the non-nazis (Ibid, 163) Pastor Neimohler s oft-quoted (and mis-quoted) statement, that was only recently in the media during commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II, is an eloquent testament to that dark period: When they arrested my neighbour, I did not protest. When they arrested the men and women in the opposite house, I did not protest. And when fi nally they came for me, there was nobody left to protest. (Quoted in CRM, 1987, 49). The Third World In the modern world the tendency towards totalitarianism is universal. Many third world countries, after the achievement of political independence, have somehow not been able to manage multi-party democracies, and slipped into one-party governments or no-party dictatorships. Nigeria is one such country, where after a debilitating civil war, a succession of military governments held power for nearly a decade. Throughout this period a remarkable free press kept the torch of democracy burning. University teachers and other intellectuals were outspoken critics of successive governments. Names like Wole Soyinka, the first black African to win a Nobel prize (for Literature), of the University of Ibadan, and Dele Cole, Editor of the Lagos Times, come to mind. They contributed in no small measure to the return to civilian rule in 1979, after a nation-wide series of elections over a period of six months, culminating in a Presidential election, a remarkable exercise in democracy spread over a six month period brought to a triumphant conclusion. Very little of this 218

248 great achievement in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, poor third world country with a typically low standard of literacy, was mentioned at this time in the so-called free press managed by the first world. During this period British Petroleum (Nigeria) was nationalized after having been caught on two occasions, transferring Nigerian oil to S. Africa, in breach of agreed sanctions. The news was taken up by the free press and flashed around the world with a great display of energy and (misplaced) righteous indignation. Through control of the media, western countries never cease to preach democracy to the third world, but rob them of their natural resources through control of the international economic order. Rarely does the third world hear such words as the following attributed to one James P. Warburg, addressing a Methodist conclave: We the inheritors of the Judeo-Christian tradition, have preached peace and practiced war. The fact is that our civilization has for centuries practiced neither the Jewish teaching of justice under moral law, nor the Greek teaching of rational thought and behaviour, nor the Christian teaching of love, compassion and universal brotherhood. It has spawned crusaders, inquisitors, conquerors and tyrants - Torquemadas, Napoleons, Hitlers, and Stalins - not a single prophet of brotherhood and peace. The Western World which we like to think of as the cradle of civilization has been the breeding ground of most of the fratricidal confl icts with which the human race has been affl icted during the past 2000 years (Coffin, 1964, 27-28). More often, the west is held up as a model to be respected from afar, and emulated in a scaled-down manner befitting a developing country. The result is imitative development which invariably leads even oil rich countries into the debt trap (Payer, 1974), as victims of aid as imperialism. (Hayter, 1975). Almost without exception in poor countries, pursuit of development and modernization of their economies, results in currency devaluation, increase in the national debt to unbearable levels, and skewed internal distribution of wealth that causes severe sociopolitical tension. When the rich get unconscionably richer, the poor get desperate. Somewhere down the line a local arms race starts, and that is the beginning of the end. Interference in the Executive and the Judiciary by the Legislature then follows, to maintain law and order. Finally in the worst case, the Rule of Law is abandoned. The question that has to be posed then, is how can third world countries in the search to modernize and increase agricultural and industrial production, as well as the supply of services, avoid the sad experience of those countries that have ended up with one party or no-party governments? Are these the inevitable forms of the modern state in so far as poor third world countries are concerned? Anyone trying to answer this difficult question should carefully study Murray Bookshin s astute observations quoted above. Countries like Sri Lanka that have deep roots in an ancient organic society, may have a chance to build an unique third world model of a non-totalitarian state. Such a third world democracy would be founded on ecologically stable and sustainable agriculture systems, in which the vitality of modern western science and scientific method is introduced, shielded from the harsh effects of capitalist extractive processes based on profit-making alone. Both traditional (empirical) and modern (science and capital based) technologies would be used for development, but with restraints imposed on them to circumvent the destructive potential of conventional capitalist techniques. If we are to achieve this even in a limited sense in a particular area, there is an essential pre-requisite. We must free ourselves from the debilitating effects of imitative development models, based on the one-dimensional concept of economic growth. Pursuit of economic growth alone, without paying equal attention to distribution and equity, environmental conservation 219

249 and sustainability, seems to have led to the totalitarian form of the modern state in many third world countries. Socio-economic studies may show that destabilization of a society results from accelerated economic growth, just as destabilization and destruction of ecosystems results from the impact of hydraulic engineering. (Mendis, 1989) Lessons of History The Indian historian Kossambi has said: The function of the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to understanding the present. Great history is written precisely when the historian s vision of the past is illuminated by insights into the problems of the present... Learning from history is never simply a one-way process. To learn about the present in the light of the past also means to learn about the past in the light of the present. The function of history is to promote a profounder understanding of both past and present through the inter-relation between them (Kossambi, 1965, 24). In Sri Lanka today, it seems that there are important lessons to be learned both from ancient and modern history. A study of the ancient irrigation systems of Sri Lanka must be related to present day planning for new irrigation and multi-purpose development projects. Even at this late stage, knowledge of the ancient irrigation systems should be made mandatory for high level decision makers in the Mahaweli Development project. Three areas are available for study and research: Evolution and development of the ancient systems over several centuries Their stability and sustainability over an even longer period of time, and Their final apparently irreversible decline after the Parakrama Bahu era In conclusion, the lessons to be learned from modern history take us to other countries. Response to violence with greater violence has brought this country to the brink of protracted civil and guerilla war. An army of occupation is ready perhaps to intervene on one side or the other, destroying the last shreds of our sovereignty. Self-fulfilling prophecies of the Merton type*, seem to be coming to fulfillment. This is why the recent historical experience of other countries is relevant, and must be studied. Finally, may I conclude this already drawn-out lecture with the last paragraph of the Russell- Einstein manifesto, prepared nearly 35 years ago to alert humanity against the dangers of nuclear war. I believe its message is valid for us in Sri Lanka today, who face the danger not of a nuclear holocaust, but of a disastrous civil war. * Professor Robert K. Merton, Professor of Sociology, Columbia University, wrote in The Self-fulfilling Prophecy : Men respond not only to the objective features of a situation, but also, and at times primarily, to the meaning this situation has for them. And once they have assigned some meaning to the situation, their consequent behaviour and some of the consequences of that behaviour are determined by the ascribed meaning... It is believed (for example) that war between two nations is inevitable. Actuated by this conviction, representatives of the two nations become progressively alienated, apprehensively countering each offensive move of the other with a defensive move of their own The anticipation of war helps create the actuality. The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behviour which makes the originally false conception come true. The specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning... The tragic, often vicious, circle of self-fulfilling prophecies can be broken. The initial definition of the situation which set the circle in motion must be abandoned. Only when the original assumption is questioned and a new definition of the situation introduced, does the consequent flow of events give lie to the assumption. Only then does the belief no longer father the reality. (Merton, 1957, quoted in The Cox Commission Report - Crisis at Columbia) 220

250 There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal, as human beings, to human beings: remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new paradise; if you cannot there lies before you the risk of universal death. (Russell, 1973, 58). References 1. Bookchin, Murray (1982) The Ecology of Freedom. 2. Brohier, R.L. (1937). The Inter-relation of Groups of Reservoirs and Channels in the Ancient Rajarata. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Ceylon, Vol. 3. Brohier, R.L. (1956). Some Structural Features of the Ancient Irrigation Works in Ceylon. Presidential Address in 50th Anniversary Souvenir, of the Engineering Association of Ceylon. 4. Coffin, Tristram (1964). The Armed Society - Militarism in America. Pelican books. 5. Coomaraswamy, Ananda (1909) Medieval Sinhalese Art. Second Edition, (1956). Pantheon books 6. The Cox Commission Report - Crisis at Columbia. (1968). Vintage books, Random House. 7. Dicey, A.V. (1959) The Law of the Constitution. Maxwell. 8. DeVroey, Michael and N. Shanmugaratnam, (1984). Peasant Resettlement in Sri Lanka. Tricontinental. 9. Fischer, Louis, (1941). Men and Politics. An Autobiography. Jonathan Cape. 10. Galbraith, John Kenneth. (1969). How to Control the Military. Signet books. 11. Goldsmith, E. and N. Hildeyard, (1984). The Social and Environmental Effects of Large Dams. Wadebridge Ecological Centre. Cornwall. 12. Hayter, Theresa (1975). Aid as Imperialism. Penguin books. 13. Horowitz, David L. (1980) Coup Theory and Offi cers Motives. Sri Lanka in Comparative Perspective. Princeton University press. 14. Kennedy, J.S. (1934) Evolution of Scientific Development of Village Irrigation Works in Ceylon. Proceedings of the Engineering Association of Ceylon, Kossambi, D.D. (1965). Culture and Civilization in Ancient India. Routledge and Keagan Paul 16. Kuhn, Thomas, S. (1960). The Structure of Scientifi c Revolutions. 17. Leach, E.R. (1959) Hydraulic Society in Ceylon. Past and Present. April Lovins, Amory, (1977) Soft Energy Paths. Penguin 19. Mendis, D.L.O. (1968). Some Observations on the Designs for Uda Walawe Headworks. Transactions of the Institution of Engineers, Ceylon, Mendis, D.L.O. (1971). The Engineer and National Planning. Transactions of the Institution of Engineers, Ceylon, Mendis D.L.O. (1977) Some Thoughts on Technology Transfer for Irrigation and Multipurpose Development Projects in Sri Lanka. Transactions of the Institution of Engineers, Ceylon, Mendis, D.L.O. (1984). Evolution and Development of Irrigation Systems in Ancient Sri Lanka. Mimeo. Sri Lanka Association for the Advancement of Science, General Research Committee, Seminar on Science and Civilization in Ancient Sri Lanka 23. Mendis, D.L.O. (1985). Some Notes on Ancient and Modem Irrigation Systems in Sri Lanka from an Ecological Perspective. Mimeo. Commonwealth Engineering Council, Seminar on Agricultural Engineering, Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka, November

251 Pugwash Conference No. 41, 1991 Non-Ethnic Causes of Violent Conflict in Sri Lanka: Environmental Degradation by the Impact of Hydraulic Engineering D L O Mendis Ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka has been given global publicity in recent times, represented as being between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority. It is said that some Tamils are demanding a separate state, because the government is allegedly partisan towards the Sinhalese, or actually controlled by the Sinhalese to the detriment of the Tamils. Such global publicity often originates from a widespread expatriate Sri Lankan Tamil community - the Tamil diaspora - who claim that the Sinhalese government is bent on genocide of the Tamil minority in their traditional Tamil homelands. Attempts are then made to counteract such bad publicity by expatriate Sinhalese in different parts of the world, which often reduces to an effort to defend the human rights record of the government, which also has been criticized from time to time in the global media. Non-ethnic violent conflict in the southern areas of Sri Lanka has never been given publicity in the global media to the same extent as that given to the conflict in the north and east, presumably because the Sinhalese majority live in the south. Any conflict, however violent, which has no ethnic element, is less newsworthy than one which has, especially in the West where the average newspaper reader believes that tribal violence is a characteristic of most developing countries. Thus the brutal suppression of the southern insurrection in the recent past went virtually unnoticed outside the country. There was little difference between the southern conflict, while it lasted, and civil war in the north, as far as loss of life, destruction and damage to properly, and the general futility of the conflict is concerned. In the north where the freedom fighters are known to carry cyanide capsules, which they swallow when faced with capture, individual brutality may in fact have been less than in the south where the so-called Sinhalese extremists were not so equipped to frustrate their capture. In fact, it is quite possible that the expeditious suppression of the insurrection in the south was possible, because of threats, torture and reprisals on captured youths as well as on other, older members of their families. The lack of global publicity about such acts, compared to the glare of publicity attendant on any attempt to contain the secession of the north, may have made the quick suppression of the southern insurrection that much easier. What then were the causes of the violent conflict in the south? In this paper an attempt is made to answer that question in terms of environmental degradation over a period of nearly twenty-five years, in the southern area of Sri Lanka, which has been under discussion amongst engineers in Sri Lanka since The ancient irrigation works in Sri Lanka have long been recognized as one of the wonders of the ancient world, with a history dating from about the third century BC to about the twelfth century AD 1. These ancient works consisted of river diversion and storage systems. The former consisted of temporary or seasonal diversion and permanent diversion systems. The latter consisted of small, medium and large scale storage reservoirs of which the small reservoirs were described as village tanks, because every village in the dry zone had one or more of such reservoirs. The dry zone is that area of the country which receives rainfall only during the northeast monsoon season, from about October to about March. The wet zone on the other hand receives some rainfall during the northeast monsoon, and virtually all the rainfall of the southwest monsoon from about April until about September. The SW monsoon thus blows as a dry wind over the dry 222

252 zone for about half the year. The ancient irrigation systems had been built in the dry zone to support irrigated agriculture throughout the year. The major benefits of these ancient works were irrigation, drainage and flood control. In contrast, the major benefits of water conservation works established in ancient China were transport, flood control, irrigation and defence 2. A very large number of small village tanks, estimated at about , had been built in an area of about sq. krn of the dry zone. The reason for this was not understood by engineers, who thought that the small tank represented a stage in the evolution and development of irrigation works 3. Some social scientists on the other hand had rather different views. Leach, for example, said:... although the major irrigation works provided food for labourers as well as amenities of palaces, the hydraulic system was not of crucial importance for the society as a whole. When the central government was disrupted, and the major works fell into disrepair, village life could carry on quite adequately, for each village still possessed its own small-scale irrigation systems which were maintained by the villagers themselves. 4 Thus Leach was of the opinion that the small tanks functioned independently of the large reservoirs and channels. However, Brohier in an historic paper to the Royal Asiatic Society (Ceylon Branch) on the major irrigation works in and around the ancient capital cities, Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa, titled Inter-relation of Groups of Ancient Reservoirs and Channels, said: The Jayaganga, indeed an ingenious memorial of ancient irrigation, which was undoubtedly designed to serve as a combined irrigation and water supply canal, was not entirely dependent on its feeder reservoir, Kala weva, for the water it carried. The length of the bund between Kala weva and Anuradhapura intercepted all the drainage from the high ground to the east which otherwise would have run to waste. Thus the Jayaganga adapted itself to a wide field of irrigation by feeding the little village tanks in each subsidiary valley which lay below its bund. Not infrequently it fed a chain of village tanks down these valleys - the tank lower down receiving the overfl ow from the tank higher up on each chain. (Brohier, 1937, 70) 5 Brohier, a future Surveyor-General, and the author of the first definitive documentation of the ancient irrigation works, The Ancient Irrigation Works in Ceylon, 6 was describing the interdependence of the small village tanks and the large interconnected reservoirs and channels. Leach, however, chose to ignore this study when he rather rashly said: The major hydraulic works are not created rationally and systematically but haphazardly as pieces of self-advertisement by individual leaders. But once started, such constructions survive and can be enhanced by later adventurers of the same type 7. Brohier himself had apparently forgotten his classic study on the inter-relation of major reservoirs and channels in the dry zone when, some twenty years later he presented a four-stage hypothesis for the evolution and development of the irrigation systems in ancient Sri Lanka. Some time later, Joseph Needham, after a brief visit to some of the ancient irrigation works in Sri Lanka, in the company of Brohier and others, re-published Brohier s hypothesis in his monumental classic Science and Civilization in China 8. It has been shown 9 that Brohier was expressing an incorrect interpretation of a statement made by J S Kennedy, a well-recognized authority on irrigation, who, referring to the small village tanks in the dry zone had said: the village tanks like the village cattle are too numerous for effi ciency. 10 That statement had later been assumed by irrigation engineers to mean that the small village tank was a stage in the evolution and development of irrigation reservoirs, and therefore that large reservoirs should and would later replace small village tanks. Brohier placed the seal of 223

253 his own authority on this erroneous interpretation, in his Presidential Address to the Engineering Association of Ceylon in its 50th Jubilee year. The consequences of this incorrect interpretation of Kennedy s statement by engineers, and its authoritative enunciation by Brohier in Sri Lanka, (to be repeated later by Needham at Cambridge) were to be far-reaching. The Irrigation Department prepared a Map of Water Resources Development of Ceylon, published by the Survey Department in 1959, based on this hypothesis. A number of suitable sites were identified using the 100 foot contours on the one-mile-to-an-inch topographical survey sheets, for large reservoirs in the major river basins in the island. A withinbasin balance of water and land resources was used without consideration of any possibility for trans-basin diversion. It had been pointed out that in effect this set the clock back more than 1500 years in water resources development planning in Sri Lanka, because the Jayaganga described in the reference from Brohier quoted above was a trans-basin diversion channel built in the 5th century, if not earlier 11. Criticism of this so-called Water Resources Development Plan has been studiously ignored by the powers that be, and two major new reservoirs have been built in recent times in the southern area, based solely on the authority of this map. When the first of these, the Uda Walawe reservoir, was being built in 1967, it was pointed out that the best location for a major reservoir in the Walawe basin is about 24 km upstream of the present site 12 It was also pointed out that Uda Walawe does not fit into a proposal for long term. development in the south described as the Southern Area Plan, which would ultimately involve trans-basin diversion of excess water from the southwest wet zone to the southeast dry zone. The gigantic modern Uda Walawe reservoir, built in record time, submerged an unknown number of ancient small village tanks. This of course conformed to the Brohier hypothesis on which the 1959 Map was based, and by and large pleased some engineers, to whom big is both beautiful and bountiful. Land acquisition and new settlement under the terms for the new Uda Walawe reservoir soon ran into difficulties. One report has said: In fact the official land distribution never occurred. Once the land had been levelled and prepared, purana villagers, infuriated by the coming of outsiders, forcefully and disorderly occupied the land. 13 This comment by social scientists viewing the scene from a considerable distance in time and space, has a familiar ring. It smacks of the claim to exclusive occupation of traditional homelands of the following type: The Sinhalese governments, by a policy of aggressive state financed Sinhalese colonisation and resettlement of traditional Tamil areas, sought to end the Tamil s exclusive occupation of their homelands in the north and east. 14 A response to this long-distance pseudo-criticism has been given recently, in terms of irrigation ecosystems: What these two authors are trying to say is that official land acquisition and blocking out was forcefully resisted by the old villagers in a disorderly manner, because they were infuriated by the coming of outsiders. The fi rst part is a factual report of events, the second part is the authors supposition as to the reasons behind the observed facts. This supposition has more than a hint of a claim to exclusive occupation of the lands, of a type similar to the claim by Ponnambalam, quoted above, in respect of so-called traditional Tamil homelands. However, supporting evidence that such a claim to exclusive occupation had been made by the local people has not been provided by these two authors. An altogether different explanation for their resistance to the alienation and blocking out of private lands, will be presented in terms of irrigation ecosystems

254 Not long after the attempts by the authorities to force their blocking out plans on traditional peasant cultivators was resisted as described above, the first insurrection against the government broke out in April 1971 in the south. This was suppressed with great brutality, and became one of the major issues in the General Election of 1977, when the incumbent government was routed, and a new government elected with an unprecedented 83 per cent majority of seats in parliament. It may be mentioned in passing that this was the seventh (and last) time in a row that the incumbent government in Sri Lanka had been defeated at the polls in a free and fair General Election since Independence. There are both positive and negative indicators of the term free and fair. Since 1960, one day all-island General Elections have been held in Sri Lanka. The percentage of votes polled, and the magnitude of the victory of the Opposition are considered positive indicators, and the number of spoilt votes a negative indicator of a free and fair ballot. After the abortive insurrection of 1971, the then Prime Minister Mrs Sirimavo Bandaranaike asked for technical assistance from the People s Republic of China for the proposed Southern Area Plan, the objective being to create new employment opportunities for frustrated youth in the south. Unscrupulous bureaucratic manoevering now took place, and the concept of the Southern Area Plan was cleverly aborted. Technical assistance from China was asked for and obtained for some minor flood protection projects in the southwest wet zone, and any prospect of restoring some of the small village tanks in the southeast dry zone was forgotten. Instead, steps were taken to investigate another proposed new large reservoir project in the southeast, identified from the 1957 Map, the Lunugamvehera weva 11, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20. Directions were then given by the Prime Minister to the Minister of Irrigation to also investigate an alternative site for a large reservoir at a location called Hurathgamuva, some 24 km upstream of the proposed Lunugamvehera dam site. Over the next seven years, bureaucrats and technocrats conspired to defy the Prime Ministerial directions, so that the alternative site was never investigated. This bureaucratic skulduggery, that was to have the most grievous consequences, has been described recently as follows: In ignoring the directions given by the Prime Minister s Ministry of Planning and Economic Affairs, the Ministry of Irrigation (aided and abetted by the Irrigation department) defi ed both the basic tenets of inter-ministerial and collective Cabinet responsibility, and the basic principles of water resources development planning (or any planning for that matter) that at the planning stage if not later, alternatives should be considered. 16 When the new government took power, the new Minister for Irrigation appointed a fiveman Committee of Engineers to report to him on the question of the proposed Lunugamvehera reservoir and the alternative Hurathgamuva site. The Committee included a leading supporter of the Lunugamvhera site as Chairman, two others who were aspiring for office under the new regime, and two who were supporters of the alternative site and the proposed Southern Area plan into which the alternative site fitted, but not the Lunugamvehera site. Three members of the Committee recommended to the Minister that the Lunugamvehera project should be taken up for construction immediately since all investigations were complete, and that if the alternative site was to be investigated there would be loss of time! This incredible recommendation was accepted by the Minister who gave orders to go ahead with construction at Lunugamvehara. No questions were asked as to how long it would take to investigate the alternative site - estimated at six months to one year - or why the alternative site had not been investigated for so long. However, on a later occasion the Minister, a lawyer who presumably had been quite new to irrigation when he took office, said that he had been guided by a dictum of Napoleon that a general could afford to lose a battle or even a war, but not to lose time. In the event, construction at Lunugamvehera did not start for another year, until late 1978, during which time the alternative site could easily have been investigated but was not. The Ministry of Planning and Economic Affairs was abolished at the end of 1978, and the two 225

255 engineers in that Ministry who had favoured investigation of the alternative site were forced into premature retirement. Construction of the Lunugamvehera headworks had been estimated to take four years, but took eight, being completed in The cost is not yet known, but is rumoured to have escalated to four times the original estimated figure. Shortly after the Lunugamvehera headworks was ceremoniously inaugurated, with much fanfare, the site engineers office was burnt down. The unexpected outburst of violence apparently took everybody by surprise, bureaucrats and politicians alike. The easiest explanation that politicians were ready to believe was offered by the bureaucrats - that it was the work of disgruntled anti-government elements. However, as violence escalated and spread, it was obvious to the discerning that such facile explanations were not going to help solve the problem. The underlying causes had to be found by studying the problem with an open mind. In the prevailing circumstances this was easier said than done. From May 1988 a number of papers 17 were published in Sri Lanka and abroad in an attempt to draw attention to the problem of environmental degradation in the south, which was suspected to be one of the root causes of the civil commotion and unrest. This attempt still goes on, and a limited measure of success is presented here. It is the latest in a series of presentations, considered particularly appropriate because the Pugwash conference is being held in China, the repository of one of the greatest hydraulic civilizations in the world. More so because Ministers from 41 developing countries have met very recently in Beijing at a Conference on Environment and Development, June, 1991, and published the Beijing Declaration on Environment and Development, 18 which is most relevant to the content of this paper 17. Joseph Needham s attention had already been drawn in 1984 to what was considered to be an incorrect statement of Brohier s, of the evolution and development of irrigation systems in ancient Sri Lanka, re-published in Volume 4, Part 3 of his great work. Needham, having studied the subject, asked me to undertake a comparative study of hydraulic engineering in ancient Sri Lanka and ancient China, in order to set the record straight. An attempt has now been made to commence such a study, with the preparation of an Outline at the Needham Research Institute at Cambridge followed by a preliminary visit to China, in July Meanwhile, it was considered most important and urgent to prove that the Walawe and Lunugamvehera reservoirs, both of which had submerged large numbers of ancient small tanks, when they were built according to the Brohier hypothesis were wrongly located. An acceptable new hypothesis was required, and a study of the history of irrigation systems had therefore to be undertaken. For this purpose, history was seen as a chronological record of successive changes in the means and relations of production. Reconstruction in the history of irrigation was therefore a study of successive changes in the use of water for crop production. A seven-stage theory for the evolution and development of irrigation systems was the direct result, from which the concept of irrigation ecosystems was a natural corollary. The modern concept of ecosystems distinguishes between terrestrial, aquatic and atmospheric ecosystems. Irrigation ecosystems are recognized as being based on the hydrological cycle which encompasses land, water and air. The ancient irrigation systems in Sri Lanka are therefore described as irrigation ecosystems. It is interesting to observe, in passing, that the above-mentioned Beijing Declaration on Environment, Development uses a similar turn of phrase in its opening paragraph: We are deeply concerned about the degradation of the global environment. This is largely on account of unsustainable development models and life styles. As a result, the elements indispensable for human life - land, water and atmosphere - are gravely threatened

256 From this study of history, defined as successive changes in the use of water as the means of crop production, seven stages were identified in the evolution and development of irrigation systems, in opposition to the four stages in Brohier s hypothesis, namely: 1. rainfed agriculture; 2. seasonal or temporary river diversion, and flood or inundation irrigation on river banks; 3. development of permanent river diversion structures, and channel systems on river banks; 4. construction and operation of weirs and spillways on diversion channels; 5. invention of the sorowwa (sluice) with its bisokotuwa (access tower); 6. construction of storage reservoirs equipped with sluices; 7. damming a perennial river using a sluice for temporary river diversion, or the twin-tank method. The following six types of irrigation ecosystems were identified from these seven stages: 1. Rainfed agriculture: (a) seasonal cultivation including slash and burn or swidden agriculture; (b) permanent highland plantations, like the Kandyan forest garden, for example. 2. Seasonal cropping based on flood irrigation systems. 3. Seasonal cropping based on channel irrigation systems. 4. Micro irrigation ecosystems based on small village tanks. 5. Macro irrigation ecosystems based on large village tanks with one or more micro irrigation ecosystems of types 2, 3 or 4 in its command area. 6. A complex of macro irrigation ecosystems based on a system of interconnected large reservoirs and channels. It was argued that the inter-relation of groups of large reservoirs and channels in the dry zone of Sri Lanka, that Brohier had been the first to identify, was an example of the sixth type of irrigation ecosystem. Each of the ancient large reservoirs, considered in isolation, was an example of the fifth type, and each of the large number of small village tanks was an example of the fourth type. Seen from this perspective the view that the small tank was a stage in the evolution and development of irrigation systems and should some day be replaced by being submerged under a new large reservoir, was clearly quite ludicrous. The Brohier hypothesis had assumed that storage reservoirs had been built before river diversion. This incorrect interpretation of history has been set right in the seven stage hypothesis, which also recognizes invention of the sluice in ancient Sri Lanka as a vital stage before storage reservoirs could have been built. The other essential difference in the two hypotheses lies in the way in which the function of water in agricultural production is considered. In the Brohier hypothesis, water is treated as being inanimate but active, exactly as in the study of hydraulics or hydraulic engineering. In the ecosystems approach, water is treated as if it were animate, albeit a passive vehicle for the conveyance of nutrients in nature s bio-geo-chemical cycles. Crop production is dependent on the hydrological cycle in which water moves through three domains: land, water, and air. The smallest drop of water is an ecosystem. From the ecosystem perspective, an irrigation ecosystem should include social organization and cultural practices, (production relations), whereas from the hydraulic engineering perspective the social organization is not usually included as a part of hydraulic technology (see below). This new hypothesis for understanding the ancient irrigation systems in Sri Lanka had been well received among scientists and engineers, but had not yet made an impact on the highest levels of bureaucratic and political decision makers, as the conflict in the country escalated. Then, in 1987, an Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) was brought in to the northern conflict under the Jayawardene - Gandhi Accord, allegedly to release Sri Lankan forces to contain the insurrection in the south. 227

257 This was seen as a violation of the sovereignty of the nation by many, including then Prime Minister R Premadasa, but was hailed by other ardent government supporters as a clever move to wipe out terrorism in the north. It is recent history that the IPKF failed to do anything of the sort. The conflict in the north actually escalated after the arrival of the IPKF, and when the Prime Minister was elected President in January 1989, he insisted that the IPKF should pull out, which they did quite willingly. But another dimension had been added to the conflict in Sri Lanka and another miserable chapter written in the recent tragic history of Sri Lanka. With the release of more armed forces to the south, the carnage there increased understandably. Throughout 1988, as civil law failed to contain civil unrest, universities, and then schools were forced to close down. The rule of law was now abandoned, the only law being the law of the gun. While fear stalked the country little of this was reported in the foreign media where the ethnic conflict or tribal war in the north and its escalation to the east continued to be the only newsworthy events in Sri Lanka. In these desperate circumstances a presentation was made at the Annual Sessions of the Institution of Engineers, in October 1988, which succeeded beyond all expectations in drawing attention to the situation in the south. The President of Sri Lanka who was Chief Guest at the Ceremonial Inauguration, cast aside his prepared speech to say that there was a paper which carried a severe criticism of my government. He added My government welcomes criticism, and said that he would ask the Minister of Irrigation to appoint a Commission of Inquiry into the Lunugamvehera project. However, before a Commission could be appointed, a new President took office in December, and a new Minister of Irrigation was also appointed. Thereafter, a Committee of Inquiry was appointed to report to the President on Lunugamvehera. After this Committee had reported that socioeconomic problems in the south could indeed be traced to problems in the two major irrigation schemes, various suggestions were soon being made to remedy the situation. The President of Sri Lanka, R Premadasa, gave me an opportunity to explain these views on the causes of the problems in the southern area at a private meeting in his office on 26 January, The present position is that a suggestion has been made to the President that there is a shortage of water in the Lunugamvehera reservoir, and that this could be remedied by diverting water from the adjacent Menik ganga (river) to Lunugamvehera. This proposal has been severely criticized by conservationists who are concerned about wild life in the Sanctuary through which the Menik ganga flows in its lower reaches. It has also been criticized by engineers at the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka, as a hasty and unplanned move that would create more problems than it could possibly solve. It has also been stressed that even at this late stage the possibility of building a new reservoir at the Hurathgamuva site should be studied. There seems to be a great reluctance to do this because Lunugamvehera has already come into existence, although now everyone seems to agree that it should never have been built. Another problem is being discussed relating to the Uda Walawe reservoir. A sanctuary had been declared in the upper reaches of the reservoir in what is now seen to be prime agricultural land in the middle basin of the Walawe ganga. Wildlife enthusiasts are in conflict with politicians and others who are more anxious to use the land for cultivation of sugar cane than to have it reserved for wildlife. Our dwindling herd of wild elephants is now estimated in the hundreds, of which some 260 are said to be in the Uda Walawe National Park. Thus, the problem becomes more and more complicated. That the root cause is the incorrect location of both Uda Walawe and Lunugamvehera is now given guarded credence by engineers, but no one has the courage to stand up and insist on the remedy - relocation of both these reservoirs in their alternative upstream locations. 228

258 The situation is typical of what happens in a poor Third World country, where there is a stratification of society with a Westernized bureaucracy in the upper echelons allegedly advising the politicians who come more and more from lesser stratifications of society. The bureaucrats, including the professionally qualified and trained technocrats, survive without much care for scruple, alleging that it does not pay to be honest when giving advice to politicians. They therefore only pay lip-service to professional integrity when giving an opinion to a politician. For their part, politicians have acquired a reputation for giving short shrift to a bureaucrat or technocrat who speaks out of turn or expresses an opinion that may appear to be politically unacceptable. In modern Sri Lanka this situation has been further complicated by the fact that, at the time of Independence in 1948, there was a gross disproportion in the numbers of Tamil public servants compared to their population. This was due to the simple fact that availability of education, especially higher education and science education facilities, was something like seven times higher for Tamil students in the north than for students in the rest of the country. Thus, at the time of Independence in 1948, whereas the ethnic proportion of Tamils to Sinhalese was about 1:7, their representation in the higher levels of public service was sometimes almost 1:1. From 1956, successive governments have been evasive in speaking out about this problem, while at the same time trying to increase the proportion of the Sinhalese majority in the public service, sometimes surreptitiously. Predictably, these efforts have been seen as infringing the rights of the Tamil minority, and have been resisted. Educated Sri Lankan Tamils had started finding alternative means of livelihood by migrating or moving temporarily to foreign climes long before the ethnic conflict escalated. Today, it is estimated that there are some Tamil expatriates in all parts of the world, most of whom are believed to support the armed struggle of their brethren in Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan government continues to employ Tamils at all levels of the public service, but in decreasing proportion to the Sinhalese. There is a feeling of resentment among Tamils because the public service can no longer absorb qualified Tamils who pass out of the secondary and tertiary education system to the extent it once did, long ago. The Sinhalese masses too feel deprived because, lacking the better educational facilities available to the more privileged Sinhalese, and Tamils, they can find employment only at comparatively lower levels, both at home and abroad. It has already been remarked that the war in the north and east is being fought by the masses, although this is not strictly correct. Thus, the glimmer of a new class struggle that may emerge from the war is already evident. In this complex situation, there is also a latent aspect which has the potential to explode at a future date, if it is not exorcised early. It is an unfortunate fact that many of the decisions made with regard to the location of the reservoirs in the south were supported, if not actually initiated, by Tamil public servants, in the past. This again was a result of the disproportionate representation of Tamils in the professions and public service, compared to their numbers in the population as described above. Wrong location of the reservoirs should be seen as being due to ignorance and incompetence, rather than motivated by communal feelings. However, at the present time there is a world-wide movement organized by expatriate Tamils to give publicity to their cause - the struggle for a separate state in the island of Sri Lanka - which has escalated from a non-violent struggle to an armed struggle amounting to a civil war. From time to time, learned discussions are held in different parts of the world where speakers from Western universities and Research Institutes also present papers which directly or indirectly support this cause. An example is a conference organized in the State University of California at Sacramento, July, 1991, at which a presentation was made by Bryan Pfaffenberger. Pfaffenberger had previously published a study titled 20 The Harsh Facts of Hydraulics: Technology and Society in Sri Lanka s Colonization Schemes, in which he argued that: 229

259 the supposed causal relationship between gravity-flow irrigation works and socioeconomic differentiation is, in the Sri Lanka case, illusory and deceptive. The appearance is created and becomes convincing, only to the extent that observers adopt a highly restricted definition of technology, a technology that includes only the hardware of irrigation (such as dams, pumps and canals). As scholars in the history of technology frequently argue, a more useful definition of technology would certainly include cultural values and social behaviour, which are, after all, vital to the operation and maintenance of a technical system. Socio-economic differentiation in the south is only part of the bigger socio-political problem there. Pfaffenberger is quite correct when he asserts that technology should be seen as including cultural values and social behaviour. The irrigation ecosystems approach to irrigation permits such a definition of technology, which the hydraulic engineering approach does not. For that reason, by analogy with Amory Lovins concept of hard energy and soft energy paths, the irrigation ecosystems approach is defined as a soft technology perspective, and the hydraulic engineering approach is defined as a hard technology perspective. Pfaffenberger goes on to say: 20 The question this article addresses, therefore, is not why Sri Lanka s modern irrigation technology creates socioeconomic differentiation; on the contrary, the question is why the schemes social design omitted the customs and behaviours that could have mitigated the differentiation process. The question he poses if answered in terms of ethnicity could raise a hornets nest and add a new dimension to the already disastrous situation in Sri Lanka. That is why Pfaffenberger s participation in the Sacramento conference is mentioned in this paper. He should be doubly sensitive to the explosive nature of the material he is dealing with when he makes presentations and personal appearances at such meetings. He should realize that the soft technology irrigation ecosystems perspective could never be understood by a hard technologist hydraulic engineer lacking the basic knowledge of nature possessed by any farmer. The reason the social design of the big irrigation schemes omitted customs and behaviour is intimately tied up with this fact, which may not be easily discovered by a visiting social scientist, although one of them, Leach, 21 did document social customs and behaviour in a micro irrigation ecosystem, in his classic study a long time ago. References 1 E R Leach, Hydraulic Society in Ceylon, in Past and Present, April J Needham, Wang Ling and Lu Gwei Djin, (1971) Science and Civilization in China, Volume 4, Part 3, Cambridge University Press. 3 R L Brohier, Some Structural Features of the Ancient Irrigation Works in Ceylon. Presidential Address, Engineering Association of Ceylon, ref.1, p R L Brohier, The Inter-relation of Groups of Reservoirs and Channels in the Rajarata of Ceylon, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1937, p R L Brohier, The Ancient Irrigation Works in Ceylon, (1934), Government Press. 7 ref. 1, p ref. 2, p D L O Mendis, Ancient Irrigation Ecosystems of Sri Lanka. Unpublished. General Research Committee, Sri Lanka Association for the Advancement of Science, (1983). 10 J S Kennedy, Evolution of Scientific Development of Village Irrigation Works in Ceylon. Proceedings of the Engineering Association of Ceylon, (1934). 11 D L O Mendis, Hydraulic Civilizations, Irrigation Ecosystems, and the Modern State, (1989), Professor E 0 E Pereira Commemoration Lecture, Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka. 12 D L O Mendis, Some Observations on the Designs for Uda Walawe Headworks. Transactions of the Institutions of Engineers, (1968), Ceylon. 230

260 13 M Dvroey and N Shanmugaratnam Peasant Resettlement in Sri Lanka, (1984), Tricontinental, p S Ponnanbalam, Sri Lanka: The National Question and the Tamil Liberation Struggle, (1983), Zed Books 15 D L O Mendis, Development of Underdevelopment in Southern Sri Lanka: Destabilization of Ancient Irrigation Ecosystems by the Impact of Hydraulic Engineering, (1989), Transactions of the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka. 16 D L O Mendis, The Need of the Hour: Non-dependent Implementation of Southern Area Plan. Transactions of the Institution of Engineers, (1988), Sri Lanka. 17 D L O Mendis, Theory, Paradigm and Crisis in Understanding the History of Irrigation Systems in Sri Lanka. Unpublished (1988), 11th Conference, International Association of Historians of Asia. 18 Beijing Review, Vol 34, No 27, July 8-14, H Parker, Ancient Ceylon (1909). Lusacs, London. 20 B Pfaffenberger, The Harsh facts of Hydraulics: Technology and Lanka s Colonization Schemes, Technology and Society, July 1990, p E R Leach, Pul Aliya - A Village in Ceylon, (1961), Cambridge. 22 D L O Mendis, Lessons from Sri Lanka s Ancient Irrigation Ecosys Proceedings of the 14th Congress of the International Commission on I Drainage, [CID, New Delhi. 23 D L O Mendis, A Comparative Study of Hydraulic Engineering ix Lanka and Ancient China. (1990), Transactions of the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka. 24 D L O Mendis, Irrigation Development and Underdevelopment in Sri Lanka, (1990), Economic Review, December 1990, Peoples Bank, Sri Lanka 231

261 Pugwash Conference No. 42, 1992 Environmental Degradation: Little-Known Cause of Violent Conflict in Sri Lanka D L O Mendis Introduction From time to time much publicity is given in the global media to the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka, generally referred to as the Tamil liberation struggle. In this respect, Sri Lanka is no different from many other countries, including Western countries like the UK, USA, and Canada, where ethnic minorities who allege that they have been discriminated against, have found themselves in violent conflict with the government. However, in the Sri Lankan case, the ethnic conflict has grown to the proportions of a protracted struggle that attracts global media attention, like the IRA struggle in Northern Ireland. The Sri Lanka conflict has also been internationalized by expatriate Sri Lankans, some of whom have fled the country as political or economic refugees, and by interested foreigners ranging from humanitarian organizations to gun-runners and busybodies. Another conflict in the extreme south of the country has gone virtually unnoticed in the global news media, even when there was tremendous loss of life some years ago, presumably because it could not be described as an ethnic conflict. Unlike the long drawn-out secessionist war, which goes on and on (like the war in Northern Ireland), the uprising in the southern area of Sri Lanka was effectively suppressed by the government with great brutality. Nevertheless, the underlying causes for the revolt, far from being removed, have not even been properly understood. Nor can it be said that government development efforts have succeeded in ameliorating the underlying causes of the original conflict. It is argued that the essence of the problem lies in the degradation, in very recent times, of the ancient irrigation or water conservation systems in the region. This happened because there was a completely wrong understanding of the ancient irrigation works in the area and an incorrect interpretation of their evolution and development, in harmony with the natural environment over a long period, going back to pre-christian times. As a result, three major irrigation systems were constructed in this area, which destabilized the natural ecosystems, causing severe environmental stress. The impact of this environmental degradation is the prime cause for the conflict in southern Sri Lanka. In 1992, the year of the United Nations Conference on the Environment, in Brazil, it is appropriate to draw the attention of Pugwash scientists to this situation, particularly because it may be relevant to other developing countries, especially in tropical regions. Irrigation Ecosystems Western science has identified terrestrial, aquatic and atmospheric ecosystems corresponding to the lithosphere, the hydrosphere, and the atmosphere, the three parts of the ecosphere in which all living things exist. In the humid tropics, where irrigated agriculture is practiced, it is appropriate to recognize irrigation ecosystems, which in general may be comprised of components of terrestrial, aquatic and atmospheric ecosystems. Irrigation is defined in this context as an intervention by Man in nature s hydrological cycle, which depicts the perpetual motion of water through its domains of land, water and air, powered by energy from the sun. History has been defined as successive changes in chronological order of the forms and modes of production. By analogy, the history of irrigation is defined as successive changes in the use of water by Man for crop production. Irrigation systems then become irrigation ecosystems, and their evolution and development through seven successive stages may be identified, thus: 232

262 - rain-fed agriculture; - natural flooding of rivers; - river diversion induced or engineered by Man; - development of channel systems which include weirs and spillways; - invention of the sluice; - construction of storage reservoirs; - damming a perennial river using the sluice for temporary river diversion. It should be noted here that river diversion, both natural and Man-induced, is a far older system for irrigated agriculture than storage reservoirs. The former represents water management in the space dimension, while the latter represents water management in the time dimension, a much later achievement. Different irrigation ecosystems may now be identified, namely: - inundation irrigation ecosystems; - channel irrigation ecosystems; - micro-irrigation ecosystem depending on a small reservoir, or tank; - macro-irrigation ecosystem depending on a large reservoir with one or more microirrigation ecosystems of the three types above in its command area; - a complex of macro-irrigation ecosystems consisting of a number of interconnected large reservoirs and channels. Examples of all five types of irrigation ecosystems can be seen in Sri Lanka, dating from the pre-christian era known as the ancient hydraulic civilization. Modern Water Resources Development in Sri Lanka A comprehensive topographical survey of the island was done by the British, and a complete set of topographical survey sheets on a scale of one mile to an inch, which show the ancient irrigation works in great detail, were published in the nineteenth century. Restoration of some of the greater works had also been done by the British, while a number of the smaller works had been repaired and put to use through local endeavour. About forty years ago, an erroneous interpretation of the evolution and development of these ancient hydraulic works had come to be accepted by irrigation engineers. This interpretation was accepted by R L Brohier, the doyen of surveyors, and later (1971) republished by Joseph Needham, in his classic work Science and Civilization in China. This erroneous hypothesis was spelled out as follows: The process of evolution which is thought to have occurred may be described as. follows; fi rst, the farmers made numerous small tanks in the hills and foothills, near their fields or terraces to catch the run-off water, which they baled out at leisure. Then numbers of small dams, forming small reservoirs were built, often in series, on the upper reaches of tributaries of the greater rivers, thus retaining the annual or inundatory flow, and discharging it as desired by small canals along the valley sides. As time went on larger dams were built submerging or rendering unnecessary the smaller ones. The next step was revolutionary: a weir was built much higher up the main river to form the headwork for a long lateral trunk derivative canal, which thus brought perennial water to join the annual monsoon supplies in the great reservoir. This method [which was] ambitious, as well as scientifi c, had numerous advantages. 233

263 Needham himself has recognized the need to revise this part of his great work, and steps are being taken to do this; but in Sri Lanka, correction of the tragic error in understanding how the irrigation systems had evolved and developed, and its disastrous consequences, is still being resisted in certain quarters. Underdevelopment in the Southern Area of Sri Lanka On the basis of this erroneous hypothesis, a map described as the Water Resources Development Map of Ceylon was published in 1957, and on the false authority of this map three new large reservoirs were built in the southern area of the country. Of these, Uda Walawe built in 1967, and Lunuganvehera built in 1986 are gigantic reservoirs that each submerged a large number of ancient small tanks, thus conforming to stage three of the erroneous hypothesis. Local villagers, heirs to an ancient tradition dating back more than two millennia, had no voice in the design and construction of the new projects. In fact these large projects were imposed on them in spite of the protests they expressed during the stage of blocking out of land for the new settlements. Each project was conceived in the capital city Colombo, by Western-trained engineers, who had no clue at all about the ancient irrigation ecosystems as described above. After the headworks of each system was constructed, the downstream development of the project ran into difficulties on account of shortage of water. This was blamed on the cultivators, who were alleged to be wasting this precious resource because there was no price placed on it, and it was surmised that imposition of a water duty would alleviate if not altogether solve the problem. However, these fond hopes have not been realized. By 1988, the state of armed conflict that had developed in the south (and also in other parts of the country), as distinct from the separatist struggle in the north, appeared to be completely out of control, at a time when a Presidential election was also due to be held. A series of papers were then presented in Sri Lanka and abroad, in order to focus attention on the non-ethnic causes of violent conflict in southern Sri Lanka, which achieved some of the desired results. The then President of Sri Lanka, J R Jayewardene took personal note of one of these presentations in October 1988, and his successor, R Premadasa called me up for a personal presentation in January Despite all this, real remedial measures for the environmental degradation caused by the wrong location of the two great reservoirs, Uda Walawe and Lunuganvehera, have not been attempted. Instead, absurd palliatives like the proposal to divert an adjacent river into the great reservoir at Lunuganvehera, to meet the alleged shortage there, have been sprung on the politicians by opportunistic civil servants. In turn, politicians have tended to clutch at this sort of straw, (especially at a time when general elections, that have not been held in this country since 1977 on various pretexts, are now a possibility in most areas). That particular proposal for river diversion was stalled for a while when the local environmentalist lobby insisted that an Environmental Impact Assessment should be done first, but it is not at all clear what will happen next. The present situation is that large sums of money are being spent to rehabilitate the recently constructed irrigation systems in both large projects in the south. Simultaneously large sums of money are being spent on socio-economic studies in both these project areas, which invariably only re-discover and re-confirm a well-established fact about Sri Lanka s new irrigation projects, that the (few) rich become richer and the (majority) poor become poorer with the passage of time. Thus, the cause for conflict between man and man increases rather than decreases as a result of the vast sums of money spent by government on these projects. The potential for conflict between man and beast is also increasing rapidly on account of the demarcation of large extents of arable land (that had, in fact, been cultivated under small tanks in ancient times), in the upper catchments of the two great reservoirs, as Nature Reserves. These two reserves have been joined together by a corridor and also joined up with a Strict Natural Reserve in the adjoining river basin, (which it was proposed to divert into Lunuganvehera). 234

264 An important reason for the creation and aggravation of this unfortunate situation is the widely-held view that modern agricultural techniques developed in the temperate regions can and should be transferred to the humid tropics in toto, on account of their success in those regions where they originated. The much-publicized green revolution is of course, the experience supporting this view. An equally widely-accepted corollary that productivity levels of traditional systems are inadequate to sustain present-day populations, and sadly, the regular occurrence in poor developing countries of food shortages, including famines, lend credence to this view. But this is not so at all in Sri Lanka. On the contrary, there is steadily increasing evidence that the ancient irrigation systems, that were completely misinterpreted and had modern systems imposed on them, should be restored on the basis of a proper scientific study of how those ancient systems actually functioned. In fact, recent work suggests that the large numbers of all tanks (reservoirs) estimated at 30,000 in just square miles of the dry zone, had been built in such large numbers as much to conserve the water-table to enable the cultivation of tree crops on what are now called the arable uplands, as to irrigate the rice soils in the valley bottoms. This is especially so in the southern region. The very term irrigation is therefore misleading, and it has been suggested that the correct term for describing the ancient hydraulic works in Sri Lanka should preferably be water conservation systems or water conservation ecosystems rather than irrigation systems. A recently reported historical archaeology project from Peru suggests that there may indeed be some surprises in store if some of the ancient projects in Sri Lanka are reconstructed in their original state and function, and studied. In the Peruvian study, by Dr Clark Erickson of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology/Anthropology, potato yields of up to 10 metric tonnes per hectare were obtained when using the ancient techniques, without addition of chemical fertilizer, while adjacent fields, farmed according to modern agricultural practices using high inputs, gave only 4 tonnes per hectare. This type of comparative study may ultimately establish a similar potential in Sri Lanka. Viewed from that perspective, the enormity of the adverse impact of the new irrigation projects in the southern area comes into focus. Fundamental reasons for the wasteful use of water in the cultivation of rice in these projects may then be seen more clearly as arising from basic errors in the very design of the systems, rather than being due to inefficient cultivation practices adopted by farmers. In summary, then, important lessons from the whole experience in southern Sri Lanka have been highlighted, which have to be learnt before permanent remedies can be achieved. Unfortunately, in the present order of things, high officials in the money lending aid agencies, like the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, have to be convinced of these findings first. Many of these important officials are economists and financial administrators rather than scientists, which makes the task that much more difficult. Moreover, local scientists quite often find it more convenient to go along with the aid givers, for a variety of reasons, especially in Sri Lanka today, where we find that our economy is now virtually controlled by these agencies. References 1. J Needham, Wang Ling and Lu Gwei Djen, Science and Civilization in China, Volume 4, Part 3, Section 28 (f) Xu Zhifang and D L O Mendis, Traditional Hydraulic (Water Conservancy) Societies in the Ancient World: Their Relevance for Sustainable Development Strategies in the Modern World, an examination of some Hypotheses in Joseph Needham s Science and Civilization in China. Transactions of the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka,

265 3. DLO Mendis, Theory, Paradigm and Crisis in Understanding the History of Irrigation Systems in Sri Lanka, International Association of Historians of Asia, 11th Conference, Colombo, DLO Mendis, The Need of the Hour: Non-Dependent Implementation of Southern Area Plan, Transactions of the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka, M Dvroey and N Shanmugaretnam, Peasant Resettlement in Sri Lanka, Tricontinental, DLO Mendis, Development of Underdevelopment in Southern Sri Lanka: Destabilization of Ancient Irrigation Ecosystems by the Impact of Hydraulic Engineering, Transactions of the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka, DLO Mendis, Non-ethnic Causes of Violent Conflict in Sri Lanka: Environmental Degradation by the Impact of Hydraulic Engineering, Proceedings of 41st Pugwash Conference, p DLO Mendis, Irrigation Development and Underdevelopment in Southern Sri Lanka, Economic Review, December R Wijesinha, Sri Lanka in Crisis , J R Jayawardene and the Erosion of Democracy. Council for Liberal Democracy, Colombo, B Pfaffenberger, The Harsh Facts of Hydraulics: Technology and Society in Sri Lanka s Colonization Schemes, Technology and Society, July

266 PUGWASH SPECIAL STUDY GROUP The Value of Indigenous Knowledge The Case of Water and Soil Conservation Ecosystems in Sri Lanka* D L O Mendis Sri Lanka is an island lying between 6 and 8 degrees north latitude, about 30 km south-east of southern India across the Palk Strait. It receives rainfall from two monsoons, each blowing for about half the year: the north-east monsoon from about October to March; and the south-west monsoon from about April to September. Due to a south-central massif rising to over 2500 m, the south-west quadrant of the island receives more than 2500 mm of rainfall from each monsoon and is known as the wet zone. The dry zone receives less than 1900 nim of rainfall annually, mainly from the north-east monsoon, while an intermediate zone receives between 1900 and 2500 mm of rain each year. In ancient times a system of irrigation works, now recognized as water and soil conservation ecosystems, had been built in stages, mainly in the dry zone. These works consisted of river diversion systems, and small, medium and large storage reservoirs. They were the basis for a hydraulic civilization that had flourished from about the fifth century BC to the beginning of the thirteenth, century AD. The evolution and development of the ancient irrigation systems, their stability, productivity and sustainability through a period of over 17 centuries, and the reasons for their final decline have yet to be completely researched by multidisciplinary scholars rather than by narrow specialists. It is known that there were a number of contributing causes, including invasions, internecine strife, occupation of the northern regions by invaders, elimination of the class of persons, called kulinas, traditionally entrusted with maintenance and operation of the systems, the advent of malaria and decline of foreign trade (Indrapala, 1971). However, research in depth has been eschewed in favour of the facile assumption that the ancient systems were inefficient and should be replaced by new large-scale centralized systems. Various problems, discussed below, have arisen on new projects based on this hypothesis and built in large part with transferred technology. Restoration of the ancient systems based on a correct understanding of their functions, even at this late stage, would contribute to both environmental and socio-political stability in the island. THE ANCIENT SYSTEMS Wittfogel (1957), taking the example of ancient China, surmised that ancient hydraulic societies came into existence simultaneously with the growth of the extensive bureaucratic organization that managed it. Leach (1959) discounted this with the example of ancient Sri Lanka where a system of taxation in kind called rajakariya or king s labour, which he, called corvee labour, had been used. Leach however made some serious mistakes concerning the ancient irrigation systems (Mendis, 1990). In ancient Sri Lanka there were three main regions, Rajarata and Ruhunurata, together covering the dry zone, and Maya rata covering most of the wet zone. These had been ruled at times as separate kingdoms or as principalities under satraps owing allegiance to a single king. There were three kingdoms, in Kandy, Kotte and Jaffna, when the Portuguese arrived in They occupied the maritime provinces from 1505 to 1658, until they were displaced by the Dutch, who in turn yielded these provinces to the British in The British captured the Kandyan kingdom in the central hills in 1815 and ruled over the who country until A comprehensive topographical survey of the island completed by British in the early twentieth century (Skinner, 1960), and plotted on a scale of 1 mile to 1 inch, show the remains of the ancient irrigation works in detail. These maps have been used by historians, surveyors and engineers 237

267 researching the ancient systems. R L Brohier s Ancient Irrigation Works in Ceylon (1934) remains the best example of such research work to the present day. Brohier (1937) showed that all the large reservoirs in the ancient Rajarata were interconnected by means of large channels, some of them trans-basin channels, built as far back as the fifth century, if not earlier. He also showed, with the example of the Kalaweva, that these interconnected large reservoirs and channels supplemented the small village tanks which were the heart of the village settlements in ancient times (Ibid, p 70). In contrast to this system in Rajarata, there was a noticeable paucity of interconnected large reservoirs and channels in the southern area, which was part of the ancient Ruhunurata. On the other hand a large number of small village tanks are shown in this area on modern topographical survey maps. Historical sources indicate that at one time some 20,000 of these small tanks may have been functioning in the ancient Ruhunurata alone (Geiger, 1960). Viewed from a biotic perspective (as against a hydraulic engineering perspective) the ancient irrigation works are seen as water and soil conservation ecosystems. It has been argued that the evolution and development of these systems took place in the following seven stages (Mendis, 1986): 1. rain-fed agriculture 2. temporary river diversion and inundation irrigation on river banks 3. permanent river diversion and channel irrigation systems 4. development of weirs and spillways on diversion channels 5. invention of the sluice 6. construction of reservoirs equipped with sluices 7. damming a perennial river. Six types of water and soil conservation ecosystems may be identified in Sri Lanka from this hypothesis, of which all but the first are irrigation ecosystems: 1. rain-fed agriculture ecosystems of two types - traditional haen govithan (also described as swidden agriculture) and permanent tree crops of which the Kandyan forest garden is the best example (Knox, 1965) 2. flood or inundation irrigation ecosystems 3. channel irrigation ecosystems 4. a micro-irrigation ecosystem below a small tank with a sluice 5. a macro-irrigation ecosystem with one or more micro-irrigation ecosystems of types 2, 3 or 4 in its command area 6. a complex of macro-irrigation ecosystems consisting of a number of interconnected macro-irrigation ecosystems, as in the ancient Rajarata. The purpose of the large number of small tanks shown on the topographical survey sheets of the southern area (in ancient Ruhunurata) rremained an enigma until detailed engineering surveys were done in the Walawe ganga (ganga means a perennial river) basin. These surveys revealed that the ends of the small earth embankments called bunds, apparently, forming small tanks, were all curved in the downstream direction and that they had been built in echelon at corresponding elevations along the non-perennial streams. These streams are called oya or ara (Tamil aru), to distinguish them from a ganga, a perennial river. The discovery of the curved ends of the earth bunds, together with already known fact that none of these bunds was equipped with a sluice made clear that these were not the bunds of conventional small tanks, which are meant for the storage of water. They were in fact earth diversion structures, referred to by traditional farmers as vetiya, different from the traditional diversion structure, the amuna, made of stone masonry. The function of the vetiya was to raise water in the oya above the low humic gley rice soils in the valley bottom and divert it into channels 238

268 on either side, in the less impermeable, reddish-brown earth soils in the valley shoulders, during the monsoon rain season. This must have made it possible to cultivate seasonally what are now described as other field crops, together with permanent tree crops, in the reddish-brown soils of the valley shoulders. This resulted in a unique rain-fed agriculture ecosystem, irrigated during the monsoon rain season. The high productive potential of such a system, as it probably existed in ancient times, has been demonstrated under the Hambantota Integrated Rural Development Program funded by the Norwegian aid agency NORAD (Daily News, 26 January 1993). However, the actual carrying capacity of the system must await a study of the type carried out in Peru, where an ancient technique is again being used for cultivation (Erickson, 1988). Meanwhile a tentative assessment of the direct canying capacity indicates that it was between 45 and 7.3 persons per irrigated hectare (Goonesekera, 1991). THE ROLE OF ENGINEERS In British colonial times, engineers did some pioneering investigative work on the ancient irrigation works and other engineering structures, such as roads and buildings and especially religious structures, of which the stupa is the best known (Paranavitana, 1960). Henry Parker s Ancient Ceylon (1909) contains useful information about ancient bricks and also the first definitive statement about the invention of the sluice in ancient Sri Lanka (Parker, 1909, p 379): Since about the middle of the last century, open wells, called `valve pits when they stand clear of the embankment, and valve-towers when they are on it, have been built on numerous reservoirs in Europe. Their duty is to hold the valves, and the lifting gear for working them, by means of which the outward fl ow of the water is regulated or totally stopped. Such also was the function of the bisokotuwa of the Sinhalese engineers; they were the fi rst inventors of the valve-pit, more than 2100 years ago. The word bisokotuwa, which means indraught enclosure (Geiger, 1960), describes the valvetower or valve-pit of the sluice. The Sinhala word for sluice is sorowwa. The invention of the sorowwa with its bisokotuwa in about the third century BC enabled construction of true storage reservoirs in ancient Sri Lanka, with this device for control and issue of irrigation water. In 1900 the irrigation department of Sri Lanka was set up by hiving off the irrigation branch from the public works department. The new department undertook restoration of ancient large reservoirs and channels, most of them in the ancient Rajarata, while small tanks came under the purview of government agents. Small tanks were therefore given less attention and the function of the small bund, the vetiya, was not understood at all by the irrigation department s hydraulic engineers and their perception, now seen as a hydraulic engineering approach, was dominant. In 1923 the failure of a chain of small tanks (often described as a cascade of tanks) in the dry zone resulted in an official study of the small tanks by the irrigation department and a landmark paper was published by J S Kennedy, who later became director of irrigation. He stated, inter alia The small village tanks, like the village cattle, are; too numerous for efficiency (Kennedy, 1934, p 132). This statement led to the conviction among, irrigation engineers that the small tank was `inefficient and had to be replaced by large reservoirs. Their arithmetic was correct, but probably little else besides. This error also led to a wrong interpretation of the evolution of the ancient irrigation systems in Sri Lanka as having taken place in four successive stages. The small earth bund, whether tank or vetiya, was mistakenly assumed to be an early stage in the evolution and development of large reservoirs that were thought to have been built later, submerging the small bunds which had become obsolete. Brohier (1956) unfortunately placed the seal of his undoubted authority on this erroneous hypothesis of the hydraulic engineers. This hypothesis was also adopted by Joseph 239

269 Needham (Needham, Wang Ling and Lu Gwei Djjin, 1971), although he acknowledged later that Brohier s interpretation was incorrect (Needham, 1989). The four-stage hypothesis also incorrectly assumed that construction of storage reservoirs preceded river diversion systems. River diversion irrigation was practised in the river valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, the Nile, the Indus, and the rivers in China, long before construction of storage reservoirs which depended on the invention of the sluice. River diversion represents water management in space, while storage represents water management in time. The former is a much earlier achievement in human history than the latter. In the dominant view of hydraulic engineers in Sri Lanka, water is seen as inanimate and active, as is generally the case in the study of hydraulics (Ven Te Chow, 1959). A bio-scientist, however, sees water in exactly the opposite terms, as animate and passive, due to its role as a solvent for nutrients in the root zone of soils and as a facilitating agent in nature s bio-geochemical cycles, for example in fixing carbon in photosynthesis. A map described as the Water Resources Development Plan of Ceylon was prepared by hydraulic engineers and published in 1959, based on the four-stage hypothesis. This map shows suitable sites for construction of large reservoirs, most of which submerge ancient small earth bunds. The best examples are the Uda Walawe reservoir on the Walawe ganga and the Lunugamvehera reservoir across the Kirindi oya in the south-east dry zone. Both reservoirs were built without investigating much better alternative sites, each about 20 km upstream of the selected site, because of the authority of the Water Resources Development Plan. New agricultural development projects are based on these new large reservoirs. It has been argued that a contributory cause for civil commotion and riot in the southern area of Sri Lanka in recent times has been the incorrect location of these reservoirs, and the wrong designs based on purely hydraulic engineering, hard technology principles, of the irrigation systems under these new reservoirs (Mendis, 1990,1992a, 1992b, 1993a, 1993b). This type of exercise in hydraulic engineering (in which water is treated as inanimate and active) assumes that the ancient water conservation systems have no intrinsic worth. This is well illustrated in the following statement from a feasibility report for another large reservoir selected from the Water Resources Development Plan of Ceylon, the Heda oya reservoir, in the southeast dry zone area further east from Kirindi oya, which, however, has never been constructed (Irrigation Department, 1950: 5): The development of Heda oya is recommended as it compares very favourably, from technical and fi nancial viewpoints, with other major schemes already undertaken by government. There does not exist any doubt as to the need to achieve self-sufficiency in food. This is an achievement that cannot be realized by spending large sums of money on tiny village tanks which do not have the staying power in a drought, nor can a better standard of living be taken to a people depending on them. Vagaries of the monsoons and resulting destitution can be fought only by spending public funds on large schemes and not by creating little evaporating pans and relief works. The age of the village pond has passed away and the time has come to embark on large projects like the scheme under review. THE ROLE OF MODERN EDUCATION There can be no real justification for this approach to the ancient systems, based as it is on ignorance of the biotic nature of water s function in crop production, especially its role as a facilitating agent in nature s bio-geochemical cycles. It is therefore important to understand how this attitude came about, by taking a look at the modem education system in Sri Lanka. In British colonial times, state and missionary schools were set up, displacing the school system that had been in existence since ancient times (Ruberu, 1962). Students from the new schools had the best opportunities for higher education and employment in the public and private sectors. With 240

270 few exceptions, education in the English medium was biased towards Western cultural values and the study of indigenous traditions was neglected. This resulted in the emergence of a Westernoriented and privileged class of elites. On the positive side the high level of literacy resulted in the introduction of universal adult franchise under the Donoughmore constitution in 1931, well before any other colonial country. In turn, parliamentary democracy on the Westminster model became firmly established in the country. A tradition of free and fair elections prevailed up to and including the general elections of On the negative side, well before the present ethnic and non-ethnic conflicts started in Sri Lanka, a group of these privileged elites attempted to stage a coup against the democratically elected government in Those elites who occupied high positions in the administration, especially in the police and armed services, were largely from ethnic and religious minorities (Horowitz, 1980). This was a result of the educational and employment advantages made available to minorities under the colonial policy of divide et impera. Today, at secondary school level, students are routed into science and arts streams for the GCE O level examinations. The science stream is directed into a physical science stream and a biological science stream for the A level examinations. Until very recently engineering graduates in the physical sciences stream were never exposed to biosciences. Consequently those who became irrigation engineers quite naturally adopted a hydraulic engineering attitude towards the ancient irrigation systems. This was not the case at Indian universities, where irrigation engineering was taught as a subject. In the 1940s and 1950s a few technical assistants and engineering assistants from Sri Lanka were sent to these universities to qualify as engineering graduates, but that practice was stopped after the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Ceylon was set up in In any case, even in the irrigation department the dominant influence was that of the Western trained engineers, especially those from the prestigious Oxbridge universities, of which there were a select few who wielded considerable influence. It would seem that their foreign education had consolidated their faith in Western scientific methods, at the cost of any sympathy for, or understanding of, the intrinsic value inherent in traditional knowledge systems (Goonetilake, 1983). This is of course understandable in the context of the period. THE ROLE OF FOREIGN AID AND FOREIGN AGENCIES In Sri Lanka in the 1990s, the expenditure necessary for operation and maintenance of existing services exceeds revenue. Consequently any capital expenditure has to be met with foreign assistance (Central Bank of Ceylon, Annual Report ). All national development projects today are funded by what is euphemistically called foreign aid. In practice this omnibus term embraces everything from outright grants to ordinary commercial credits. The result is a situation fraught with danger to national economic sovereignty. (Jayawardena 1969). This potentially dangerous situation was further compounded in 1977 by the abolition of the Ministry of Planning and Economic Affairs. The national planning function is today exercised by the Ministry of Finance and Planning, which publishes an annual rolling plan. Foreign aided projects virtually determine the plan each year. An important project launched in 1989, allegedly against the advice of the World Bank and the IMF, was the Janasaviya or Poverty Alleviation Programme. It consisted of the social welfare measures necessary to support the poorest of the poor after previous welfare facilities had been removed by the new government that came into power in July The programme was a personal endeavour near and dear to the heart of the then President of the country, Ranesinghe Premadasa, who was assassinated in May Its future is now in doubt. 241

271 The welfare measures that were discontinued in 1977 included a subsidy on the staple food, rice. Sri Lanka at that time had acquired an enviable reputation as a poor Third World country that had achieved an extraordinarily high physical quality of life index (PQLI) of 82 and had very low military expenditure. The following figures speak for themselves in this context: Percentage of GNP rice subsidy 5.0% 0.07% military expenditure 0.7% 5.0% Source: World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER, 1990) Achievement of self-sufficiency in rice has long been a major objective of government in Sri Lanka. Before independence, the colonial government started so-called colonization schemes based on restoration of large ancient reservoirs in the dry zone and resettlement of pioneer peasant colonists. This was continued after independence by successive governments (Farmer, 1956). A new major irrigation and settlement project was started after independence in 1948, for which preliminary investigations had commenced many years earlier. This was the Galoya project in the eastern dry zone, based on the model of the Tennessee Valley Authority (one of the major schemes in President Franklin D Roosevelt s New Deal in the early 1930s). In this scheme a very large new reservoir, the Senanayake samudra, named after the first Prime Minister, D S Senanayake, was built. This gigantic new reservoir provided supplementary (assured) irrigation water for some 14,000 hectares of existing irrigated lands and also irrigated about 34,000 hectares of new land in its command area. In effect a macro-irrigation ecosystem was being created (by accident, not by design) with a number of micro-irrigation ecosystems, based on small tanks and river diversion amunas, within its command area. This could have resulted in a stable and sustainable system, but for the fact that irrigation facilities for the new lands (34,000 hectares) were designed on the hydraulic engineering model. Consequently, this scheme, too, has been faced with irrigation difficulties in recent times. In the irrigation subsector of the agriculture sector of the economy, a number of foreign funded projects have been launched since 1977, of which the Accelerated Mahaweli Development Project (AMDP) is by far the largest. To date the cost of the AMDP is in excess of 60 billion rupees (about US$1.25 billion). The AMDP has been criticized by local engineers for the high proportion of foreign exchange cost in the total cost due to the large number of foreign consultants and contractors that have been employed on projects funded by foreign agencies in this programme. Employment of foreign consultants on the AMDP has further aggravated the situation where new designs are imposed on existing ancient water conservation ecosystems, as if they did not exist. The major objectives of the AMDP were the construction of six new headworks, which have now been completed and the introduction of modern agribusiness in the downstream development areas. This latter objective was more or less surreptitious in the beginning, but is now gathering momentum through foreign aid and foreign expertise. Outside the AMDP a number of foreign funded programs have been undertaken in the irrigation subsector, many of them described as `rehabilitation or `modernization projects. Examples are the Village Irrigation Works Rehabilitation Project (VIRP), the Major Irrigation Works Rehabilitation Project (MIRP), the National Irrigation Rehabilitation Project (NIRP) and the Uda Walawe Rehabilitation Project. In addition to these projects, there are a number of Integrated Rural Development Programmes (IRDP) in administrative districts, in which rehabilitation of small village tanks is a major component.. Rehabilitation work under the Uda Walawe project with financial assistance from the Asian Development Bank started in the early 1970s, well before downstream development and 242

272 settlement work was completed. The need for rehabilitation soon after or during construction, can only be due to bad construction or inherent defects in the underlying design. At Uda Walawe there was no doubt that the prime cause was the latter - there were basic conceptual errors in the design and layout of the modem hydraulic engineering design superimposed on the ancient man-made ecosystems in the area, but they were never recognized as such. Recognition of these basic errors would have required revolutionary changes in the attitudes of Western trained and Western oriented engineers using a hydraulic engineering approach to design (Mendis, 1968). This was unthinkable at the time, and is still not easy to achieve, among older engineers and decision makers who are quite unsympathetic to the concept of water and soil conservation ecosystems, since this requires an appreciation of biosciences. In Uda Walawe there had already been resistance, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, from traditional peasant cultivators in the area, to the land alienation work consisting of acquisition of existing lands under, minor irrigation schemes (described in this chapter as `micro-irrigation ecosystems ), re-blocking out and resettlement. This was commented on much later as follows: The blocking out and land alienation did not actually take place. The purana villagers infuriated by the coming of outsiders, forcefully and disorderly occupied the land. Dvroey and Shanmugaratnam, 1984, p 85 This is an unwarranted slander on the old (purana) villagers who had tried to resist what they saw as an attempt to destroy their traditional irrigation ecosystems, in the name of development. This became quite apparent, some years later in the mid 1970s when the same thing happened again in Mahaweli System H area, below the great ancient Kalaweva, considered by most Sri Lankans to be the heart of the ancient irrigation systems of the Rajarata. Purana villagers resisted the blocking out of their lands for reallocation under the Mahaweli scheme. The then Chairman of Mahaweli lived in the area for a month to find out for himself why the old villagers were protesting against the blocking out of their existing lands irrigated under ancient small tanks systems, when they were being promised an assured water supply under the new major scheme. He learnt from them that the small tank is a necessary complement to the large interconnected system of large reservoirs and channels in the ancient Rajarata, and gave orders that as many as possible of these small tanks should be incorporated in the new designs. Sadly, the Chairman died just two years later, and the Mahaweli designs once again came under the sway of hydraulic engineers who would rather follow the foreign engineers than discuss these issues with, and learn from, the ancient wisdom of local farmers, about the vetiya, amuna and weva (Mendis and Tennakoon, 1993). A SOUTHERN AREA PLAN BASED ON SOFT TECHNOLOGY Restoration of the ancient irrigation works on a piecemeal basis started by the British (who restored Kalaweva in 1883 for example) was continued after independence in The grand leitmotiv of the ancient system of interconnected large reservoirs and channels in the RaJarata and the complementary system made up of the small village tanks, and small diversion structures (amunas and vetiyas, see above) was lost in the course of this piecemeal restoration. Consequently later commentators, like Leach, did not even know of its existence (Leach, 1959). Modem development in the malaria-stricken dry zone took the form of colonization schemes based on this piecemeal restoration of large reservoirs and channels. In the process, irrigation engineers who played the. dominant role focused attention only on the visible aspects of the schemes, neglecting the intangible features. A recent comment sums this up: The supposed causal relation between gravity fl ow irrigation and socio-economic differentiation is, in the Sri Lanka case, illusory and deceptive. The appearance is created and becomes convincing, only to the extent that observers adopt a highly restricted defi nition of technology, a technology that includes only the hardware of irrigation (such as dams, pumps 243

273 and canals). As scholars in the history of technology frequently argue, a more useful defi nition of technology would certainly include cultural values and social behaviour, which are, after all, vital to the operation and maintenance of a technical system... The question... is not why Sri Lanka s modern irrigation technology creates socioeconomic differentiation; on the contrary, the question is why the schemes social design omitted tire customs and behaviours that could have mitigated the differentiation process. (Pfaffenberger, 1990, P 364) By analogy with Amory Lovins s concept of soft and hard energy paths (Lovins, 1977), the hydraulic engineering approach may be siescribed as a hard technology and the ecosystems approach as a soft technology. The hard technology approach described by Pfaffenberger is the one used by irrigation engineers in Sri Lanka. The soft technology approach that would avoid many of the problems he describes would be an ecosystems approach, based on a correct understanding of the ancient water and soil conservation ecosystems. The Southern Area Plan that was proposed in the late 1960s by M S M de Silva (Mendis, 1971) was also originally based on a hard technology approach. It has now been restructured by this author (Mendis, 1993b) in terms of the soft technology ecosystems approach. In its modified form this could be the basis for a stable and sustainable system for irrigated agriculture over the long term. However, this proposal has still not been accepted due to the obstacles arising from a lack of awareness of traditional agricultural systems on the part of Western trained and Western oriented modem irrigation engineers. An example that illustrates the hard technology approach now practiced is the present design of the development area in the south. Wildlife reservations have been demarcated in the catchment areas immediately above the two large new reservoirs, Uda Walawe and Lunugamvehera, and these two reservations have been joined together by another reservation. The new reservation has also been connected up with the large reservation in the southern area, the Yala sanctuary. A state sugar plantation has cultivated land immediately below this reservation The boundary between the wildlife reservation and the sugar plantation now has a live electric fence, allegedly to keep wild elephants from trespassing into the sugar plantation. But this fence also serves to warn people not to trespass into the new reservation, which was prime agricultural land in ancient times and which the new settlers in the state settlement schemes often try to cultivate illegally. It will become increasingly difficult to enforce the no trespassing rule as time passes. The hard technology method that starts with electric fences will soon progress to firearms. This will further aggravate rather than resolve the conflict between human and human, and between human and beast. If the soft technology approach to the Southern Area Plan mentioned above were to be carried out, there would be two new large reservoirs in locations each about 24 km above the present Uda Walawe and Lunugamvehera reservoirs, and these two new reservoirs will be connected by a transbasin channel. The new wildlife reservation will be located above this channel, well above the agricultural land and therefore safe for wildlife for the foreseeable future. This proposal can be implemented in stages by local endeavour rather than with massive lumpsum foreign aid, but the main problem is to make the administrative machine accept the reality of the situation. This means agreeing that the already constructed two large reservoirs, Uda Walawe and Lunugamvehera, will have to be abandoned as sunken capital, while the ancient microirrigation ecosystems that were submerged under these reservoirs will be resurrected as the new centres of human settlements. In short, this means creation of two new modern macro-irrigation ecosystems to replace two unsuccessful hydraulic engineering projects. A referendum among the southern farmers could be a way to decide the issue if the government were prepared to hold one without intimidating the voters. In today s context in Sri Lanka, this does not seem likely. 244

274 CONCLUSION What has been discussed in this chapter is the situation prevailing in southern Sri Lanka due to the use of hydraulic engineering models for modem irrigation projects. These projects were built on the remains of traditional water and soil conservation ecosystems that had flourished for many centuries, until their decline about seven centuries ago. Whereas hydraulic engineering models are part and parcel of temperate zone agribusiness systems - designed for summer-winter cropping cycles on temperate-zone soils - traditional agricultural ecosystems on tropical soils had evolved down the ages in a wet season/dry season cycle. The transfer of this inappropriate technology from the West took place because the evolution and development in stages, from pre-christian times, of ancient water and soil conservation ecosystems in Sri Lanka, had been wrongly understood by hydraulic engineers. Although they were quite ignorant of traditional agriculture, hydraulic engineers succeeded in convincing policy makers of the correctness of their interpretation of the history of the ancient irrigation systems. That wrong interpretation became the basis for modern water resources development planning in Sri Lanka. Apart from ignorance of traditional culture and their own history, a contributory cause for neglect of traditional knowledge in agriculture by decision makers in Sri Lanka has been the social distance between them and traditional farmers. The potential of the ancient systems for sustainable and stable crop production is known to the latter who, given the opportunity; still live by practicing it, but is quite unknown to the former. Incomplete knowledge of the reasons for the decline of the ancient irrigation systems after about the twelfth century AD may also have led decision makers to believe that these systems were intrinsically unsustainable. As mentioned above this decline has yet to be adequately studied. Another contributory cause of this decline may possibly be added to the list given above (Indrapala, 1971), namely the impact of hydraulic engineering after the well-known Parakrama Bahu era ( ). This may sound blasphemous to some who honour that king for having accelerated development during his reign (Geiger, 1959). However, it is possible that in the process of promoting rapid development he introduced hydraulic engineering concepts which for the first time superseded age-old concepts of water and soil conservation ecosystems, thereby destabilizing those Systems for the first time in history. Among Western trained and Western oriented modem scientists and technologists, an awareness of the stable and sustainable potential of ancient water and soil conservation ecosystems that had evolved down the ages is comparatively recent. Assessment of their full potential has yet to be done by means of full-scale field trials. Meanwhile, as mentioned above, there is mounting evidence that the instability and lack of sustainability of the modem systems has been a contributory cause of civil commotion and attempted insurrection in southern Sri Lanka. REFERENCES Brohier, R L, Ancient Irrigation Works in Ceylon, 3 vols, Colombo: Ceylon Government Press, Bromer, R L, Inter-relation of Groups of Ancient Reservoirs and Channels in Ceylon, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Ceylon Branch, vol 34, no 90, 1937, pp Brohier, R L, Some Structural Features of the Ancient Irrigation Works in Ceylon, Presidential Address, Engineering Association of Ceylon, Central Bank of Ceylon, Annual Report 1992, Colombo: Central Bank, Daily News, Hambantota IRDP a Success, Colombo, 26 January

275 Dvrory, M and K Shanmugaratnam, Peasant Resettlement in Ceylon, London: Tri-continental, Erickson, C L, Raised-Field Agriculture in the Lake Titicaca Basin, Expedition, Vol 30, No 3, 1988, pp Farmer, B F, Pioneer Peasant Colonization, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Geiger, Culture of Ceylon in Medieval Times, Wiesbaden: Otto Harrosowitz, Geiger, Culavamsa, Colombo, Ceylon Government Press, Goonesekera, K, Ancient Irrigation Systems in the Walawe Basin: Are they Sustainable?, Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka, 1991 Goonetilake, S, Crippled Minds, New Delhi: Vikas, Goonetilake, S, The Evolution of Information: Lineages in Gene, Culture and Artefact, New Delhi: CBS Publishers and Distributors, Horowitz, D L, Coup Theory and Offi cers Motives: Sri Lanka in Comparative Perspective, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, Indrapala, K (ed), The Decline of the Rajarata Civilization and the Drift to the Southwest, Peradeniya: Ceylon Studies Seminar, Irrigation Department, Feasibility Study on Heda oya Project, Colombo, 1950, (mimeo). Jayawardena, L R, National Economic Sovereignty and the World Bank, Proceedings of the Ceylon Association for the Advancement of Science, Colombo: SLAAS, 1969, pp Kennedy, J S, Evolution of Scientific Development of Village Irrigation Works in Ceylon, Proceedings of the Engineering Association of Ceylon, Colombo: 1934, pp Knox, An Historical Relation of Ceylon, Colombo: Tisara Prakasakayo, Leach, E R, Hydraulic Society in Ceylon, Past and Present, April Lovins, A, Soft Energy Paths, Harmondsworth: Penguin books, Mendis, D L O, Some Observations on the Designs for Uda Walawe Headworks, Transactions of the Institution of Engineers, Ceylon 1968, Colombo, Vol. 1, 1968, pp Mendis, D L O The Southern Area Plan, Transactions of the Institution of Engineers, Ceylon, 1971, Colombo, Vol 1, 1971, pp Mendis, D L O, Evolution and Development of Irrigation Ecosystems and Social Formations in Ancient Sri Lanka, Transactions of the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka 1986, Colombo, Vol 1, 1986, pp Mendis, D L O, Theory, Paradigm and Crisis in Understanding the History of Irrigation Systems in Sri Lanka, International Association of Historians of Asia, 11th Conference, August 1988, Colombo (mimeo). Mendis, D L O, Irrigation Development and Underdevelopment in Southern Sri Lanka, Economic Review, December 1990, pp Mendis, D L O, How Hydraulic Engineering Underdeveloped Southern Sri Lanka, Transactions of the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka, 1992, vol 1, 1992a, pp Mendis, D L O, The Water Resources Development Plan of Ceylon 1959, Engineer, Journal of the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka, 1992, Vol XX, 1992b, pp Mendis, D L O, Non-Ethnic Causes of Violent Conflict in Sri Lanka: Environmental Degradation on Account of Destruction of Ancient Irrigation Ecosystems by the Impact of Hydraulic 246

276 Engineering ; Proceedings of the 41st Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, Being, China, Singapore: Continental Press, 1993a, pp Mendis, D L O, `Irrigation Systems in the Walawe Ganga Basin in the South-East Dry Zone of Sri Lanka - an Overview, Proceedings of a Seminar, Colombo, Agrarian Research and Training Institute, 1993b. Mendis, D L O and M Tennekoon, Vetiya, Amuna and Weva, Colombo, Proceedings of a Seminar of the Ministry of Environmental Affairs, 1993, (mimeo). Needham, J, Wang Ling and Lu Gwei Djin, Science and Civilization in China, vol 4, part 3, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971, pp Needham, I, (personal communication, unpublished), 12 May, Pfaffenberger, B, The Harsh Facts of Hydraulics: Technology and Society in Sri Lanka s Traditional Colonization Schemes, Technology and Culture, July 1990, pp Paranavitana, S, The Stupa in Ceylon, Colombo: Gunasena Press, Parker, H W, Ancient Ceylon, London: Lusacs, 1909 Ruberu, R, Education in Ancient Ceylon, Kandy: Kandy Printers Ltd, Skinner, T, Fifty Years in Ceylon, Colombo: Tisara Prakasakayo, Ven Te Chow, Open Channel Hydraulics, New York: McGraw Hill, WIDER (World Institute for Development Economics Research), Helsinki: Publications No 1, Wittfogel, K, Oriental Despotism, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,

277 Pugwash Conference No. 45, 1995 Past Present and Future Conflicts over Water in Sri Lanka D L O Mendis Introduction Sri Lanka is an island lying about 30 km off the southeastern tip of India. It receives rainfall from two monsoons, in the southwest and the northeast, each blowing for about half the year. A central hill massif in the south-central area intercepts most of the rain from the southwest monsoon, but the northeast monsoon gives precipitation all over the island. As a result, the southwestern sector gets rainfall in excess of 2500 nun and is called the wet zone.. About two-thirds of the island, gets less than 1900 mm, mostly during less than half the year, and is known as the dry zone. An intermediate zone lies in between. Three ancient kingdoms, Rajarata, Ruhunurata, and Mayarata had existed in ancient times, the first two covering almost the entirety of the dry zone. Ancient Water and Soil Conservation Ecosystems or Irrigation Systems Extensive man-made water and soil conservation ecosystems had been built in the dry zone, starting in the first millenium BC, which had functioned for more than 17 centuries until after the 12th century. A number of contributory causes for the final, apparently irreversible, decline of the ancient systems have been identified. These causes include invasions from south India, internecine strife, occupation of the heartland of Rajarata by invaders who were not able or did not care to maintain the systems, elimination of the kulinas, a class of persons vested with the task of maintaining the systems, and the advent of malaria, 1 as well as breakdown of foreign trade, sustained heavy rainfall, and even earthquakes. The most recently identified contributory cause is the possible introduction for the first time of a hydraulic engineering perspective, (which will be explained below), in the reign of Parakrama Bahu ( ), replacing the existing ecosystems approach to the ancient systems at that time. 2 A comprehensive topographical survey of the island was completed by the British in the early years of the 20th century, which showed the remains of the ancient systems. Using these data Brohier 3 showed that all the large reservoirs in the ancient Rajarata were inter-connected by means of channels and natural rivers. Small reservoirs called tanks (after the Portuguese word tanque) had been built in cascades in mini-catchments in the ancient Rajarata. Brohier showed that each of these cascades was dependent on the inter-connected systems of large reservoirs and channels thereby forming an efficient water and soil conservation ecosystem. 4 These cascades have been studied in greater detail recently. 5 The term hydraulic society was used to describe the ancient civilization; 6 this description, however, is now seen to be misleading. 7 The preferred description is a sustainable and stable society, or, in more popular current phraseology, a viable Green society. Modern Development: Hydraulic Engineering Starting in British times, hydraulic engineers in the public works department and in the irrigation department (after it was set up in 1900) played a dominant role in piecemeal restoration of abandoned large reservoirs in the ancient Rajarata, thereby dismembering what had once been a marvellous complex of water and soil conservation ecosystems that may well be described as a Wonder of the Ancient World. 8 They went further and developed a four stage hypothesis for the evolution and development of the ancient systems as seen from a hydraulic engineering perspective, to which the best known authority on the ancient systems ultimately lent his illustrious name. 9 The four stage hypothesis was later re-published by Joseph Needham in his Science and Civilization in China, and described as follows:

278 The process of evolution which is thought to have occurred may be described as follows; fi rst the farmers made numerous small tanks in the hills and foothills near their fi elds or terraces to catch the runoff water, which they bailed out at leisure. Then numbers of small dams (bunds, bemma) forming small reservoirs (tanks weva, (Mm.) kulam) were built, often in series, on the upper reaches of the tributaries of the great rivers, thus retaining the annual or inundatory fl ow, and discharging it as desired by small canals (ela), along the valley sides. As time went on larger tanks were built, submerging or rendering unnecessary the smaller ones. The next step was revolutionary: a weir (anicut (Tam.) tekkam) was built much higher up the main river (gangs, oya, (Tam.) aru) to form the headwork for a long lateral trunk derivative canal (yodi-ela) which thus brought perennial water to join the annual monsoon water in the great reservoir. Needham subsequently acknowledged that this hypothesis was not correct. 11 It is incorrect because it dates storage as an earlier stage than river diversion. River diversion is water management in space, a much older process in irrigated agriculture than storage, which is water management in time. The former dates back to the stone age, whereas storage depends on the invention of the sluice - an event that took place in the iron age. For example, in Sri Lanka, this invention has been dated back to the 3rd/2nd century BC 12 : Since about the middle of the last century, open wells, called valve-pits when they stand clear of the embankment, and valve-towers when they are on it, have been built on numerous reservoirs in Europe. Their duty is to hold the valves, and the lifting gear for working them, by means of which the outward fl ow of the water is regulated or totally stopped. Such also was the function of the bisokotuwa of the Sinhalese engineers; they were the fi rst inventors of the valve-pit, more than 2100 years ago. The invention of the sluice has been recognized as a stage in the evolution and development of water and soil conservation ecosystems, in a new seven stage hypothesis that is presented below. The Water Resources Development Plan of Ceylon, 1959 Based on the hydraulic engineering perspective, a map called the Water Resource Development Plan of Ceylon was published in This map, while ignoring all but the very largest of the ancient reservoirs and channels shown on the topographical survey sheets identified locations for new large reservoirs that would submerge ancient tanks, and small river diversion systems, in accordance with the third stage of the erroneous four stage hypothesis. This Water Resources Development Plan, was prepared by engineers in the irrigatiol department who were not attuned at all to the cultural history of the country, and wen therefore, totally ignorant of the traditional knowledge of its peoples. 13 These engineer believed that there was little value in the ancient systems, which they described as irrigatic, systems rather than as water and soil conservation ecosystems. More particularly the believed that the ancient small tanks were inefficient and had to be replaced by large reservoirs submerging numbers of them. This is indeed so when small tanks are viewed fror a purely hydraulic engineering perspective. This is vividly seen in an extract from Reconnaisance Report (now a Pre-Feasibility study) prepared 45 years ago before the Watt Resources Development Plan in 1959: 14 The development of Heda oya is recommended as it compares very favourably, from technical and fi nancial viewpoints, with other major schemes already undertaken b government. There does not exist any doubt as to the need to achieve self-suffi ciency i food This is an achievement that cannot be realized by spending large sums of move on tiny village tanks which do not have the staying power in a drought nor can a beat standard of living be taken to a people depending on them. Vagaries of the monsoon, and resulting destitution can be fought only by spending public funds on large scheme and not by creating 249

279 little evaporating pans and relief works. The age of the village pond has passed away and the time has come to embark on large projects like the scheme under review. This deep-seated prejudice against small tanks (described as little evaporating pans) has recently been extended to another dimension. Thambiah, in his polemic Buddhism Betrayed. has argued that the small tank, the Buddhist temple stupa or dagaba, and the paddy field, are triad that is venerated as symbolic of a past glory, as a result of which real developmen meaning economic growth, in modem Sri Lanka is being retarded. 15 Recently, this incorrect analysis has been responded to in detail. Western-trained and western-oriented engineers, of the type who prepared the Water Resources Development Plan, though ignorant of history and unsympathetic to the tradition knowledge of traditional farmers, were nevertheless dominant in water resources development planning, and they impressed their view on other scientists. (Recently, however, there have at last been some significant changes. For example, a soil scientist who had earlier subscribed to wrong interpretations of the hydraulic engineers, studied some cascades of small tanks in ancient Rajarata, and found them to be extremely efficient water and soil conservation ecosystems). 17 Kuhnian Stages in Understanding the History of Irrigation in Sri Lanka It has been shown that an incorrect understanding of the evolution and development of the ancient systems has followed Kuhnian stages of Theory, Paradigm, Crisis and Revolution. 18 The pre-paradigm stage or Theory began with the publication of a landmark paper which described the earliest understanding of the scientific basis of small tank systems in the ancient Rajarata. 19 The Paradigm was the publication of the four stage hypothesis 20, followed by publication of the 1959 Water Resources Development Plan of Ceylon, both based on a hydraulic engineering perspective. Kuhnian style paradigm-based normal science took the form of paradigm-based engineering - implementation of some projects based on construction of large reservoirs selected from this map, in the southern area of Sri Lanka. The succeeding Crisis stage was highlighted by protestations of local people on account of destruction of the ancient water and soil conservation ecosystems, beginning in the early seventies. 21 The Crisis continued with environmental degradation on the new projects, which led to civil commotion and insurrection aimed at overthrowing the government itself. 22 The final stage of Revolution should be the arrival of a new paradigm. A new Paradigm candidate, the seven stage hypothesis based on ecosystems, announced in 1983/84 and published later is given below. 23 (A more literal interpretation of this stage is also available in the form of break-down in law and order, and continued civil commotion and unrest with tremendous loss of life and property, in the 1980s. Sadly, these events were themselves overshadowed by the more widely publicized ethnic conflict, which has always received wide global media coverage especially in the West. Consequently there has been an understatement of the scale and magnitude of the non-ethnic conflict. For example, although a visiting EEC delegation estimated the numbers of missing persons in the southern, central, eastern and western parts of the country as 60,000 - twice the highest estimate for those killed and missing in the ethnic conflict in the north and east - outside commentators have given absurdly low figures, thereby masking the extent of the tragedy. The Ecosystems Perspective The hydraulic engineering perspective may be described as a hard technology approach in which water is inanimate and active as in the study of hydraulics. In the soft technology ecosystems approach, on the other hand, water is seen in exactly the opposite terms, as animate but passive, as in its function as a facilitating agent in Nature s biogeochemical cycles, and in photosynthesis. The seven stage hypothesis based on ecosystems is as follows:

280 1. Rain fed agriculture 2. Temporary river diversion and inundation irrigation on river banks 3. Permanent river diversion and channel irrigation systems 4. Development of weirs and spillways on diversion channels 5. Invention of the sluice 6. Construction of reservoirs equipped with sluices 7. Damming a perennial river. Six types of water and soil conservation ecosystems may be identified in Sri Lanka from this hypothesis, of which all but the first are man-made water and soil conservation ecosystems: 1. Rain fed agriculture ecosystems of two types: traditional haen govithan (also described as swidden agriculture), and permanent tree crops of which the Kandyan forest garden is the best example 26 and the Dry Zone forest garden is another Flood or inundation irrigation ecosystems. 3. Channel irrigation ecosystems. 4. A micro irrigation ecosystem below a small tank with a sluice. 5. A macro irrigation ecosystem with one or more micro irrigation ecosystems of type 2, 3 or 4, in its command area. 6. A complex of macro irrigation ecosystems consisting of a number of interconnected macro irrigation ecosystems as in the ancient Rajarata. Small tanks are seen to be efficient from the ecosystems perspective, either in cascades or in combination, with other hydraulic structures, as listed above. There are two aspects of the ecosystems concept relating to small tanks. Firstly, it has been found that a large number of the small earth embankments shown on the old topographical survey as abandoned small tanks, were not fitted with sluices in ancient times, although some of them have been so equipped when restored in recent times. These earth embankments were in fact deflection structures which served to raise water and divert it into permeable soils in the valley sides, and thus maintain the water table. 28 Secondly, in Tamilnadu and other parts of south India, there is appreciation of the village tank as a water and soil conservation device called eri or yeri in Tamil. In contrast to the narrow hydraulic engineering attitude to these small tanks in Sri Lanka, they have been described as follows: As appropriate irrigation devices in the cultivation of paddy. 2. As a system which acted as a flood control device, thus preventing soil erosic wastage of run-off waters during periods of heavy rainfall. 3. As storage devices which acted as insurance against low rainfall periods an recharged ground water in the surrounding area. 4. As a device which was crucial to the overall ecosystem. A similar appreciation of the ancient water and soil conservation ecosystem, is a necessary prerequisite for rational water resources development planning. Any true water resources development plan must build on these ancient systems, which are priceless assets and not liabilities. Scientific study of these systems must be a multidisciplinary exercise; the hydraulics engineer in Sri Lanka must take the leading role in water resources planning, and should collaborate with many other disciplines - bioscientists, historians and archeologists for example. For 30 To learn about the past in the light of the present is to learn about the present in the light of the past. 251

281 Hydraulic Engineering in the Southern Area of Sri Lanka The two large reservoir-based projects in the southern area in which ancient ecosystems were destroyed by the imposition of new hydraulic engineering design, are Uda Walawe in Walawe ganga, and Lunuganvehera in Kirindi oya, river basins. (Ganga refers to a perennial river, and oya or ara (Tamil aru) refers to a non-perennial river.) In both cases, the new large reservoirs submerged large numbers of ancient small tanks and diversion structures according to the third stage of the four stage hypothesis. Alternative upstream sites for construction of large reservoirs, which would have commanded the large numbers of ancient small-scale systems rather than submerge them, were available but were not investigated. Samanala weva A third large reservoir, Samanala weva (literally: butterfly reservoir, due to its shape in plan) constructed recently in the south at tremendous cost, mainly for hydropower benefits, has been given much global publicity on account of complex foundation engineering problems. 32 It is not generally known that these problems would have been avoided if an alternative proposal to construct a run-of-the-river project in the first instance had been accepted. 33 Now, a proposal to solve a problem of continuing leakage in the right bank abutment by a process described as wet blanketing, is the subject of heated debate. Local engineers have expressed grave doubts about the proposal, 34 while foreign experts are backing it strongly. Furthermore, local people in and around the site are not being consulted, while the proposal is being publicized and promoted by its proponents under slogans like `Environment and Development. The message is that development depends on hydropower that is environmentally clean. However, the propaganda methods used to create support for the project have apparently been borrowed from Madison Avenue, and do not deceive local people, who see it as yet another attempt by big business interests to pull the wool over their eyes. Ancient Iron and Steel manufacture in Sri Lanka An important development during construction of Samanala dam was the discovery in the vicinity of a unique, previously unknown system of smelting locally available iron ore for production of iron and steel, dating to the pre-christian era. This discovery has far-reaching implications for the study of the ancient man-made water and soil conservation ecosystems in Sri Lanka. More than 9000 tonnes of high quality steel have been produced in unique west-facing linear furnaces, powered entirely by wind, 35 quite different from the foot-bellows technology documented earlier. 36 This was most probably the source of the famous Damascus or damascene steel, used in making weapons for the Crusades and other adventures in the Middle ages. 37 It was undoubtedly also the source of steel used for making high quality surgical instruments used in the first hospitals ever built in Sri Lanka in the early Middle Ages. 38 Large amounts of slag from iron and steel smelting are also found in various locations all over the dry zone. These are indications of local manufacture of earth moving tools and equipment used in construction of the vast infrastructure of water and soil conservation ecosystems, as well as of tools and implements used in agriculture and industries, ancient civilization. 39 A New Conflict over Water? - Moragahakande Reservoir and the NCP Despite protestations that the Water Resources Development Plan published based on unscientific and irrational principles, 40 an announcement has been made the government that yet another large reservoir, Moragahakande, picked out fron this time in the ancient Rajarata in the north central dry zone, is to be constr Japanese aid. It is predicted that new conflicts over water will result from this project. Engineers who prepared the Water Resources Development Plan, though ignorant, were wellmotivated, and one of their foremost thoughts was how to transfer surface water from the north central region to the semi-arid northern region. Towards this end, they proposed construction of a 252

282 large reservoir, Moragahakande, and a long channel called North Central Province or NCP canal located approximately along the dividing ridge in the north of the island, carrying water from the Moragahakande reservoir at the source to the systems at the end. No such major ridge channel has ever been built in Sri Lanka, and all major ancient channels are contour channels that receive water from one side and issue water to chains of small tanks on the other side, all along their course. The intention to given some measure of relief for semi-arid lands in the north - identified as part of the traditional homelands of the Tamil minority in the island, a few of whom are presently engaged in a disastrous civil war - can never be achieved by the Moragahakande project. Rather if constructed as designed, the NCP canal will be a cause of conflict over water all along its course from beginning to end. This conflict will be compounded by an the ethnic element. It has been, predicted that the on-going north-south conflict will be supplemented by east-west conflict over water if the NCP canal is built, as it surely will be if the Moragahakande reservoir is constructed. The tragedy of this proposal is that it stems from ignorance of the ancient water conservation ecosystems, which was earlier responsible for alternatives not being considered when large reservoirs were built in the south - with tragic consequences. In a similar way an alternative proposal to Moragahakande has been discarded apparently because the high public official is expected and is sometimes required to expound the conventional wisdom. 40 Nor is it clear whether this is due to entrenched beneficiaries of the ancien regime whom the President herself has warned the nation about recently. Conclusion In conclusion it must be said that it is not a matter for satisfaction to make this prediction about conflict over water in the proposed Moragahakande reservoir project and NCP canel However, having anticipated problems in the Uda Walawe, Lunuganvehera and Samanala weva projects in the southern area, and proposed alternatives that were not accepted predictions vis-a-vis Moragahakande are being given publicity. It is intended that scientists would thereby become aware of diverse problems in the field of water resources development planning in Sri Lanka. If, as a result, some assistance comes the way of the isilent, long-suffering majority of Sri Lanka in some unexpected, serendipitous manner, the purpose of this presentation would have been amply served. References 1 K Indrapala (ed), the Decline of the Rajarata Civilization and the Drift to the Southwest, Ceylon Studies Seminar, Peradeniya, DLO Mendis, The Value of Indigenous Knowledge - the Case of Water and Soil Conservation Ecosystems in Sri Lanka, Phil Smith et al (eds), The World at the Crossroads - Towards a Sustainable, Equitable and Liveable World, Earthscan, London, R L Brohier, Inter-relation of Groups of Large Reservoirs and Channels in Ceylon, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Ceylon Branch), Vol 34, No 90, Ibid, p70. 5 C R Panabokke, Small Tank Cascade Systems of the Rajarata: their distribution patterns, typologies and implications for irrigation, S Arumugam Felicitation volume in The History of Engineering in Sri Lanka, series (forthcoming). 6 E R Leach, Hydraulic Society in Ceylon, Past and Present, April DLO Mendis, Rational Principles of Water Resources Development Planning: A Discussion with some examples from Southern Sri Lanka, Transactions of the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka, DLO Mendis, The Water Resources Development Plan of Ceylon, Engineer, Journal of the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka, R L Brohier, Some Structural Features of the Ancient Irrigation Works in Ceylon, Pressidential Address, Transactions of the Engineering Association of Ceylon,

283 10 J Needham et al, Science and Civilization in China, Vol 4, Part 3, p369, Cambridge University Press, J Needham, Personal Communication, 12 May, H W Parker, Ancient Ceylon, Lusacs, London Mendis, 1994, op cit. 14 D W R Kahawita, Reconnaisance Report on Heda oya Project, Irrigation department, Colombo, S J Thambiah, Buddhism Betrayed?, WIDER, Helsinki, Institute of Fundamental Studies, Kandy. Hambantota Integrated Rural Developmen Environmental Impact Assessment Study, Panabokke, forthcoming, op cit. 18 D L O Mendis, Theory, Paradigm and Crisis in Understanding the History of Irrigation in Sri Lanka, 11th Conference of the International Association of Historians of Asia, J S Kennedy, Evolution of Scientific Development of Village Irrigation Works in Ceylon Transactions of the Engineering Association of Ceylon, Brohier, 1956, op cit. 21 D L O Mendis, 1989., Development of Underdevelopment in Southern Sri Lanka. Destabilization of Ancient Irrigation Ecosystems by the Impact of Hydraulic Engineering Transactions of the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka, D L O Mendis, Non-ethnic Causes of Violent Conflict in Sri Lanka: Environmental Degradation on Account of Destruction of Ancient Irrigation. Ecosystems by the Impact of Hydraulic Engineering, Proceedings of the 41st Pugwash Conferenece on Science and World Affairs, Pugwash, London, D L O Mendis, Environmental Degradation due to the Imposition of Western Models on Tropical Irrigation Ecosystems in Sri Lanka, 12th Conference of the International Association if Historians of Asia, Hong Kong, D L O Mendis, Evolution and Development of Irirgation Ecosystems and Social Formations in Ancient Sri Lanka, Transactions of the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka, Susan George, The Debt Boomerang - How the Third World Debt Harms us All, Transnational Institute (TNI), London, Mendis, 1986, op cit. 26 R Knox, An Historical Relation of Ceylon, Tisara Prakasakayo, Colombo, Institute of Fundamental Studies, Mendis, 1994 etc, op cit. 29 T M Mukundam, The ERI System in Tamilnadu, Water Resources Management, Proceddings of a Seminar, CPR Environmental Education Centre, Madras, 1993, p D D Kossambi, Culture and Civilization in Ancient India, Routledge and Keagan Paul, 31 D L O Mendis, Some Observations on the Designs for Uda Walawe Headworks, Transactions of the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka, Mendis, 1994, op cit. 32 F Pearce, Britain s other dam scandal, New Scientist, 26 February D L O Mendis, Some Thoughts on Technology Transfer for Irrigation and Multi-purpose Development Projects in Sri Lanka, Transactions of the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka, Mendis, 1994, op cit. 34 V Pereira, Samanala weva Project Prolems and Suggested Solutions, Proceedings of a seminar on Samanala weva Leaks: Remedial measures January 13, Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka, Colombo, D V A Senaratne, Analytical study of the applicability of the water quality monitoring data to conclusions drawn at Samanala weva. Proceedings of a seminar on Samanala weva Leaks Remedial Measures January 13, 1995, Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka, Colombo, D V A Senaratne, Reality of the sub-surface conditions of the RB Abutment at Samanala weva and the economic and environmental disaster that will follow with the proposed wet blanket treatment, Proceedings of a Seminar on Samanala weva Leaks - Remedial Measures January 13, 1995, Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka, Colombo, G Juleff, Samanala - 20 Centuries of Iron and Steel production in Sri Lanka, 1995 D T Davendra Memorail Lecture, Colombo, (unpublished). 254

284 36 A Coomaraswamy, Medieval Sinhalese Art, Pantheon, Juleff, 1995, op cit. DLO Mendis, Review of the 1995 D T Devendra memorial lecture by Gill Juleff: Samanala - 20 Centuries of Iron and Steel Production in Sri Lanka, Daily News, Colombo, 27 February Prematilleke and A Aluvihare, Surgical Instruments found in the Alahena Pirivena, Polonnaruwa, Archaeological Congress, Sri Lanka, 1987, Mimeo. 39 J W Bennett, Ceylon and its Capabilities: An Account of its Natural Resources, Indigenous Production and Commercial Facilities, London, W H Allen, Mendis, 1992, op cit. 41 Ibid. 42 J K Galbraith, The Affluent Society, Penguin books, Island, Daily Newspaper, Sri Lanka, 28 February Mendis, 1977, op cit; Mendis, 1994, op cit When first submitted this paper had been read with interest by the Secretary General of Pugwash, Professor Francesco Calogero himself, and commended by him in a personal letter to me. It was well received at the Working group a member of that group Dr Malin Falkenmark whose specialty is water resources development was very interested in the concept of water and soil conservation ecosystems in Sri Lanka, which was new to her. She asked me later to contribute an article to the UN Environmental Forum on the subject. The Report of the Working Group under the caption Future action on water and confl ict had the following comment: As shown in the case of Sri Lanka, there is a lot to learn from traditional water systems, which unfortunately have been ignored in the construction of modern alternatives. However, when this paper was brought to the attention of a Sri Lanka scholar, a distinguished former diplomat, it was subject to scathing criticism, which is published here for the first time, with his permission. This shows that my presentation may not be all that convincing, and that, moreover, in certain circumstances it is dangerous to show appreciation of the ancient systems in Sri Lanka. (D L O Mendis, Water Heritage of Sri Lanka. p. 147) The criticism referred to is published as an Annex to this paper. Dr John Gooneratne is a friend I have known for half a century and I know that he knows nothing about irrigation or water and soil conservation ecosystems. I would refer him and others of his ilk to what Henry Parker wrote in 1909, after more than thirty years in Ceylon, quoted in Brohier s Ancient Irrigation Works in Ceylon, Vol. 1, page 27: If we rashly think, after a mere glance at the site (in comparison, on the other hand, with the actual practical experience of the Sinhalese for nearly 1000 years) that we can change all that, and effect untold improvements on the general designs of the ancient works we may fi nd, when too late, that they were right and we are wrong. Experience constantly impressed on me that if there was one subject which those wonderful old engineers understood better than another, it certainly was the irrigation of paddy fi elds, and the designing at least in outline, of great structures that were needed for that purpose. 255

285 ANNEX Some comments on D L O Mendis Paper Past, Present and Future Conflicts over Water in Sri Lanka Dr John Gunaratne The main argument that runs through the paper is that for modern Sri Lanka the principles for water management in the dry zone have been set by the ancient tank builders. The moderns should follow these principles. One gets the impression that no modern analysis etc. need be done; only try and find what the ancients did, and follow it. The principles of water management of the ancients can be deduced from available tanks etc. together with a little bit of imagination based on ancient chronicles. Aren t there any principles one has to follow in constructing hydraulic works of this kind? What if there hadn t been ancient hydraulic works in Sri Lanka, and one had to build tanks etc. Wouldn t one have to follow certain principles. A project shouldn t be faulted purely on the basis it did not conform to an ancient pattern that one has `constructed for oneself based on a variety of types of evidence; rather, it should be judged, based on whether it is good engineering or bad. One can research Ancient Water and Soil Conservation Ecosystems or Irrigation Systems, as has been done in paras 2 and 3 of page 2. A certain picture is painted. It could be so, or it could be challenged by others, because one is trying to come to some conclusions based on the evidence. No doubt, there was a marvelous complex of water and soil conservation ecosystems (page 3, para 1). But does it mean that one has only to try and recreate a past and maintain it, for all problems to be solved; and any modifications will be sacrilegious? How about changed times, changed population needs etc? How about budget constraints, and other more urgent needs as explaining piece-meal restoration (page 3, para 1) of abandoned tanks. Engineers did not totally reject the past, as seen in the restoration of large abandoned tanks. But your criticism sounds like you have to restore all or nothing. A more useful criticism would have been whether the hydraulic principles followed were bad engineering or not. Needham introduces his four stage hypothesis of evolution, quite correctly and cautiously - The process of evolution which is thought to have occurred may be described as follows... The counter you provide (para 2 and 3 on page 3) is also challengeable, in theory, by those who are knowledgeable on this area. One can see this subject area as one that can be developed further, expanding on the different interpretations on this subject: Different theories on how the ancient tank system started. One can cite other proponents of the seven stage hypothesis? (Perhaps you have given it in your other writings), and develop it in a non-acrimonious way. Is some project bad merely because it would submerge ancient small tanks, and small diversion systems (page 7, para 1)? What hydraulic engineering principles do they offend? What is bad in the principles present engineers follow in this respect? You seem to be making the restoration of the ancient tank system into a religion, and those who tamper with an imagined original tank system are hydraulic apostates. On what basis does one presume that those who prepared the Water Resources Development Plan 1959 were not attuned at all to the cultural history of the country? Is there a nationalist/cultural czar at work here? Why not confine ones critique to the area of hydraulic principles, without trying to make out whether they are culturally attuned or not? Who is a pukka nationalist/patriotic Sri Lankan engineer? If one is to call the comments quoted in (Kahawita, 1950) page 4. a deep-seated prejudice against small tanks, then, is the opposite view a deep-seated prejudice for small tanks? Pot calling kettle black. The small tank is not the issue. It should be, I imagine, what is the need and what is the best solution for it, hydraulic engineering speaking. Why make a religion of small tanks? Interpretations can change; after all these are all hypotheses one is working with, as seen in the change of view cited at page 4, last para. But why call the earlier interpretation wrong 256

286 interpretations? Theories are developed and refined in this manner. And that is how paradigm shifts occur. p.7. para 1. What one wishes to have seen here are reasons why the alternate method (not submerging ancient small tanks) is the better method than the one adopted. If as suggested here, the method adopted was bad hydraulic engineering, the criticism can be valid, and has nothing to do with protecting ancient small tanks for its own sake. p.7. para 2. If the criticisms made in this section on the Samanala Wewa are valid (and I am not competent to comment on it), they appear based on hydraulic engineering principles, and does not involve arguments about how the ancients did it. The solution might be worse than the ailment, it is made out. Not admitting one s mistake is a bureaucratic weakness; and covering it up ( wet blanketing ) is another bureaucratic weakness. What else is new? p. 7. Para 3. Ancient Iron and Steel Mnufacture in Sri Lanka Doesn t fit directly into the subject at hand, except to extol some of the achievements of the ancients. p. 8. Moragahakande. The only objection made is that the ancients have not constructed that type of canal in ancient times, and so should not be tried by the moderns. This is not an engineering reason for objecting to the construction of such a canal. If there is a need for water in one area, and this is a possible method of taking the water there, then one can try it. Objections must be based on engineering grounds. p. 8 The paragraph has the heading A New Conflict over Water... But the theme is not developed at all. What has been mentioned are only ethnic attitudes which are now in vogue. Doesn t the Mahaweli also take good Sinhala water to Tamil areas? Definitely, there is conflict associated with water e.g. the settlement of Tamil colonists in the Eastern province on the right bank of the Madura Oya (vide. Malinga Gunaratne s book on this episode). But more instances need to be cited e.g. has there been population movements as a result of degradation of soil resulting from engineering projects cited by you. Trying to tie the JVP uprising solely to bad water use seems to be more journalistic (and appealing - another Ruhuna myth) than based on evidence. Perhaps, given Sri Lanka s still ample (but fast dwindling) water and land resources, there is no immediate conflict likely. But it is an area where conflict can develop, as land and water resources dwindle. But, that is another point, not one this paper has developed. So, the title of the paper is a little ambiguous. Perhaps, it is not only conflicts as is generally known, but includes conflicts among hydraulic engineers over ancient/modem water use! Final thoughts: - The writer is plugging a belief (an article of faith, shall we say), hence the tone of religious intolerance for others beliefs. As a result, what should be a scientific presentation, has tones of evangelistic fervour. - There is an uncritical acceptance that what s ancient is best, and should be faithfully reproduced, even though circumstances and conditions of all kinds have changed. A very un-engineer-like approach. Is it (the ancient tank system) becoming a bee in the bonnet? When it comes to tank construction and hydraulic engineering, maybe, there s more than one way to skin a cat. Try the advice given by a French diplomatist of yore to budding diplomats - pas trop de zele. Are you saved brother? Do you believe in the ancient irrigation system? Have you seen the light? Praise the Lord! Hallelujah! 257

287 52 nd Annual Sessions of the Sri Lanka Association for the Advancement of Science November 25 29, 1996 at the University of Kelaniya Seminar on Aesthetics in Science Evolution and Development of Water and Soil Conservation Ecosystems (Irrigation systems) in Sri Lanka D L O Mendis Synopsis (All Figures referred to are in the complete paper) There are three main issues to be researched and studied: Evolution and development of ancient irrigation systems in Sri Lanka Sustainability and stability over a long period of more than 17 centuries Final apparently irreversible decline after the Parakrama Bahu era ( ) Purpose of study To avoid mistakes on modern projects as described by D D Kossambi: The function of the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to understanding the present. Great history is written precisely when the historian s view of the past is illumined by insights into the problems of the present... learning from history is never simply a one way process. To learn about the present in the light of the past is to learn about the past in the light of the present. The function of history is to promote a profounder understanding of both past and present through the inter-relation between them. Method Ideally, a multi-disciplinary study should be done involving historian and archaeologist, natural scientist, physical scientist, engineer, and social scientist. Application of Thomas S Kuhn s Theory, Paradigm, Crisis and Revolution (1961) A Kuhn type sequence has been experienced due to engineers adopting a hydraulic engineering approach without trying to understand and learn the lessons of history The pre-paradigm stage began with Kennedy s paper Evolution of Scientific Development of Village Irrigation Works in Ceylon (Kennedy, 1934) The Paradigm was Brohier s 4 stage hypothesis announced in 1956 Paradigm based Normal science was paradigm based engineering the Water Resources Development Plan of Ceylon, 1959, from which Uda Walawe and Lunuganvehera reservoirs were identified and constructed The Crisis was maldevelopment in Uda walawe and Lunuganvehera schemes The Revolution was arrival of a new paradigm candidate, a 7 stage hypothesis [In this case Revolution also had a literal meaning in the southern area when attempted insurrections in 1971 and in had strong support in the large projects Uda Walawe and Lunuganvehera. Mal-development on these projects was seen as a contributory cause of disaffection, that led to the attempted insurrections. This mal- development also caused the biggest ever swing in an election in Sri Lanka 22% in Lunuganvehera at the 1994 general elections (Frontline, March 1995) 258

288 How the 7 stage hypothesis was developed, and some consequences: 1. Enigma of the abandoned small tanks in the Walawe basin (Figure 1) 2. Opportunity to study the enigma in the field during construction of Uda Walawe headworks, and submissions to Chairman RVDB on wrong location of the dam, resulting in papers to the Institution of Engineers, in 1967 and 1968 (Figure 2) 3. Brohier s 4 stage hypothesis (1956), republished by Needham (1971), which was manifestly incorrect, and was very probably due to hydraulic engineers (Figure 3) 4. Brohier, in Ancient Irrigation Works in Ceylon (1934), Anuradhapura City Tanks, (Figure 4), says that an old diversion channel to Nuwera weva had been built before Nachchaduwa, which had submerged its headworks: Was the diversion channel always built first, and reservoirs built at the head end or tail end later? 5. Brohier (1937) also showed that all major reservoirs in Rajarata are interconnected by channels and the rivers themselves (Figures 5, 6). Did this become possible only because a large reservoir was built as above on an existing channel? Paranavitana and Nicholas used this data in the Concise History of Ceylon (Figures 7, 8) 6. Hence the 7 stage hypothesis was established (Figure 9). The last piece in the puzzle were the abandoned small tanks in the Mau ara basin. When Paranamana proposed Augmentation of Malala oya by restoration of ancient Galamuna weva in Mau ara, he showed for the first time that these are all breached earth bunds with their ends turned in the downstream direction, called vetiyas (Figures 10, 11) 7. But, hydraulic engineers would not abandon their conventional wisdom the fount of which is the Water Resources Development Plan, Therefore in due time, a comparative statement of contrasting perspectives from the hydraulic engineering approach and the ecosystems approach was developed and published (Figure 13). 8. Lunuganvehera selected from the Water Resources Development Plan, 1959, was built in by subterfuge: directions given by the Prime Minister s Ministry of Planning and Economic Affairs in the early 1970s, to investigate the alternative Huratgamuva site (Figure 12) were ignored. Instead full investigations were completed for Lunuganvehera, and when the government changed in 1977, it was put up for ADB financing by bureaucrats. Protests by the two Planning Ministry engineers, MSM de Silva and DLO Mendis, led to the appointment of a 5 man Committee by Minister Gamini Dissanayake, which recommended by a majority of three to two that Lunuganvehera should be built without investigating Huratgamuva to save time. (Two of the three engineers who gave this incredible recommendation are not living today). Lunuganvehera created another major obstruction to the ultimate implementation of MSM de Silva s Southern Area Plan which too was based on a hydraulic engineering perspective (Figure 14). But, adaptation for an ecosystems perspective is now available (Figure 15) which can resolve the scenario for perpetual confl ict in the southern area between man and beast, man and man, and man and authority, if adopted even at this late stage. 9. Moragahakande reservoir and the NCP canal, are now to be built, again without considering alternatives, which incidentally are much less costly. If these are built as planned perpetual east-west conflict over water is predicted (Mendis, 1992). [An alternative for Lunuganvehera and suggestions for Samanala weva as a run-of-the-river project were ignored, and bad predictions on these projects came to pass. (Mendis, 1977). There is no joy in being a prophet of doom, but discussion among scientists is needed today when decision makers build glass curtains around their splendid isolation. (The Southern Development Authority is a glaring example)]. 259

289 Evolution and Development of Water and Soil Conservation Ecosystems (Irrigation Systems) in Sri Lanka D L O Mendis Preamble Professor Valentine Basnayake has said that the purpose of the SLAAS seminar on Aesthetics in Science is to show that scientific work can be a joyous experience comparable with that of artistic work. He identified three factors that produce joy, namely one set connected with the conduct of the scientific work itself, including the perception of orderliness and pattern, and fl ashes of insight and artistry; another set connected with the subsequent fate of the work, including applause by the scientific community and the public; and the third set called scientific appreciation in which a thing that is seen as being beautiful has its beauty enhanced by knowledge of the relevant scientifi c background. While following that analysis in this paper, which describes my research on the evolution and development of ancient irrigation systems in Sri Lanka, I shall tell of both joy and its opposite sadness associated with the subsequent fate of the work. Introduction My interest in the ancient irrigation works goes back to my childhood. I had watched the Eramadhu oya breach closure being done by the Irrigation department, using bulldozers, in 1942, when my late father was Station Master at Polonnaruwa. After one unsuccessful attempt, closure was achieved the next year, and water was impounded in the Parakarama samudra after a period of perhaps seven hundred years l. As a schoolboy I visited the Irrigation department s Hydraulic research laboratories at Jawatte road, met Mr D W R Kahawita, Senior Designs and Planing Engineer, and marveled at the large scale hydraulic models built in the premises where the head office of the department now stands. I transferred from the Faculty of Science in the University of Ceylon, to the newly set up Faculty of Engineering in 1950, and came under the life-long influence of Professor E O E Pereira and Professor R H Paul. I presented a paper on the Ancient Irrigation Works in Ceylon, and was awarded a Rs 10 prize by Mr P H Wickremaratne, Lecturer in Hydraulics. I bought three volumes of R L Brohier s Ancient Irrigation Works in Ceylon, published in 1934/35, by the Ceylon government press, for Rs 9, and had Re 1 left over to celebrate at the University canteen! After graduation I joined the Irrigation department where my interest in the ancient irrigation systems came into focus on the field, on the Kantalai Extension scheme in , and on the Allai extension scheme in My first paper to the SLAAS in 1959 was titled 2 An Investigation into the Ancient Aspects of the Allai Irrigation Scheme. After studying the history of the ancient systems I concluded that research should focus on three important aspects of the ancient irrigation systems in Sri Lanka, namely their Evolution and development from earliest times Sustainability and stability over a period of about 17 centuries Final apparently irreversible decline after the 12 th / 13 th centuries. I resigned from the Irrigation department in 1961, but instead of going abroad in search of greener pastures, or chasing after a pot of gold, I remained in Sri Lanka. Whilst keeping in touch with irrigation work and with the Irrigation department, I continued with my studies on the ancient irrigation systems, using Brohier s publications as the starting point. In time I was able to work in Walawe, and presented many papers on irrigation thereafter. This paper presents a record of my experience, and I ask forgiveness if it sounds somewhat ego-centred. 260

290 Aesthetic experience in studying ancient irrigation systems Conduct of the scientific work itself I spent many hours studying Brohier s classic Ancient Irrigation Works in Ceylon, from the time I first acquired the three volumes. The Timbolketiya sheet of the one mile to an inch topographical survey of Ceylon, one of the most dramatic for any student of ancient irrigation systems in Sri Lanka, is included in Volume 3 of this magnum opus. Brohier had drawn attention specially to the large numbers of breached earth bunds in the Mau ara basin in Walawe basin, described as abandoned small tanks, on this topo sheet, which became a fascinating enigma for me (Figure 1). I had a chance to study the enigma on the field when Uda Walawe headworks was being built, in the nineteenth sixties, working first for the contractor Ceylon Development Engineering company Ltd., and later for the client the River Valleys Development Board. At that time, Mr M S M de Silva, General Manager of CDE prepared a conceptual plan called the Southern Area Plan, which included provision for diversion of water from the southwest wet zone to the southeast dry zone, across the Walawe basin (Figure 14). I introduced this concept to the Ministry of Planning and Economic Affairs, which I joined in Many of these breached bunds lie in the catchment area of an ancient large reservoir called Magama weva, Pandikulama or Urusittaweva, in the lower basin of the Mau ara, just above its confluence with the main Walawe gangs. The surveyor or draftsman who mapped these bunds, had assumed that they were small tanks. Brohier has described the ancient large reservoir as follows 2 : There is a local tradition which asserts that Pandikulam held the waters of a thousand tanks. A glance at the topographical map of this area is suffi cient to afford the source of this tradition. As a matter of fact 440 tanks were found in the drainage area of 142 square miles including that of Hambegamuva in the upper reaches of the Mau ara. The drainage from this area is suffi cient to fi ll the largest tank in the island. More than passing allusion must however be made to these hundreds of small tanks which stud the courses of the Mau ara and its affl uents. It might be truly said that we are confronted in this instance with the most picturesque example of the genius of the tank builder. The scheme elucidated by the topographical surveyor in the basin of the Mau ara illustrates an aspect of ancient irrigation which is particularly unique and has in no other instance been so graphically illustrated on our maps. Apparently long before Pandikulam was built, the system of water storage was confi ned to these chains of little tanks, built across the fl oor of the streams, forming a succession of links in the chain. If one paused to consider how each tank affects and is affected by the other tanks in the same chain, it is not unreasonable to assume that when at the height of a fl ood one bund should burst, the disaster was not limited to that tank only. Presumably then, we have in this instance a scheme of the greatest antiquity Profi ting by the weak points in this system the ancients no doubt evolved their later schemes which turned the water of a thousand tanks into one large tank. It is very possible that the anicuts built across the Walawe ganga and the channels which distributed the water of the river trammeled by the dams, were also works originating from an advanced knowledge of the science of irrigation. The Engineering Association of Ceylon became the Institution of Engineers, Ceylon, in its 50 th Jubilee year, 1956 (also the year I joined the Institution), and R L Brohier was President. In his Presidential Address5, Brohier gave a hypothesis for the evolution and development of the ancient irrigation systems in four stages: 1. Rain water tanks from which water was bailed out 2. Small village tanks 261

291 3. Large reservoirs each submerging a number of small tanks 4. Augmentation of a large reservoir by diversion from a river Following stage three, Uda Walawe reservoir is sited so as to submerge a large number of ancient small tanks, just as ancient Pandikulama or Magama weva seems to have done (Figure 2). But this is not the same as turning the waters of a thousand tanks into one tank as described by Brohier. When working on construction of Uda Walawe headworks the idea dawned on me that instead of submerging all these ancient small tanks, we should have built a new large reservoir several miles upstream, so as to command the systems of small tanks. In 1967 I submitted a paper to the Chairman of the RVDB, Mr D W R Kahawita about this. Mr Kahawita s reaction took my by surprise. He said that my views should be presented to a larger audience, and that I should make my career as a designs engineer, starting as Designs and Planning Engineer at Embilipitiya, very soon after. He gave me an order in writing to pursue post graduate studies for a PhD, and he told me to choose any University anywhere in the world that would accept me, and he would see that I got there. Since he was a man of his word who had a lot of influence, having been at Cambridge with both Professor EOE Perera and the Prime Minister Dudley Senanayake, I had no reason to doubt that he could do what he promised. Nevertheless I chose the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya, where we lived at the time, and the Dean Professor EOE Pereira was mad at me, because there was no postgraduate course in Engineering in his faculty at that time. Mr Kahawita also nominated me to attend the Indian Water Power and Drainage Congress in New Delhi in 1967, also attended by the Director or Irrigation and one of his Divisional Engineers, who of course were many years my senior. This was to have its consequences just two years later when I put up the Southern Area Plan for investigation and implementation in the Planning Ministry. The sequel to my application to Peradeniya came soon after, in 1968, when Professor E O E Pereira was appointed Vice Chancellor. Professor J C V Chinnapah who succeeded him as Dean of Enginering asked me to submit a plan of study. My proposal was for A Comparative Study of Ancient and Modern Irrigation development in the Walawe ganga basin. However my proposed Supervisor, Dr K Shanmugaratnam, Head of Hydraulics in the Engineering Faculty, now Head of a Division at Hydraulics Research, Walingford, UK, told me with a charming smile on his face: DLO, you can supervise me on this study, I can t supervise you. However, remembering Mr Kahawita s advice, I presented two papers on Walawe at Annual sessions of the Institution of Engineers, Ceylon: Planning by Network for Construction of Uda Walawe Headworks 6 in 1967, and Some Observations on the Designs for Uda Walawe headwork in In the latter paper attention was drawn to the principles of water resources development planning: 1. Define the purpose of the engineering project. Formulate its useful end which makes the creation of the project a desirable objective. 2. Plan the project in accordance with its established purpose. Investigate alternative proposals, and select the project that will most effectively fulfil this purpose. 3. Design the project in the most efficient manner and in accordance with appropriate criteria of safety. 4. Construct the project according to its design, while applying suitable standards of workmanship. 5. Operate the project, thus bringing the useful end of the engineering plan into concrete existence. Following these principles given by Kuiper 8 (1965) an alternative location for headworks was found about 10 miles upstream of the Uda Walawe location near Ukgal Kaltota (Figure 2). During discussions, Mr H de S Manamperi, former General Manager, Walawe, decided to tear 262

292 the paper to pieces, but yielded with easy grace, when he realized that I had studied the subject carefully, and could respond to all his criticism.. Mr Manamperi was one who was not afraid to admit it, if he ever found himself in the wrong. At the time of his premature death in 1975, he was General President - Elect of the SLAAS. As President, Section C (Engineering, Architecture and Surveying), at the time, I was able to raise funds for a Manamperi Memorial award, the only endowed award of its type in the SLAAS to this day. The Uda Walawe dam site had been selected from a map Water Resources Development Plan of Ceylon, published in It was only later that I learned that the map had in fact been prepared by Mr V Kothare, Assistant Director of Irrigation, initially under the direction of Mr Kahawita, as Senior Designs and Research Engineer, a position equivalent to that of Deputy Director of Irrigation. Mr Kahawita had not told me that I was (unknowingly) being critical of his own work, and instead of resenting it had encouraged me to in every imaginable way. He was indeed one of that rare breed a true scientist who was not afraid of an alternative proposal or point of view, and respected another s opinion. In 1969 I was appointed by the Public Services Commission to a post in the Ministry of Planning and Economic Affairs, with a very strong recommendation from Mr Kahawita. I soon became involved in a lot of technical work especially in Divisional Development Council (DDC) projects, which were seen at that time as a way to create much needed employment opportunities for youth, after the 1971 attempted insurrection. M S M de Silva was also appointed to the Ministry at this time, and the two of us, the only engineers in the Ministry were summoned one day to meet our Minister, the Prime Minister, Mrs Sirimavo Bandaranaike, at Temple trees, to explain to her the proposed Southern Area Plan, and assess its employment generating capabilities (Figure 13). We heard nothing more about it for a few months, while the Prime Minister left Sri Lanka on an official visit to China. Then we heard news from their official news agency that the Peoples Republic of China would provide technical assistance for a water resources development project in the southern area. At this stage the Irrigation department came in, and after discussions in Sri Lanka with a team of Chinese engineers, and a visit to Beijing (from which both MSM and I were kept out), a flood protection scheme in Gin ganga was undertaken. (The same concept was later taken up by the Ministry of Finance and Planning in Nilwala ganga basin, with French aid). The grand concept of the Southern Area Plan was abandoned. This was an example of bureaucratic maneuvering of which both MSM and I were ignorant, that was to be used again to implement the Lunugamvehera project, (Figure 12) disregarding directions from the Prime Minister s Ministry of Planning and economic Affairs to investigate the alternative Huratgamuva site, with tragically disastrous results. In 1975, during the very successful SLAAS international Science conference organized by me before the Non Aligned Summit meeting, I saw my friend Kuru Gunawardena s copy of Vol. 4, Part 3 of Joseph Needham s great work, Science and Civilization in China. The few pages on the ancient irrigation works in Ceylon included Brohier s four-stage hypothesis (Figure 3). I realized that this statement of the supposed evolution and development of the ancient irrigation systems in Sri Lanka was a serious mistake, but, sadly, I did nothing about it at the time. However, in 1977, in an IESL paper 2, Some Thoughts on Technology Transfer for Irrigation and Multi purpose Development Projects in Sri Lanka I discussed how some ancient irrigation systems may have developed. In Malwatu oya basin for example, the Anuradhapura city tanks, Basawakkulama and Tissa weva were built on the left-bank in pre-christian times. Nuwera weva on the right bank was built in the 1 st century, and appears to have been augmented later by a diversion anicut and channel. Brohier had said that the channel had been built earlier than Nachchaduwa weva at its head end (Figure 4). In fact, a diversion channel would always have 263

293 been built first, and storage reservoirs built later, either at the head end or the tail end of the channel, after invention of the sluice. This means that Nuwera weva was built at the tail end of an existing channel, followed by Nachchaduwa weva at the head-end, centuries later, submerging the ancient diversion anicut. In fact, Parker (1909) has said that the remains of this ancient anicut had been evident when Nachchaduwa weva was restored by the British. It was not hard to see that augmentation of Malwatu oya basin from the adjacent Kala oya basin, centuries later, would have followed a similar sequence, with an anicut being built across the Kala oya with one or more transbasin diversion channels, followed by construction of Kalaweva at the head end, much later. The remains of this anicut too, were said to have been visible when Kalaweva lay breached 14. In another example, Elahera channel taking off from Amban gangs was built by King Vasabha in the 1 st century, and Minneriya and Giritale weva were built at its tail end by King Mahasen, in the 3 rd century. Further extension of the Elahera channel from Minneriya to Kantalai was done later by King Aggabodhi I and Kantalai weva was built at the tail end of this channel by his successor Aggabodhi II. These reconstructions in history were the germ of an emerging seven-stage hypothesis, (presented below) an alternative to Brohier s four-stage hypothesis for the evolution and development of the ancient irrigation systems. At about this time I also read Brohier s landmark paper to the Royal Asiatic Society, Ceylon Branch, Colombo, in 1935, titled Inter-relation of Groups of Large reservoirs and Channels in Ancient Ceylon, in which he vividly described the inter-dependence of the interconnected large reservoirs and channels, and small village tanks in ancient Rajarata, with the example of the Kalaweva Jayaganga as follows 15 The Jayaganga, indeed an ingenious memorial of ancient irrigation which was undoubtedly designed to serve as a combined irrigation and water supply channel, was not entirely dependent on its feeder reservoir the Kalaweva for the water it carried. The length of bund between Kalaweva and Anuradhapura intercepted all the drainage from the high ground to the east which otherwise would have run to waste. Thus the Jayaganga adapted itself to a wide fi eld of irrigation by feeding little village tanks in each subsidiary valley which lay below its bund. Not infrequently it fed a chain of village tanks down these valleys - the tank lower down receiving the overfl ow from the tank higher up on each chain. I just could not understand how Brohier who had so brilliantly documented the ancient irrigation systems in the Rajarata in two diagrams in this historic paper (Figures 5, 6), could have lent his name to the erroneous four stage hypothesis. Paranavitana and Nicholas in fact had later published two composite diagrams in their Concise History of Ceylon 16, in 1960, based on Brohier s documentation of the inter-connected large reservoirs of the Rajarata, described as Ancient Irrigation Systems of Rajarata, and Inter-relation of Irrigation Works in Rajarata. (Figures 7, 8). I came to the conclusion that Brohier had, against his better judgement, agreed with hydraulic engineers in the Irrigation department who had (mis)interpreted J S Kennedy s remark, The small village tanks like the village cattle are too numerous for efficiency in his 1934 paper Evolution of Scientific Development of Village Irrigation Works. Irrigation engineers had assumed that this meant that small village tanks should be replaced by submerging them under large reservoirs. In fact when the beds of many large reservoirs breached in the great 1957 floods lay exposed to view, there was no evidence of any small village tanks submerged in them. But, this significant fact escaped documentation at the time. In late 1983, Susantha Goonetilleke organized a SLAAS Seminar on Ancient Science and Technology, and asked me to give two papers on Ancient Irrigation Works and on Ancient Dam Construction. When I told him about Needham s four stage hypothesis which I disagreed, Susantha was positively excited. Iconoclast that he was he wanted me to turn that hypothesis on its head! I was not so sure of myself though and decided to first write to Dr Joseph Needham about 264

294 it, since the Seminar was put off for early Dr Needham expressed delight about my views on the evolution and development of ancient irrigation systems, and asked for more information, which made me regret not having written to him earlier. Thus began a beautiful friendship which lasted till the day he died in March In London, in 1987, my old friend Kura who now lived there drove me to Cambridge to meet Dr Needham and Lu Gwei Djin, his research collaborator and future second wife, for the first time. Later I made three more short visits to the Needham Research Institute, with support from the British Council, Colombo. The conclusion arrived at from my research, since presented in papers and lectures in many different parts of the world, is that the ancient irrigation systems in Sri Lanka are human-made water and soil conservation ecosystems that had evolved and developed in seven stages by a process akin to natural selection. Dr Needham, agreeing with this hypothesis, wrote on May 12, 1989, My treatment of the subject can be improved upon and I am counting on you to do it. However, a new edition of Vol. 4, part 3, may not come out for another ten or fifteen years. Seven stage hypothesis for Evolution and Development of Water and Soil Conservation Ecosystems (Irrigation Systems) Summary Statement 1. Rain fed agriculture 2. Seasonal or temporary rive diversion and inundation irrigation 3. Permanent river diversion and channel irrigation 4. Development of weirs and spillways on irrigation channels 5. Invention of the sluice (sorowwa) with its access tower (bisokotuwa) 6. Construction of storage reservoirs equipped with sluices 7. Damming a perennial river There is a certain logical orderliness in the seven stage hypothesis since it follows stages of human development in historical sequence. Man had practiced pastoralism after the early huntergatherer stage, known rain fed agriculture, and discovered the possibility of settled agriculture in river valleys, before he learned to build storage reservoirs. Natural ponds and dug wells were of course used for domestic water supply, and even for some irrigation, but this was by lifting, as also from a river or stream. Construction of storage reservoirs depended on invention of the sluice, and this insight had escaped Brohier who had based his incorrect four stage hypothesis on the increasing size of storage reservoirs, with channels used as a last stage for augmentation of the largest tanks or reservoirs, without any reference to the invention of the sluice. The striking resemblance between Figure 2 and Figure 3 suggests that the germ of Brohier s four stage hypothesis may lie in the Mau ara basin in the left bank of the Walawe basin. But, the enigma of the large numbers of so-called abandoned small tanks in the Walawe basin, especially in the Mau ara basin, as well as in other river basins, remained for a long time. The explanation for these came finally in the form of a flash of insight, due to some brilliant investigative work by Mr P A G Paranamana, Irrigation Engineer, Hambantota. He had started his working life as a Draftsman apprentice in the Designs and Planning office in Walawe, when I was Designs and Planning Engineer, and later qualified as an Engineer. When appointed to Hambantota in around 1990, he had studied some of the 12 chain engineering survey sheets of the Walawe left bank area and prepared a Proposal for Augmentation of the Malala oya basin from the Mau ara. (Figure 9). This proposal is unique in the southern area, in that it seeks to reconstruct a part of the ancient water and soil conservation ecosystems. So far I have no indication what the members of the Southern Area Task Force, appointed by the Peoples Alliance government, think about it. Studying the engineering survey sheets, Paranamana had found that all the earth bunds in he Mau ara basin, described on the topographical survey sheets as small tank (abandoned) had their 265

295 ends curved in the downstream direction; and they had all been built in echelon at corresponding elevations on tributary streams of the Mau ara. (Figure 10). Field inspection had revealed that the remains of sluices were not found in any of them18. These were not the bunds of any abandoned small tanks at all, but examples of what are now called a vetiya, a small earth bund, essentially a water conservation device built to raise the water table. The vetiya is well known to the traditional farmer, but is not usually known to the irrigation engineer, unless his roots are in the dry zone of Sri Lanka. In South India, a small tank is called a yeri or eri 19, and the term includes the vetiya. There is no confusion about this because, whether as vetiya, or as bund of a small tank, it is recognized as a water conservation device. Excitement about discovery of the identity of small tanks (abandoned in the Mau ara basin, as vetiyas is documented in an unpublished book, Genocide in Southern Sri Lanka: Destruction of Ancient Water and Soil Conservation Ecosystems in the name of Development. (Mendis, Unpublished, Chapter 6). I was elated beyond words and this was the time I would have really run down the streets of Ambalantota shouting Eureka, Eureka, I have found it, I have found it! but I did not know the correct Greek words for he has found it! because it was Paranamana who had found it. So I tried to keep calm, and drove across instead to the office of A P Chandrasena, Project Director of the Ministry of Plan Implementation s Integrated Rural Development Project and told him and the NORAD reprresentative May Sommerveldt, all about it. A sequel to this discovery was that the Norwegian aid agency, NORAD, asked me to undertake an Environmental Impact Assessment Study on the proposal that Paranamana had put up, for restoration of the ancient Galamuna weva and diversion to the Malala oya basin. (Figure 9). That study done as an Institute of Fundamental Studies, Kandy, project by a team of six scientists, including an archaeologist was described by a reviewer as an EIA 20 Study with a difference Sadly, as far as I am aware, it has been ignored by the Southern Area Task Force that is currently engaged in preparing development proposals for the southern area. In passing, it may be mentioned that the use of Engineering surveys to find out more about the ancient irrigation systems had been anticipated by the Surveyor General, G K Thornhill, many years ago. He had written a prophetic Foreword in Brohier s great work Ancient Irrigation Works in Ceylon (1934) as follows 21 : It must be noted however that Mr Brohier deals only with the historical and general aspect of the question and not with the Engineering problems. These must be investigated by making further Engineering surveys to supplement the Topographical surveys. The one mile Topo sheets that are continually being revised and added to, form a useful base, however, on which Engineers can start their work. It should be mentioned however, that the new topographical survey maps show land use patterns on a metric scale. Some of the ancient irrigation works shown on the earlier one mile sheets referred to by Thornhill, are no longer evident on the new sheets. Whether this is the result of a new emphasis (on land use patterns), or simply because the old structures have been removed 22, was a topic for discussion in the media a few years ago. The point that may be emphasized here, is that the old one mile sheets have to be referred to by researchers into the ancient irrigation systems, in preference to the new sheets, specially because there is no chapter on the Ancient Irrigation Works in the much vaunted National Atlas of Sri Lanka 23 Subsequent fate of the work including applause by the scientific community and the public This is the second stage in Professor Basnayake s analysis of aesthetics in science. Around 1985, Professor Edward Kuiper from Winnipeg, Canada, was invited by the Mahaweli Authority to lecture on water resources development planning to Mahaweli engineers. Having read about this in the press, I made an appointment to meet him in at his hotel, since I was not 266

296 among the invitees to his lectures. I showed him my 1968 IESL paper 24 in which I had quoted his principles of water resources planning, just two years after his book was published 25, to argue the case for an alternative upstream site for Uda Walawe reservoir. (Figure 2). He was very pleased to learn this, but was surprised and disappointed that the Mahaweli Authority had not told him about this paper. If I had told him that I had been on the Board of Directors of the former Mahaweli Development Board, just a few years earlier, he would have been even more surprised and saddened that the new Mahaweli Authority was giving me and my work the cold shoulder.. By 1985 I was of the view that a fundamental cause of misconception was the way engineers in Sri Lanka saw water, as inanimate and active, as in the study of.hydraulics. Bio-scientists see water in exactly the opposite terms, as animate and passive, for example as a vehicle for conveyance of nutrients in solution in the root zone of soils. These two opposing views would account for the hydraulic engineering perspective, and the ecosystems perspective, respectively. I therefore introduced the term irrigation ecosystems, for the first time in a paper titled 26 Evolution and Development ofirrigation Ecosystems and Social Formations in Ancient Sri Lanka, at the 1986 annual sessions of the IESL. After the Peace Accord of 1987, and the arrival of the Indian Peace Keeping Force, IPKF, protestations against the Accord led to violence and extra-judicial killings all over the country, outside the ethnic war zone of the north and east. Somewhere around this time, I had a disturbing encounter with an eminent engineer who held very high office in government. He told me that when he had visited his village, a local youth who had recently joined the Police force, had confided in him that the first task given to him at the Police station had been to burn a heap of rubbish behind the station. But when he had gone behind the station he had found that the heap of rubbish was in fact a heap of human bodies. On looking closely he had found signs of life in some of them. My friend had asked the rookie policeman what he had done, and he had replied that he had recited the ithipiso gatha and burned the bodies. I wondered why I was being told this terrible story, when my friend had access to the Highest in the land, who should have been told about it. I said nothing but I was deeply troubled because such extra-judicial processes were beginning at that time, apparently in response to some non-ethnic conflicts on major irrigation projects in the southern area. I felt that these conflicts were aggravated by environmental degradation due to the hydraulic engineering approach to the design of these projects, and I had to somehow make decision-makers understand this. With this in view, when the International Association of Historians of Asia held its bi-ennial conference in Colombo in 1988, under the patronage of the President of Sri Lanka, I presented a paper titled 27 Theory, Paradigm, Crisis and Revolution in Understanding the History of Irrigation Systems in Sri Lanka. This was based on Thomas S Kuhn s classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which describes stages in the progress of science. In this case I argued that the pre-paradigm stage had commenced with Kennedy s paper in1934; the paradigm was Brohier s four stage hypothesis published in 1956; paradigmbased normal. science (Kuhn s term) was paradigm-based engineering, highlighted by the Water Resources Development Plan, 1959, from which were selected for construction, Uda Walawe headworks in , and Lunugamvehera headworks in ; the crisis was maldevelopment in these two major projects adding to the unrest in the southern area, leading to the attempted insurrection in the late 1980s; and the revolution was the arrival of a new paradigm, the seven stage hypothesis. However, very few in the local audience appeared to appreciate the analogy, and the paper was not published in the proceedings of the conference. Next, I presented a paper to the IESL in October titled The Need of the hour: Non dependent Implementation of Southern Area Plan. There was a mild sensation when the Chief Guest President J R Jayewardene, referred to my paper in his inaugural address on the first day at the BMICH. This was reported later in a morning newspaper thus 30 : The President said that Walawe and Lunugaamvenera in particular had been called mad folly that they were sited in 267

297 the wrong places. You should take it up, and tell the Minister that there should be a Commission of Inquiry appointed to look into it, the President said. Anyway it shows that you engineers are thinking, and that s a good thing the President added. His words were thus given wide publicity which sparked off an interesting discussion in Sunday papers for a few weeks. This made me decide to present a sequel the next year, : Development of Underdevelopment in Southern Sri Lanka: Destruction of Ancient Irrigation Ecosystems by the Impact of Hydraulic Engineering. In September 1989 I also presented the second Professor E O E Pereira Commemoration Lecture 32, on Hydraulic Civilizations, Irrigation Ecosystems, and the Modern State. I took the opportunity to draw attention to the ethnic conflict, and commented on certain claims concerning Traditional Tamil Homelands. I also drew attention to extra-judicial killings and tyre pyres, like the burning bodies in the Police station mentioned above, which were, alas, all too common by then, by means of a parody of Rev. W S Senior s unforgettable poem 33, The Call of Lanka. In fact, my first response to Professor Basnayake s request for a contribution to this seminar was titled Two Poems on Aspects of Conflict in Sri Lanka (Annex). As the conviction grew in my mind that the hydraulic engineering approach to design of irrigation systems caused environmental degradation, which in turn was a contributory cause of non-ethnic conflict, I felt that I was not making any impact on high-level decision-makers by presentation of papers to local audiences, and publication in the Transactions of the Institution of Engineers, alone. Moreover, after the Professor E O E Pereira Commemoration lecture I was advice by a friend to be careful because it sounded as if I was sympathetic to the insurgents - who deserved no sympathy. At this time I recalled a 1987 Student Pugwash conference in Stanford University at which I had been a Special Guest, when I met the Morton Thiokol engineer, Roger Boisjoly, who had designed the O-rings that had failed in the Challenger Rocket disaster. Speaking on Engineering Ethics Boisjoly told his spell-bound audience how he had decided to give publicity to the O-ring story, which was later made famous at the Presidential Commission of Inquiry by Nobel Laureate physicist Richard Feynman s ice water demonstration 34. I decided to follow Boisjoly and go international, and since then I have received accolades whenever I used the Kuhnian analysis to explain how wrong conclusions about the evolution and development of the ancient irrigation systems had been arrived at, and the tragic consequences thereof. These international meetings included IAHA meetings in Hongkong in , and in Tokyo in ; the International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage conferences in Rio de Janeiro in , and in Amsterdam in ; a Society for Philosophy and Technology conference in Spain in ; and international Pugwash conferences on Science and World Affairs in Beijing in , in Berlin in and in Hiroshima in I failed to get a NARESA travel grant to attend the Berlin Pugwash conference in 1992, and my absence had been noted and my paper referred to in the final Plenary session, according to Professor Noel Baptist who had been there. He said: They were looking for you in Berlin. As a result I was immediately invited to join a Pugwash Special Study Group in The Hague, in 1993, which published a book 4 : The World at the Crossroads -Towards a Sustainable, Equitable, and Livable World. My chapter is titled 44 The Value of Indigenous Knowledge: the Case of Traditional Water and Soil Conservation Ecosystems in Sri Lanka. One of the warmest accolades I ever received was from the Convenor of this Pugwash Special Study Group, an Illinois University PhD in nuclear physics, who wrote to me, as he said from my heart after reading my Professor E O E Pereira lecture 45 : I have read and studied your Commemoration lecture. I was at once deeply moved by your sincerity and courage, impressed by your eloquence and erudition, and moved frequently to tears by what you told. Along with a hundred other things your tribute to Wole Soyinka touched me deeply because, his book The Man Died is far from what many consider it to be, just another account of barbaric suppression... We are slowly trying to push towards an 268

298 understanding of the dialectics involved in development I think that you have the background to put fl esh on this kind of skeleton of an idea, because you know exactly how things work. Simply put, my thesis is that colonialism is a process. It is a process of plundering, and will of course change its external appearance to suit circumstances. After the second world war, military control of the colonies was no longer fashionable, but more importantly, economic penetration had made it no longer necessary...needless to say, this letter gave me great joy (and hope). I have also been invited to give guest lectures in a number of foreign universities, including Cambridge University, Silsoe College, Delft University, and the Universities of Waagingen, Wuhan, Nanjing, Beijing, and Hongkong; in research centres including the Commonwealth Science Council, London, the International Center for Disaster Mitigation Engineering, Tokyo, the National Science Foundation, Washington, DC, Hydraulics Research, Walingford, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Luxemburg, Austria, and at the Annual General Meeting of the British Pugwash Group in London in April , (which was also a Felicitation to Professor Joseph Rotblat on his Nobel Prize). The Chairman, a Vice President of the Royal Society, wrote to me after that presentation: The audience was enthralled. (I was thrilled because that audience included several Fellows of the Royal Society and at least one Nobel Laureate). My paper is a chapter in the forthcoming S Arumugam Felicitation volume, edited by me, in the IESL History of Engineering in Sri Lanka series. Mr Arumugam, the foremost irrigation engineer of his time who understood the ancient irrigation systems correctly, and documented the functions of small and large reservoirs and diversion systems 47. A nonagenerian living in London, he still reads in the British Library. During my recent visit to USA, I also had invitations for seminars at the University of California at Berkeley, and at two research institutes in Oakland, California, in July 1996, which I could not honour because my suitcase containing all my documents was lost in transit from Chicago to Los Angeles, (and has not been found). Scientific Appreciation At the biennial Student Pugwash conference in Madison, Wisconsin, in June 1996, I was a Senior participant together with current and previous Pugwash Secretarys-General, Professor Francisco Calogero and Dr Martin Kaplan, and a few others. I was given a beautiful card signed by participants in the Water group, individually, thanking me for Sharing my wisdom with them. It was so un-american (and so like our traditional Shisya - Guru relations), that I felt embarrassed! Also, from time to time, I still receive letters, telephone calls and faxes from foreign scholars and researchers, invitations to attend conferences, or to contribute articles to international journals (recently from the UN Natural Resources Forum). All this sounds like applause from the scientific community and the public, but any exhilaration is dampened by a feeling of sadness, sometimes akin to despair, at the wall of silence surrounding decision makers and policy makers in Sri Lanka, about the water and soil conservation ecosystems perspective. On making discreet inquiries I have been told by friends that my views are considered controversial, and / or that I am biased. This may or may not be a method of character assassination, skillfully used by local scientists, which I am helpless to counter. The net result, which is all that matters, however, is that attention is diverted, and rational discussion is avoided, on the water and soil conservation ecosystems perspective of the ancient irrigation systems, an essential prerequisite as I see it and argue, for scientific water resources development planning, and reducing or avoiding conflict over water. Meanwhile from time to time, there are references in newspaper articles to water resources development projects selected from the Water Resources Development Plan, 1959, without considering alternatives. Alternatives that were available were not considered when Uda Walawe and Lunuganvehera reservoirs 48 were selected from this map, and it is now becoming increasingly 269

299 difficult to deny that both reservoirs are wrongly located. Implementation of the Moragahakande reservoir and NCP Canal project has been announced recently 49, again without any discussion about alternatives. Some years ago I predicted that a new east-west conflict over water will result to supplement the on-going north-south conflict, if this project is implemented as planned 50. The reason for this grim prediction is that the NCP canal is a ridge channel, traced virtually on the central dividing ridge in the north-central part of the island, and such a long ridge canal, a simple hydraulic engineering structure, will result in conflict over water. (All ancient channels like Kalaweva Jayaganga, and Minipe and Elahera canals, for example, are contour channels). The fact that I had argued against construction of Lunuganvehera weva, without at least considering an alternative site at Huratgamuva about 10 miles upstream, and anticipated problems that later developed at this gigantic reservoir (Figure 12) has been forgotten. (I had also said in my 1977 paper 54 : Samanala weva power project should be designed and constructed, initially, as a runof-the-river project. That view was scorned at the time 52, and this has cost the country billions of rupees). It does not give me any joy to mention all this here, but these facts have to be placed before this important scientific audience. There has also been misinterpretation of the ancient irrigation ecosystems in the Foreword of the book Buddhism Betrayed? 53. It says 54 :... there was a harking back to an idealized village community assumed to characterize ancient Ceylon, and constituting a valid model for Sri Lanka s modern development. The underlying form of Sinhala cultural identity comprised the weva (irrigation tank), dagaba(temple) and yaya (paddy fi eld)... Unfortunately, this book has been banned, and it is difficult to expose the wrong implications of such false and potentially dangerous statements. As shown in this paper, modern water resources development planning is based on the Water Resources Development Plan, 1959, from which locations of new large reservoirs are identified, which submerge some ancient small village tanks, while other ancient small village tanks in the downstream development areas have been leveled off. In a sense this misinterpretation is similar to some wrong statements made by another eminent social scientist, E R Leach, in his oft cited essay Hydraulic Society in Ceylon 58, (best known as an effective response to Wittfogel s Oriental Despotism. 56 Leach had spent time in a dry zone village near Anuradhapura, studying traditional irrigation and agricultural practices described in his book 57 Pul Eliya, but he made some surprising wrong statements that have not received much critical attention from scholars. Some of these are: Ancient Sinhala was located exclusively in that part of the Dry Zone of Ceylon which is now known as the North Central Province. By using the word exclusively, Leach here refers to ancient Rajarata alone, which means that the village settlements in ancient Ruhunu, referred to in the Culavamsa 59, like Dvadasasahassaka 60 (the region of twelve thousand villages), and Atthasahassaka 61 (the region of eight thousand villages) were unknown to him. Next, he gives a rather unusual statement about village tanks 62 :... although the major irrigation works provided food for labourers as well as amenities for palaces, the hydraulic system was not of crucial economic significance for the society as a whole. When the central government was disrupted and the major works fell into disrepair, village life could carry on quite adequately; for each village still possessed its own small scale irrigation system which was maintained by the villagers themselves. Panabokke says that Pul Eliya is a rare instance of a village tank in the Rajarata which stands by itself, which may account for Leach s optimism about the drought-resisting capability of all small village tanks. Finally, Leach makes a sweeping statement which shows lack of awareness of Brohier s documentation of the inter-relation ofgroups of large reservoirs and channels, in his 1937 paper 63 : 270

300 The major hydraulic works are not created rationally and systematically but haphazard, as pieces of self advertisement by individual leaders. But once started, such constructions survive and can be enhanced by later adventurers of the same type. Perhaps the saddest thing about this last remark, certainly the most ironic, is that it applies very well to the large reservoirs, Uda Walawe and Lunuganvehera, selected from the Water Resources Development Plan, 1959, and built by modern irrigation engineers, and not by any means to the large reservoirs in the ancient inter-connected systems, built many hundreds, even thousands of years ago. There also are moments of joyous compensation, other than foreign letters and invitations to present papers or give guest lectures abroad, that I have experienced. One such was on reading an article 64, The Harsh Facts of Hydraulics: Technology and Society in Sri Lanka s Traditional Colonization Schemes by Professor B Pffenburger, in the July 1990 issue of Technology and Culture, which said: The supposed causal relation between gravity fl ow irrigation and socio-economic differentiation is, in the Sri Lanka case, illusory and deceptive. The appearance is created and becomes convincing, only to the extent that observers adopt a highly restricted definition of technology, a technology that includes only the hardware of irrigation (such as dams, pumps and canals). As scholars in the history of irrigation argue, a more useful definition of technology would certainly include cultural values and social behaviour, which are, after all, vital to the operation and maintenance of a technical system... The question... is not why Sri Lanka s modern irrigation technology creates socio economic differentiation; on the contrary, the question is why the schemes social design omitted the customs and behaviours that could have mitigated the differentiation process. This led me to list contrasting features of the hydraulic engineering and ecosystems perspectives, as hard and soft technologies, terms used by a long-standing Pugwash friend, Amory Lovins 65, former Energy policy planning Adviser to President Jimmy Carter, in his book Soft Energy Paths. I was also very pleased to learn that in China they refer to Water Conservancy systems, not to irrigation systems. Finally, Steve Lansing s description of rice paddy ecosystems in Bali 66, neatly confirms the ecosystems approach to the ancient irrigation systems: The role of water in rice paddy ecosystems goes far beyond providing water to the roots of paddy plants. By controlling the fl ow of water into terraced fields, the farmers are able to create pulsed in several important cycles. The cycle of wet and dry phases alters soil ph; induces a cycle of aerobic and anaerobic conditions in the soil that determines activity of microorganisms; circulates micro-nutrients; fosters the growth of nitrogen-fi xing cyanobacteria; excludes weeds; stabilizes soil temperatures; and over the long term governs formation of a plough pan that prevents nutrients from being leached into the subsoil. On a larger scale the fl ooding and draining of blocks and terraces also has important effects on pest populations. Iffarmers on adjacent fields can synchronize their cropping patterns over a suffi ciently large area, rice pests are temporarily deprived of their habitat and pest populations can be sharply reduced. I think that the implications of this statement should be carefully studied and discussed, by all hydraulic engineers in Sri Lanka. Another such joyous event was a paper in on Cascades of Small Tanks in the Rajarata, by the eminent soil scientist Dr C R Panabokke, who had been a severe critic of M S M de Silva s Southern Area Plan, calling it a manifestation of the Mahavamsa syndrome, because it depended on large reservoirs and trans-basin channels. Such criticism would have been acceptable if directed at the hydraulic engineering perspective per se, but, having on his own admission read Kennedy s historic paper only just a few weeks earlier, he was not aware of the Kuhnian analysis of how the 271

301 history of the ancient irrigation systems had been mis-interpreted. Nor did he seem to know about the inter-relation of groups of reservoirs and channels in ancient Rajarata 68, at the time he did his study on cascades of small tanks in Anuradhapura district. Someone in the audience said that he had 69 just discovered what D L O Mendis has been talking about for many years. However, I was happy that Dr Panabokke, from being a critic would now become an ally, in efforts to bring rationality to water resources development planning, by eschewing the hydraulic engineering perspective, and adopting the water and soil conservation ecosystems perspective (I hope). Moreover, the Southern Area Plan too has been revised to accommodate the ecosystems approach, and offer a solution to a scenario of perpetual conflict between man and authority, man and beast, and man and man, in the southern area. This is due to wildlife reserves above Uda Walawe and Lunuganvehera (now joined to form Uda Walawe National Park), sugar plantations below, an electric fence in between, and human settlements above and below all this. Professor Basnayake has talked of scientific appreciation in which a thing which is perceived as being beautiful has its beauty enhanced by knowledge of the relevant scientific background. A landmark in this regard was when I enrolled in the Postgraduate Institute of Agriculture, Peradeniya, in 1984, to learn more about agriculture. I was thrilled to learn the scientific basis of what I had learnt empirically about irrigation ecosystems, for example from my Father-in law, when he and I were both stationed in Vavuniya 70 : My Father-in-law, a native of the Wanni, having been born in the village of Nathagane near Kuliyapitiya, was a man of agricultural stock, generations of traditional farmers who knew more about practical agricultural and irrigation in the dry zone, than many agriculturalists and most irrigation engineers. He had obtained a five acre highland allotment under a Middle class settlement programme in operation in the Vavuniya district in the 1950s, one of many such sited beside the Vavuniya - Trincomalee road. He set about developing the allotment systematically and scientifically, cultivating a variety of perennials, and seasonal crops. He built an earth embankment across a dry stream running through the plot of land, which filled up to form sizeable pond during the rainy season. It had a natural spill at one end, which ensured that the earth bund would not be overtopped. Although I did not realize it at the time, he had built a vetiya to conserve the water table! My Father-in-law was applying the traditional knowledge to which he was heir, that was virtually in his bones, and from which I and other theoretically qualifi ed engineers had so much to learn in the practice of water and soil conservation. At this time, a petition drafted in Tamil reached me, as Irrigation Engineer, Vavuniya, which said that Mr I MD Nathagane, Inspector of Schools (Sinhala Circuit) had blocked a drainage stream and built a small tank in the highland allotted to him. I passed on the petition to the Divisional Irrigation Engineer, S Veerakathy, a very clever and efficient engineer, who instructed his Irrigation Engineer, S Gunaratnam to inquire into the petition and report to him. The Irrigation Engineer, after a thorough investigation prepared a report, a copy of which was sent to me, which was a revelation. He said that the allottee had built a small earth bund to hold up water to sustain the water table in his allotment, which, far from doing any harm to any other allottees downstream, would benefi t them, by retaining the rain water a little longer before it ran off to waste. He advised the petitioner to learn from Mr Nathagane how to improve his own allotment in this manner and not to waste his time writing petitions. Some years later when my Father-in-law was transferred out of the Northern circuit, he transferred his allotment to a like-minded amateur farmer, the Inspector of Schools of the Tamil Circuit, who he knew would conserve and maintain the land into which he had put in so much of his sweat and toil. This then, was a classic example of a vetiya, built to raise water in a drainage stream above the low humic gley or alluvial soils in the bottom, and divert it around the vetiya, and through reddish 272

302 brown earth soils in the shoulders, to drain back into the downstream LHG soils for irrigated rice cultivation. Thus in addition to a rice crop, a variety of perennials (trees) could be grown on RBE soils, as well as seasonal crops, (often called other field crops or OFC with the water table maintained by the runoff deflected and dispersed by the vetiya, and the artificial pond formed in the wet season. This was why vetiyas had been built so carefully in echelon on tributary streams of Mauara. That wonderful system had been deliberately built to conserve water and soil as part of the ancient water and soil conservation ecosystems. In the EIA study 71 referred to above, we found that purana (old) villagers in the Malala oya basin also have a great respect for trees. It seemed to mean that dry zone forest gardens analogous to the Kandyan forest garden, had existed in the ancient Ruhunarata. The Aralu, Bullu, Nelli kele in the Eastern province may be all that remains of this today. F H Popham s Arboretum 72 at Dambulla is a good example of what can be achieved in this direction today. This also confirms that trees are a vital part of traditional agricultural practice in Sri Lanka. In a particular example, the ecologist E P Odum has described the role of trees in traditional rice production systems in the Philippines: 73 It is perhaps signifi cant that rice paddies have been cultivated for over 1000 years in the Philippines (Sears, 1957) 74, a record of success that few agricultural systems in use 75 today can claim. According to Sears these rice paddies are interspersed with patches of forests that are preserved by religious taboos We should fi rst fi nd out if the intermixture of forest and paddies has something to do with admirable balances before we rush in and recommend that the forests be bulldozed in order to plant more rice. 76 This statement made me think about the practice of irrigation engineering in Sri Lanka. There is a well-established procedure of preparing a construction estimate for work to be done, in which the first item usually is Jungle clearing. In an analogous situation, in an estimate for laying a pipeline along a road, for example, the first item is Excavation in trenches, and the last item is Reinstatement of road. But there has never been an item in any irrigation construction estimate for Reinstatement of jungle. Hydraulic engineers will howl with horror and disbelief at the very idea. I have found references to the significance of the role of trees in man s evolution, in Sir James Fraser s classic The Golden Bough, and in the works of a diverse range of modern western scholars, including architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Lewis Mumford, Barry Commoner, and Murray Bookchin, to mention just a few names. On the other hand, Leonard Woolf, John Still and Sir James Emerson Tennent have graphically described the inroads of the tropical jungle in Sri Lanka, when the social order weakens and maintenance of ancient irrigation systems is neglected. All this has confirmed that the ecosystems perspective, as opposed to the hydraulic engineering perspective, is the correct basis for planning irrigation projects. Appreciating the importance of trees for nutrient recycling in tropical agriculture, especially in rice culture, completes my understanding of the ancient irrigation ecosystems. Referring to the three most important of these systems (page 1), the second item, sustainability and stability over nearly 17 centuries, can be adequately explained in terms of ecosystems. In regard to the third and last item, the apparently irreversible decline after the Nissanka Malla regime, following the high point of the Parakrama Bahu era ( ), a number of contributory causes for the collapse of the social order were discussed in a 1971 Seminar on the Decline of the Rajarata Civilization and the Drift to the Southwest, organized by Professor K Indrapala in Peradeniya. These included invasions, internecine strife, occupation of the heartland of the dry zone by invaders who did not care or did not know how to maintain the irrigation systems, elimination of a class of persons called kulinas traditionally responsible for such maintenance, and the advent of malaria. To this list other causes added by other scholars include breakdown in foreign trade following collapse of the Vijayaraja empire, prolonged cyclonic storms, and even earthquakes. I have added the advent of hydraulic engineering during the Parakrama Bahu era

303 Conclusion The theme of this Seminar is Aesthetics in Science, and I have documented in this paper something of my aesthetic experience, including both joy and sadness, arising from learning about the ancient irrigation systems in Sri Lanka, over a rather long period of time. I have used this opportunity to document diverse aspects of my research, giving some more important chronological landmarks. In conclusion, I wish to state that, as I see it, the situation in the irrigation systems in the southern area of Sri Lanka, the main area of my research, is no better and in fact may actually be worse than what it was at the time I worked in Uda Walawe, three decades ago. [A short note relevant to this, titled A Crisis of Confidence 78 is given as Annex 2]. In trying to understand the reasons for this unhappy situation, I learned about a process called exclusivism which describes how people who are vested with administrative authority try to keep things to themselves, excluding other persons or other points of view that they are not comfortable with. An example Protestant exclusivism has been identified as a contributory cause of ethnic conflict in Northern Ireland, in a Pugwash Study titled Contemporary Terror 79, which I quoted at an Open University Seminar on Engineering Education 80. A personal example of exclusivism that I have experienced was the greeting from my VIP engineer friend, referred to previously, when I returned to Sri Lanka, after a short spell of six months in Nigeria: Have you come back to save the country? This happened in 1979, long before our country was in need of being saved, as it now is, alas! I understood those words to mean If you are not with us, you are against us. So keep off!, the classic attitude of the robber barons of the Dharmista cum Robber Baron era. Could it be then, that my research on ancient water and soil conservation ecosystems has been ignored by policy makers for such petty personal reasons? Fearing that this may in fact be the case, I have often quoted Kossambi to emphasize the importance of research on the ancient irrigation systems, before planning modern projects, but these wise words of the Indian savant too, have fallen on deaf years: The function of the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to understanding the present... learning from history is never simply a one-way process. To leave about the present in the light of the past is to learn about the past in the light of the present. The function of history is to promote a profounder understanding of both past and present through the inter-relation between them. However, the Institution of Engineers, as a body, has endorsed my views on the ancient water and soil conservation ecosystems, by honouring me with the award of the Professor E O E Pereira prize for papers on irrigation systems and on the southern area, presented at the annual Sessions in 1977, 1988, 1989, and I am indeed grateful, because it has countered to some extent continuing personal disappointment due to exclusivism, so viciously and effectively practiced by the entrenched beneficiaries of the ancien regime, about whom President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga warned when she took office (Daily News, February 28, 1994). It would seem then, that despite a change of government, these persons remained entrenched, and unchanged in their ways. In the final analysis, they are part of the burden which the long suffering, voiceless masses of our country, that the Chinese called the Land without sorrow, still have to carry on their bent and broken backs. 274

304 References Arumugam, S Water resources of Ceylon. Water Resources Board, Colombo Brohier, R L Ancient Irrigation Works in Ceylon. Government press, Colombo Brohier, R L Inter-relation of Groups of Reservoirs and Channels in Ceylon. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Ceylon Branch, Vol. 34, No. 90 Brohier, R L Some Structural Features of the Ancient Works for Storing and Distributing Water Presidential Address, Engineering Association of Ceylon Commoner, Barry Making Peace in the Planet. Victor Gollancz. London Feynman, Richard What Do You Care What Other People Think? Fraser, James The Golden Bough. Wordsworth Reference. Geiger, Wilhelm Culavamsa (Translated from the German). Government press. Colombo Geiger, Wilheim Mahavamsa (Translated from the German). Government press. Colombo Institute of Fundamental Studies, Kandy Environmental Impact Assessment Study on Augmentation of Malala oya from Mau ara basin. Hambantota Integrated Rural Development Project. NORAD. Indrapala, K The Collapse of the Rajrarata Civilization and the Drift to the Southwest. Ceylon Studies Seminar, Peradeniya Kennedy, J S Evolution of Scientific Development of Village Irrigation Works Proceedings of the Engineering Association of Ceylon Kossambi, D D Culture and Civilization in Ancient India. Routledge and Keagan Paul Kuhn, Thomas S The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago University press Kuiper, Edward Water Resources Development Planning. Wiley. Leach, E R Hydraulic Society in Ceylon. Past and Present, April 1959 Leach, E R Pul Eliya - A Village in the Dry Zone of Ceylon. Cambridge Lovins, Amory Soft Energy Paths. Penguin Mathmaluwe, M B Moragahakande Project: A Plea for Early Completion Daily News, August Mendis, D L O An Investigation into the Ancient Aspects of the Allai Irrigation Scheme. Abstract. Sri Lanka Association for the Advancement of Science. Mendis, D L O Some Observations on the Designs for Uda Walawe Headworks. Transactions of the Institution of Engineers, Ceylon, 1968 Mendis, D L O The Southern Area Plan. Annex in The Engineering and National Planning. Transactions of the Institution of Engineers, Ceylon, 1971 Mendis, D L O Some Thoughts on Technology Transfer for Irrigation and Multipurpose Development Projects in Sri Lanka. Transactions of the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka Mendis, D L O Evolution and Development of Irrigation Ecosystems and Social Formations in Ancient Sri Lanka. Transactions of the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka, 1986 Mendis, D L O Theory, Paradigm, Crisis and Revolution in Understanding the History of Irrigation in Sri Lanka. 11 th Conference of the International Association of Historians of Asia, Colombo, Unpublished. Mendis, D L O The Need of the Hour: Non-Dependent Implementation of Southern Area Plan. Transactions of the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka, 1988 Mendis, D L O Development of Underdevelopment in Southern Sri Lanka -Destabilization of Ancient Irrigation Ecosystems by the Impact of Hydraulic Engineering. Transactions of the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka, 1989 Mendis, D L O Hydraulic Civilizations, Irrigation Ecosystems, and the Modern State. Second Professor E 0 E Pereira Commemoration Lecture. Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka. Mendis, D L O Lessons from Sri Lanka s Ancient Irrigation Ecosystems. Proceedings of the 14 th Congress of the International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage, ICID, New Delhi, 1990 Mendis, D L O Irrigation Development and Underdevelopment in Southern Sri Lanka. Economic Review, December

305 Mendis, D L O Environmental Degradation due to the Imposition of Western Models on Tropical Irrigation Ecosystems in Sri Lanka. 12 th Conference of the International Association of Historians of Asia, Hongkong, Unpublished. Mendis, D L O Non-ethnic Causes of Violent Conflict in Sri Lanka: Environmental Degradation on Account of Destruction of Ancient Irrigation Ecosystems by the Impact of Hydraulic Engineering. Proceedings of the 41 St International Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, Mendis, D L O Environmental Degradation: Little-known Cause of Violent Conflict in Sri Lanka. Proceedings of the 42nd International Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, 1992 Mendis, D L O How Hydraulic Engineering Under-developed Southern Sri Lanka. Mendis, D L O 1992 The Water Resources Development Plan of Ceylon, ENGINEER, Journal of the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka, June 1992 Mendis, D L O A Regional Water Management Strategy: The Proposed Southern Area Plan in Sri Lanka. Proceedings of the 15 th Congress of the International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage, ICID, New Delhi, 1993 Mendis, D L O Irrigation Systems in the Walawe Basin in the Southeast Dry Zone -an Overview. Proceedings of a Seminar on Southeast Dry Zone Development. Agrarian Research and Training Institute, Colombo, 1993 Mendis, D L O Genocide in Southern Sri Lanka: Destruction of Ancient Water and Soil Conservation Ecosystems in the Name of Development. Unpublished Mendis, D L O The Value of Indigenous Knowledge: the Case of Water and Soil Conservation Ecosystems of Sri Lanka. Ph Smith et al. (edited). The World at the Crossroads - Towards a Sustainable, Equitable, and Livable World. Earthscan, London, 1994 Mendis, D L O Rational Principles of Water Resources Development Planning: A Discussion with Examples from Southern Sri Lanka. Transactions of the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka, 1994 Mendis, D L O Modern Water Resources Development Planning: A Continuing Cause of Nonethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka. 5 th Sri Lanka Conference. University of New Hampshire, Durham, August Unpublished Mendis, D L O Past, Present and Future Conflict over Water in Sri Lanka. Proceedings of the 45 th International Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, 1995 Mendis, D L O Environment and Conflict in Sri Lanka. Paper presented at the Annual General Meeting of the British Pugwash Group, London, April, To be published in the forthcoming S Arumugam Felicitation Volume, in the History of Engineering in Sri Lanka Series, of the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka. Mukundan, T M The ERI System in Tamilnadu Water Resources Management. Proceedings of a Seminar, CPR Environmental Education Centre, Madras, 1993 Needham, Joseph, Wang Ling and Lu Gwei Djen Science and Civilization in China. Vol. 4, Part 3. Cambridge, 1973 Odum, E P Ecology, Wiley, New York Panabokke, C R Small Tanks Cascade Systems of the Rajarata - their Distribution patterns, Typologies, and Implications for Irrigation. Paper presented at an Institution of Engineers Seminar, To be published in the forthcoming S Arumugam Felicitation Volume, in the History of Engineering in Sri Lanka series, of the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka. Paranamana, P A G and Mendis D L 0, An Environmental Impact Assessment Study of an Ancient Irrigation Scheme. Transactions of the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka, 1992 Paranavitana, S, and Nicholas, C W A Concise History of Ceylon. Gunasena, Colombo Parker, H W Ancient Ceylon. Lusacs, London Pffafenburger, B The Harsh Facts of Hydraulics: Technology and Society in Sri Lanka s Traditional Colonization Schemes. Technology and Culture. July 1990 Popham F H The Dambulla Arboretum. IFS, Kandy. 276

306 Schaerf, Carlo, and Carlton, David Contemporary Terror. Macmillan, London Tennent, James Emerson CEYLON - An Account of the Island, Physical, Historical and Topographical. Second Edition. Asian Educational Services, Madras, 1996 Thambiah, S J Buddhism Betrayed? Princeton. Transactions of the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka, Vol. II, pp Wittfogel, Karl Oriental Despotism. Yale, Newhaven, Connecticut Footnote Economic Review, 1977 article 2 See Abstract in SLAAS Proceedings, See Appendix on the Southern Area Plan, in Mendis, (1969) 4 Brohier, R L, (1934), Vol. 3, p Brohier, R L (1956). Also see Needham, Joseph et al. (1971, Vol. 4, Part 3, p Joseph Needham et al, Science and Civilization in China (1971). Vol. 4, Part 3, Cambridge 12 Transactions of the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka, Part I. pp. Parker, H. (1909) p Brohier, R L (1934) Vol. II, p Brohier, R L (1937). P Paranavitana S. and Nicholas, C W (1960), A Concise History of Ceylon 17 Kennedy J S. (1934) Evolution of Scientific Development of Village Irrigation Works, Proceedings of the Engineering Association of Ceylon. pp. 18 This was re-confirmed by ADS Gunawardena and K Jayabalamoorthy recently. See Footnote Mukundarn, T M (1992) 20 Wickremanayake, Teddy. (1994). Daily News, 21 Brohier, R L (1934) Vol. I, Foreword 22 A D S Gunawardena, Project Director Southern Development, and K Jayabalamoorthy, Deputy Director of Irrigation have informed me very recently that many of these vetiyas still remain and are being restored under the project for Augmentation of Malala oya from Mau Ara. (2001) 23 National Atlas of Sri Lanka. 24 Mendis, D L O, Some Observations on the Designs for Uda Walawe Headworks. Transactions of the Institution of Engineers, Ceylon, (1968). Vol. I pp. 25 Kuiper, Edward (1965), pp. 26 Mendis, D L O (1986) 27 Mendis, D L O (1988) unpublished 28 Kuhn, Thomas, (1960) 29 Mendis, D L 0 (1988) 30 Daily News, October 21, Mendis, D L 0 (1989) 32 Mendis, D L 0 (1989) 33 Senior W S Rev. (1922) 34 Feyman, Richard (1989), p Mendis, D L O (199 1) 36 Mendis, D L O (1994) 37 Mendis, D L O (1990) 38 Mendis, D L O (1991) 39 Mendis, D L O (1993) 40 Mendis, D L O (1991) Mendis, D L O (1995) Smith Phil, (1993) Personal Communication 46 Mendis, (1996) 47 Arumugam, S (1969) etc. 48 See Mendis D L 0 (1977) for example. 49 Daily News, November 5, Mendis, D L 0 (1992) etc. 51 Mendis, D L 0 (1977) 52 Transactions of the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka, (1977). Part II. 53. Thambiyah, S J (1992) 54 Ibid, p. 64 Pffafenberger, B, (1992) 277

307 65 Lovins, Amory (1977) 66 Lansing, Steve, (19 ) 67 Panabokke, C R (1995) 68 Brohier R L (1937) 69 Panabokke C R (1995): Several studies have been reported over the past 20 years on the small tank cascade systems (STCS) of the dry zone of the country. Most of these studies have been conducted by social scientists and geographers, of which the better known are those of Dr M U A Tennakoon in the late 1970 s and Professor Madduma Bandara in the 1980 s. Of equal importance are the recent studies reported by D L 0 Mendis on the linkages between small tank and large tank systems. (Emphasis added by me) 70 Mendis, D L O (unpublished, Chapter 6) 71 Mendis D L O et al. (1994) 72 Popham, F H (1990). 71 Odum, E P 74 Sears (1972) 75 It should be noted that the Minneriya reservoir, built by King Mahasen in the 4 th century, when discovered by the British in the early 19 h century was still functioning, so that the fields below it may have been under cultivation for nearly 16 centuries if not more. 76 Odurn E P (1983) p. 77 Mendis, D L 0 (1994) h IESL Annual sessions Newspaper Supplement Daily News, October 11, 1996, 79 Carlton, David, and Schaerf, Carlo. (1982), Contemporary Terror 80 OU Review, August 29, 1996 ANNEX 1 (A condensed version was published in the Daily News, October 6, 1996) Two Poems on aspects of Conflict in Sri Lanka In his introductory note titled Aesthetical Considerations inviting contributions to discuss the topic Aesthetics in Science, Professor Valentine Basnayake says, inter alias The idea in brief is that scientific activity like artistic activity has an emotional quality akin to beauty. This is the aesthetical aspect of science, per se. Researching the topic, I read John Dewey s 82 Art as Experience, followed by Larry Hickman s 83 John Dewey s Pragmatic Technology. I found the following statement by Professor Hickman 84 : One of Dewey s insights that is often missed even by v those who read his work quite diligently is that the material of aesthetic experience frequently grows on its own, quite apart from our conscious intent. It can find expression only through conscious productive activities, but by that point it has already undergone tremendous maturation and development. Too much conscious effort may actually interfere with the maturing appreciation of a set of circumstances. Hence when the center of energy has been subconsciously incubated so long as to be just ready to burst into fl ower; hands off is the only word for us; it must burst forth unaided. Below the level of conscious intention, there is the interplay, of the results of projects undertaken independently and a coming to fruition of projects begun but not finished. But, when patience has done its perfect work, the man is taken possession of by the appropriate muse and speaks and sings as some god dictates. 278

308 Dewey makes clear the view that this is no less the case with respect to thinkers, scientists, and technicians, than it is with respect to artists. In both cases there is emotionalized imagination at work on inchoate and unformed material. It was suggested by Professor Basnayake that I should write about my work on the evolution and development of the ancient water and soil conservation ecosystems (irrigation systems) in Sri Lanka, from the perspective of aesthetics, and this is certainly within the bounds of possibility. However, after reading Dewey and Hickman, I would also like to present this essay titled Two Poems on Aspects of Confl ict in Sri Lanka, which explains the circumstances leading to the creation of the poems, which I think confirms what Basnayake, Dewey, and Hickman, have observed about aesthetic experience. Two Poems on aspects of Conflict in Sri Lanka I joined the Irrigation department in 1955, but was immediately seconded for service as an Instructor in the Faculty of Engineering till April 1956, when I was posted to Kantalai as an Assistant Irrigation Engineer. After a year s construction experience I was entitled to a transfer to the Designs office in Colombo. But, I was transferred to the Allai scheme instead (sometimes called the Siberia of the Irrigation department at the time, on account of its remoteness and difficult access), apparently because a Sinhalese engineer was needed there. I protested to the Director of Irrigation that I should not be transferred on the basis of ethnicity or race, but to no avail. In Allai, while enjoying my work, I followed up the letter of protest with regular monthly reminders that did not endear me to the powers that were in Colombo. Within days of my arrival in Allai, the camp was burned down, accidently, and a large number of staff lost all their possessions. Camp reconstruction now became the first priority for a few months, and was barely completed when the unprecedented floods of December 1957 saw the scheme virtually isolated, as the flood waters of the Mahaweli ganga and the Verugal aru swept through the scheme. Flood damage repairs were in full swing when the July 1958 communal troubles started all over the country. Allai scheme was again isolated, deliberately this time, by decommissioning the access ferries on the Mahaweli ganga and the Verugal aru, and there were no problems in the scheme as trouble making outsiders could not get in. Thereafter transfers were available for the asking on the grounds of insecurity and I was advised to apply on these grounds. I flatly refused to do so, but was transferred to Kandy nevertheless, and went to my new station under protest, thereby perhaps confirming to high-ups in the Head office, that I was some sort of maverick who was never satisfied. In Kandy, I read Tarzie Vittachchi s Emergency 58, and was struck by some passages in his description of troubles on some major irrigation projects. Then on September 26, 1959, the Prime Minister, S W R D Bandaranaike was assassinated, and within a day I had written the following sonnet which was published abroad 85. Sonnet On the Assassination of the Prime Minister, S W R D Bandaranaike, by a Bhikkhu [Many thugs, some of them well-known criminals, had shaved their heads and assumed the yellow robes of a bhikkhu. These phoney priests went around spreading false stories, whipping up race hatred, and taking part in the lucrative side of this business, looting and robbery. Whenever the police went after a man with a shaven head, he disappeared into a house and reappeared in the invulnerable robes of a monk. Tarzie Vittachi Emergency, 58] 279

309 Is this the hour of grief? Does Death proclaim His presence by the sounds that we now hear Of weeping and of wailing? Is he here, Besides us still in yellow robes of shame? Why do we weep? Is it because the fame Of him who is no more was near and dear To us when once he lived? Or is it fear That makes us mourn the passing of his name? Yes, we will mourn! But need we turn our eyes From other griefs that went unsung, unwept, Of mothers, children, hapless, helpless things, Bewildered and afraid, who once were swept Before a tide of hate, whose deepest springs Were often veiled in this same saffron guise? Thirty years later, Sri Lanka was burning again, and we had to turn our eyes from bodies burning on the streets, even in Kandy, and in the suburbs of Colombo. It had all started, as I saw it, many years earlier with the five-sixths majority of seats in parliament given to the former Opposition party by a trusting electorate at the free and fair general elections on The deprivation of former Prime Minister Mrs Sirimavo Bandaranaike of her civic rights, prepared the ground for another term for the ruling party with a majority of seats after the next general elections. But, general elections due in July 1982 were not held. Instead the 1982 Referendum gave the government another term with its draconian majority intact. Thereafter, the holocaust of July 1983 saw the humiliation of the Tamil minority on a scale never before witnessed, not excepting even the disruption of the Jaffna Development Council elections and the burning of the Jaffna Public Library in It was obvious to sensitive observers that total war was inevitable after all this. Professor E O E Pereira was alert to all these happenings, and I kept in touch with him until his death in A Commemoration Lecture was inaugurated by the Institution of Engineers in his memory, the first lecture being delivered by Professor A Thurairajah, in I presented the second Professor E O E Pereira Commemoration lecture on September 13, 1989, on Hydraulic Civilizations, Irrigation Ecosystems and the Modern State. This was the time when thousands were disappearing and hundreds of dead bodies appeared overnight in rivers, and all over the countryside, outside the war zone of the north and east. The government had even announced that it could not assure the safety of its citizens. As I have commented elsewhere, Chicago University Professor Alan Bloom, has said: concern for the safety of one s family is a powerful reason for loyalty to the state, which protects them. It could be argued that tens of thousands of Sri Lanka people were justified in being disloyal to the state after that announcement, which was aggravated when even the media seemed to condone extra-judicial killings, by reporting them in one of two ways: civilians caught in the crossfi re, or as a prisoner being killed when trying to escape from custody. The latter type of incident also seemed to explain the known fact that Tamil militants frustrated capture by biting on cyanide capsules, which they were always known to carry on their person. In my Commemoration Lecture I discussed ancient hydraulic civilizations, introduced the subject of irrigation ecosystems (now better known as water and soil conservation ecosystems), and went on to a discussion of the modern state. After several references to the German experience between the two world wars, when Hitler rose to power, as documented by the historian Louis Fischer, in his 1942 autobiography Men and Politics, I quoted the well-known words of Pastor Neimohler 87 : 280

310 When they came for the people the opposite house, I did not protest; when they took away my neighbour I did not protest; and when they finally came for me, there was no one left to protest. I also quoted at some length from Rev. W S Senior s 88 Call of Lanka, commented on his dream of a Lanka where the races all have blended and the voice of strife is dumb, and then gave a short verse parodying the poem: Had I the gift 0 Lanka To sing in an alien tongue I d hymn thee of sorrow and anguish That from thy heart is being wrung For the fl ower of thy youth that was slaughtered And their faceless bodies fl ung On makeshift pyres of fl aming tires With ne er a requiem sung. The sixth and seventh lines were not printed though they were recited in the lecture, which concluded with the last paragraph of the Russell Einstein manifesto: There lies before us, if we chose, continued progress in happiness, knowledge and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal, as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new paradise; if you can not, there lies before you the risk of universal death. On reflection, I believe that the background to the creation of these two poems, which I have described, establishes what Hickman said, viz: One of Dewey s insights that is often missed even by those who read his work quite diligently is that the material of aesthetic experience frequently grows on its own, quite apart from our conscious intent. It can find expression only through conscious productive activities, but by that point it has already undergone tremendous maturation and development. 85. In the Manchester Guardian, October 1959; republished in the Ceylon Students Union Magazine, London, December Many years later it was again republished in the Saturday Review, in Sri Lanka. 86. Bloom, Alan, (1987). The Closing of the American Mind. Simon and Schuster, Ncw York. p Fischer, Louis. (1942) Men and Politics. An Autobiography. 88 Senior, Rev. W S (1923) The Call of Lanka and Other Poems. Trinity College press. ANNEX 2 A Crisis of Confidence Past President 1986/87, Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka (From Daily News, IESL Annual Sessions Supplement, October 6, 1996) Sri Lanka today is caught up in a crisis of confidence on account of a succession of ethnic and non-ethnic conflicts. The ongoing ethnic conflict is being discussed in Sri Lanka and abroad, with a view to understanding the situation and finding a solution that will result in the achievement of a durable Peace. There is talk of a political solution based on proposals for devolution of political power to regions, as against a military solution, while a terrible civil war goes on, which is now described as a war for peace. 281

311 A continuing cause of non-ethnic conflict is maldevelopment on modern major irrigation projects. This has been discussed in many papers in this Institution, including the second Professor EOE Pereira commemoration lecture, Hydraulic Civilizations, Irrigation Ecosystems and the Modern State, in At an international level, Pugwash became the most important forum for discussion. The Pugwash movement takes its name from a little village in Nova Scotia, Canada, where the first meeting of scientists in the quest for peace took place in At the 45th International Pugwash conference in Hiroshima in 1995, under the subject future action on water and confl ict, it was reported As shown in the case of Sri Lanka, there is a lot to learn from traditional water systems which unfortunately have been ignored in the construction on of modern alternatives. Pugwash is not a secret society, but because it maintains a low profile few persons in Sri Lanka had even heard of it till the award of the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize jointly to the Pugwash movement and its President, Professor Joseph Rotblat. Participants invited to Pugwash meetings represent no one but themselves, and become known as Pugwashites.The Sri Lanka Pugwash Group was set up in 1981, with the objective of hosting an international Pugwash Conference in Sri Lanka in 1983 at a cost estimated at a million rupees, since a very successful Non-Aligned Science Conference had been organized in the SLAAS in Professor Rotblat himself visited Sri Lanka in 1981 and met local scientists, and satisfied himself about our ability to organize an international Pugwash conference. But, after he returned to England, a group of local engineers and scientists, unexpectedly, and without any prior warning, objected to holding the Pugwash conference as planned on the grounds that it was not correct to spend such a large sum of money on foreign scientists, when local science and scientists are starved for funds. In retrospect, it is one of the saddest things that ever happened to us, that the 33rd International Pugwash Conference was not held in Sri Lanka. If that conference was held in this country as planned, the terrible tragedy of July 1983 may never have happened. Even if it did happen, subsequent misinformation that has resulted in maximum bad publicity for Sri Lanka in many foreign countries would not have had such a bad effect. Pugwashites in those countries would have turned a spotlight on the local scene, and seen things for themselves in a more balanced perspective. [Pugwash actually intervened in such conflicts as, for example, the Vietnam war, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Biafran war, with positive results]. If such a global spotlight from Pugwash was on us, criminal elements who were responsible for the cowardly attacks on innocent Tamil people in that black July of 1983, could have been exposed and brought to justice, whether or not they were protected by important persons such as pro-government supporters. The banning of political parties blamed for the atrocities which resulted in their being driven underground, and led to anti-government activity that eventually grew to the proportions of armed insurrection, may never have occurred. Above all, the continuing backlash of retaliatory violence arising from the agony and humiliation that innocent Tamils suffered at that time, which now appears to be backed by a very efficient, hi-tech, global, logistics and information network, supported if not actually set up by refugees, would never have got started. Indeed Sri Lanka is paying a terrible price for the cruel treatment of its ethnic minority in 1983, for which in my view, the perpetrators have never been correctly identified and dealt with. Nor have the victims or next of kin been properly compensated. Since that time it has been a struggle to convince Pugwash that the ethnic majority in Sri Lanka is not bent on genocide of the ethnic minority. For example, at the 46th Pugwash Conference in Lahti, Finland, in September 1996, 1 the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka was reported as genocide similar to that in Burundi. Pugwashites may have heard about government sanctioned violence in 1983, the term used by John M Richardson in the 1990 GC Mendis Memorial lecture. They did not seem to know or care that a purely Sinhalese government has never held office. Or, that it was 282

312 only a small minority of the minority Tamil community that is presently involved in a separatist war, while the large majority of Tamils still live peacefully amongst the majority Sinhalese community. Or, that an estimated 60,000 persons who have disappeared outside the ethnic war zone areas, in the nineteen-eighties, were mainly of the majority Sinhalese ethnic group. And so on. I had in fact touched on some of these issues in a guest lecture titled Environment and Confl ict in Sri Lanka, at the Annual General Meeting of the British Pugwash Group on April 19, 1996, in London, which was also a felicitation to Professor Rotblat for his Nobel prize. That lecture is a chapter in a Felicitation volume for Mr S. Arumugam a former President of this Institution, now a nonagenarian living in London, who was one of the few irrigation engineers of his generation who correctly understood the functioning of the ancient irrigation systems as ecosystems. In a comparable situation, the book Buddhism Betrayed? by an expatriate Tamil social scientist claims that the Sinhalese Buddhist majority, seeking to keep Tamils out of competition, are harking back to an alleged glorious past symbolized by the tank, the temple and the va - va (paddy field). A Foreword by a local Sinhalese economist says that development projects based on this triad will not permit the rates of economic growth required to take the country out of poverty. But both these eminent scholars have got it all hopelessly wrong. All modern water resources development projects in Sri Lanka are selected from a map called the Water Resources Development Plan, 1959, which is based on an erroneous four-stage hypothesis for evolution and development of ancient irrigation systems. This hypothesis, resulting from a hydraulic engineering perspective, had later been published by Professor Joseph Needham in his great work Science and Civilization in China, in But after studying an alternative seven stage hypothesis based on a water and soil conservation ecosystems perspective, Professor Needham wrote to me: My treatment of the subject can he improved upon and I am counting on you to do it. According to the third stage of the incorrect four-stage hypothesis, all ancient small tanks should either be submerged under new large reservoirs, or leveled off if they are in downstream development areas. This is precisely what was done in the modern Uda Walawe, and Lower Kirindi oya (Lunugamvehera) reservoir projects, identified from the Water Resources Development plan, Leveling off as well as submerging small tanks has led to ecological imbalances and maldevelopment. The argument that this is a contributory cause of non-ethnic conflict in the southern area has never been faced, and the causes of mal-development remain. Government has now (1996) set up a Southern Area Task Force, and a Japanese firm has been engaged on a Multidisciplinary Master Plan Study for the Southern Area, funded by the Japanese aid agency JICA. A wall of silence has been built up around these studies, and a glass curtain surrounds the planners that has nothing to do with transparency, so that if a Southern Area Plan is being prepared, as one would expect, the public does not really know how far it has progressed at any given time. This also keeps concerned persons in the dark as to whether official notice has been taken of arguments from an ecosystems perspective, about mal-development in the southern area, as a cause of non-ethnic conflict. This is one of the main features, perhaps the most important one, in the Crisis of Confi dence referred to. Perceptions of conflict, whether based on analysis or intuition, vary from person to person, and from time to time. A method of studying perceptions called Water Logic, due to Professor Edward de Bono who earlier developed the concept of lateral thinking, has been developed. The method has been used in an example by Professor de Bono to map the thinking process, called a fl owscape, in a perception of ethnic conflict. It is proposed to have a Teach-in Seminar on the subject, at the Institution of Engineers, sometime in the future. 283

313 Pugwash Conference No. 48, 1998 Pugwash, Environment and Conflict - A Sri Lankan Perspective D L O Mendis The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) was one of 25 nations represented by their Heads of State, at the first meeting aligned and developing countries in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1961, which started the Non-Aligned Movement or NAM. In addition there were three countries with Observer status. The NAM now has about a hundred members. A high point in the history of the NAM was the fifth Summit Conference held in Colombo in 1976, at which I was a member of the Sri Lankan delegation. A year later at the seventh successive free and fair general elections held in Sri Lanka since Independence in 1948, the Sri Lankan electorate inflicted a massive defeat on the government of Mrs Sirimavo Bandaranaike, whose name was a household word in third world countries at the time. A new government was installed in office with an unprecedented five-sixths majority of seats in Parliament. Leadership of the NAM then passed to the new Prime Minister who changed the Constitution and became the first Executive President of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka in By the time President Jayewardena handed over the Presidency of the NAM to President Fidel Castro of Cuba in 1979, NAM had lost much of its charisma, and whatever clout it may once have had in global politics. 1970s Decade of Hope Participants in Pugwash conferences represent no one but themselves but their presentations obviously should have larger objectives than ego-trips, or what Francesco Calogero has described as a prima donna role. My presentations at international Pugwash conferences have tried to bring a Sri Lankan perspective to the attention of Pugwashites, beginning with my first paper in 1980 titled The NIEO, Basic needs, PQLI, and Zero-tillage Agriculture. This apparently motley collection of what may be described as key words was not an accident. Rather, it was a deliberate attempt to present the background to the paper consisting of a number of important global events that had occurred in the previous decade of the 1970s. First was Report to the Club of Rome, the Limits to Growth study in 1971, followed by the Latin-American Bariloche Foundation s response in Next came the OPEC s first oil shock in 1973 leading to the UN Sixth Special Session in 1974, which concluded with the virtually unanimous Declaration and Program of Action on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order or NIEO. This resolution gave tremendous encouragement to the Non-Aligned Movement, which agreed at its fifth Summit meeting in Colombo in 1976, that the achievement of a NIEO was an essential pre-requisite towards solving problems of poor third world countries. The importance of meeting the Basic Needs of all people to enhance the Physical Quality of Life, as measured by an Index, PQLI, was stressed in discussions at this conference. Then in 1977, Robert McNamara initiated the setting up of an International Commission headed by Chancellor Willy Brandt of Germany. The widely acclaimed Brandt Commission Report North-South: A Program for Survival was submitted to the UN Secretary-General in All this was the background to my first international Pugwash conference in 1980, at which my presentation was outside the conventional Pugwash areas of interest like nuclear issues, 284

314 the arms race and proliferation of weapons. My paper was well received, nevertheless, and the Working Group recommended that a symposium on tropical agriculture should be organized by Pugwash. 1980s Decade of Despair In a sense my first Pugwash paper anticipated some trends to come in the decade of the 1980s which is now remembered as a decade of despair. In 1987, the Brundtland Commission report titled Our Common Future brought some of these issues into authoritative focus. Pugwash followed with the Dagomys Declaration of the Pugwash Council, which begins: We live in an interdependent world of increasing risks. Thirty-three years ago, the Russell- Einstein Manifesto warned humanity that our survival was imperiled by the risk of nuclear war. The familiar challenges identified in that Manifesto and the 1982 Warsaw Declaration of Nobel Laureates remain as important as ever. But in the spirit of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, we now call on all scientists to expand our concerns to a broader set of interrelated dangers: destruction of the environment on a global scale and denial of basic needs to a growing majority of humankind. The Sri Lanka Pugwash Group was set up in 1981, and efforts were made to get it off to a flying start with an international Pugwash conference in Alas, this was not to be despite a visit to Sri Lanka by Professor Joseph Rotblat, and acceptance of a generous funding offer by a Sri Lankan engineer to the Pugwash Council. The reason was the intransigence of a few influential local scientists, an ominous indication of things to come in Sri Lanka. The Sri Lanka Pugwash Group organised a Symposium on Tropical Agriculture in 1982, which was an unqualified success, but it was still a far cry from an international Pugwash conference. Sri Lanka s presidential election was advanced ahead of general elections that were due earlier, and the incumbent president was re-elected. General elections were then postponed on the basis of a referendum in 1982, whose legality has never been established, creating a very dangerous precedent that may be followed again in the near future. Thereafter a pogrom against the Tamil minority that broke out in July 1983 was blamed by the government on left wing political parties; but it is now belatedly being recognized as state sanctioned violence by criminal elements. Similarities to the Kristallnacht violence in Germany in 1933, a half century earlier and in another continent, are striking. My Pugwash presentation in August 1983, a quick appraisal of the situation two weeks after the outbreak of violence in July, was titled Causes of Conflict in Sri Lanka. Thereafter, even though the Sri Lanka conflict escalated to the scale of a civil war, it was not presented for formal discussion at any Pugwash meeting. Meanwhile in the USA, Amory Lovins in his exhaustive 1982 study Brittle Power had analysed and described the dangers of over-centralization in systems for the supply of energy (especially electricity), food, and water, and for industrial production. This was an indication of similarity in thinking, albeit in vastly different contexts, that had been seen in Lovins ground breaking Soft Energy Paths, and my paper The Technology of Development and the Underdevelopment of Technology in Sri Lanka. These had been brought to each other s attention at an US Pugwash Symposium in Racine, Wisconsin, on Social Values and Technology Choice in an International Context, in 1978, and had led to a warm friendship between us. 1990s Decade of Deception The award of the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize to Professor Joseph Rotblat and the Pugwash Movement was well deserved. However, despite this momentous event, the decade of the 1990s may well go down as a decade of deception or a decade of deceit. It has been 285

315 characterized, on a global scale, by the rich (countries and individuals) growing richer, and the poor growing desperate, a most dangerous polarization when seen from a NAM country perspective. In the decade of the 1990s, following the focus of the Dagomys Declaration, my work in Sri Lanka was presented to Pugwash highlighting environmental degradation and destruction, because of a mistaken understanding of ancient water and soil conservation ecosystems, commonly (but incorrectly) called irrigation systems. My 1991, 1992, 1995 and 1997 papers, and a chapter in a Pugwash book in 1994 gave a Sri Lankan perception of environmental degradation as a cause of conflict. Global perceptions of environmental problems had been discussed at the first UN conference on the environment in Stockholm in 1972, and given much more global attention in Rio de Janeiro in The Beijing Conference on Environment and Development in June 1991 had discussed Third World perceptions, embodied in the Beijing Declaration on Environment and Development, but these perceptions went unremarked by participants at the Beijing Pugwash conference in 1991, and perhaps the UN Conference on the Environment in Rio in The recent Pugwash publication World Citizenship: Allegiance to Humanity has discussed in idealistic terms the rationale for world citizenship. There is passing reference to human tragedies in our time in Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, Iraq, but special problems of third world countries seem to have escaped discussion, and a third world perspective is not evident. Recent nuclear adventures in India and Pakistan would surely have increased this apparent distance between developed and developing countries perceptions. An example of what I call western perceptions was a reference to spontaneous globalization in a Working Group draft report at last year s 47th Pugwash conference in Lillehammer, Norway. It was pointed out that, as far as developing countries are concerned globalization is not at all spontaneous, but is the result of carefully planned actions of the IMF and the World Bank. However, these views were not recorded in the final version of the Working Group report. Revival of the NAM In these circumstances it is necessary to bring to the attention of Pugwash some current and ongoing activities of the NAM. A preparatory meeting of NAM Foreign Ministers had been held in New Delhi in March, for the 12th Conference to be held in Durban, South Africa, beginning August , to be chaired by President Nelson Mandela. A Committee was set up at the Delhi meeting headed by Dr Gamani Corea, former Secretary-General of the UNCTAD, to look into changes in the world economy and polity, and their impact on developing countries, and to contribute to a positive agenda for the South. Members of this Committee represent former Presidential countries of the NAM, Algeria, Columbia, Cuba, India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and the incoming President, South Africa. I was privileged to be informed by Dr Corea about some findings in their draft report. These relate to arrangements to continue development activities in NAM countries, launch a programme for science and technology, study problems of the environment, reform of the UN system, money, finance and trade, including the World Trade Organization (WTO), the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Also, at a meeting of Foreign Ministers in Columbia, which is the current president of the movement, a statement was made on May 20, 1998, that UN sanctions should not be used for political purposes. The reference was to sanctions against Iraq, one of the founding member countries of the NAM, where sanctions are known to be causing the deaths of children and old people in horrendous numbers, due to lack of medicines, milk food, and other imported necessities. In a population of 22 million, some 500,000 deaths have been reported as resulting from the UN sanctions. 286

316 A special reason for setting up the Committee at the Delhi meeting of Foreign Ministers may be seen as the recent financial turmoil in Asian countries, that has made global headlines. Since the Pugwash conference in Norway in 1997, there has been rapid, dramatic decline in the exchange value of the Indonesian Rupiah, the Thailand Bhat, the Malaysian Ringit, and the Philippines Peso. Causes for these sudden and unexpected declines given by outside critics broadly encompass bad financial management of national economies. The terms that have been used include crony capitalism and speculative investment, especially in real estate. The IMF and the World Bank have intervened with belt-tightening measures, but the situation, for example in Indonesia, remains as bad as ever. The immediate lesson for other developing countries like Sri Lanka, seems to be that there is no known mechanism for prevention of such financial crises, and after-the-event actions like IMF bail outs, are bitter medicine for the people of the affected countries. The question has been asked, whether this type of financial collapse may happen in one of the rich countries, Japan, or even the great USA? The answer that has been given is that however unlikely, if it does happen, the USA for instance, will not turn to the IMF for a bail out, but will declare a moratorium on debts, say for six months, until the problem was sorted out. The point is that poor countries do not have this option. The biggest irony is that developed world nations are talking about a New Economic Order for the 21st century, a consolidation of the control of the global economy by the rich countries through structural adjustments, and institutions like WTO, and its off-shoot TRIPS, which will police the globalization process. This will be the exact opposite of the NIEO that third world countries called for through the NAM in the 1970s, the Decade of Hope. Little wonder then, that the 1990s will be remembered in the third world as the Decade of Deception or the Decade of Deceit. Sri Lanka - Eppawala Sri Lanka has escaped the massive devaluation of its currency in the wake of the financial crises in other Asian countries, but the exchange rate of the Rupee continues to decline steadily. Foreign direct investment is seen as a necessity for development, and projects that attract such investment are always in vogue. A proposal to mine a rare deposit of igneous phosphate rock, Apatite, said to be one of only three such deposits in the world, has been announced recently, and has caused a storm of protests. This deposit was discovered (in the same sense that Columbus discovered America, for example), by the Mineralogical Survey department in 1971, at a place called Eppawala in the north-central province. The deposit is estimated at several million tons, enough to meet local phosphate fertilizer requirements for over a thousand years. The Ministry of Planning began to use this deposit for local consumption, using locally available expertise and technology, in The project was later taken over by the Ministry of Industries. It has been going on since, the present rate of extraction being about 40,000 tons per year, all of which is used in local agricultural production. One of the reasons for gradual extraction to meet only local requirements of phosphate fertilizer, is the location of the Eppawala deposit in the heartland of the ancient irrigation systems of Sri Lanka s ancient Rajarata or King s country. These ancient systems which are now recognized as part of the unique cultural heritage of Sri Lanka, treasured by all humankind, are still in use after restoration. They consist of river diversion systems and storage reservoir systems, from which water is delivered under gravity for irrigation and crop production. These systems had been built to conserve the heavy rainfall of the northeast monsoon rain season between October and January, for use during the remaining dry months of the year, in the so-called dry zone of Sri Lanka. They checked rapid runoff thereby also reducing soil erosion, hence their description as water and soil conservation 287

317 ecosystems. The evolution and development of these systems over a period of more than fifteen centuries beginning in the middle of the first millennium of the pre-christian era, their sustainability and stability over an even longer period of time, and the reasons for their final apparently irreversible decline after the 13th century, are subjects for study by scholars even at the present time. The ancient water and soil conservation ecosystems were mapped in colonial times in the comprehensive topographical survey of the island done by the British. The ancient systems in the Rajarata or king s country were documented and described in even greater detail by the same authority. The ancient irrigation works in Rajarata included the large reservoir Kalaweva, with a water spread of more than 2000 hectares, believed to have been built in the Fifth century, and the trans-basin contour channel called the Jayaganga, or river of victory. The Jayaganga has been described as follows: The Jayaganga, indeed an ingenious memorial of ancient irrigation, which was undoubtedly designed to serve as a combined irrigation and water supply canal, was not entirely dependent on its feeder reservoir, Kalaweva, for the water it carried. The length of the bund between Kalaweva and Anuradhapura intercepted all the drainage from the high ground to the east which otherwise would have run to waste. Thus the Jayaganga adapted itself to a wide field of irrigation by feeding little village tanks in each subsidiary valley which lay below its bund. Not infrequently it fed it chain of village tanks down these valleys - the tank lower down receiving the overfl ow from the lank higher up on each chain. The Kalaweva-Jayaganga ecosystem will be adversely impacted if not totally destroyed if the proposal by the US multinational corporation to mine the Eppawala Apatite deposit to exhaustion in 30 years, is implemented. The proposal has met with a storm of protests including demonstrations at the time itself, and seminar discussions and demonstrations in the capital city, Colombo. However, at the site of writing (1998) there is no indication that the government is giving heed to these protests very wide cross-section of the public, ranging from local people to scientists and specialists, including members of the National Academy of Sri Lanka. UNESCO and ICOMOS The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), through its Institute for Cultural Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), has recognized the existence of Cultural Heritage Monuments and Sites, in various parts of the world, that belong to the universal cultural heritage of all mankind. The ICOMOS mandate is to prevent the destruction of these cultural heritage monuments and sites, and help in the restoration and reconstruction of any that have been adversely impacted, for whatever reason. This should be a matter of interest and concern to Pugwash and Pugwashites as well. Steps are now being taken to make representations to UNESCO to recognize the Kalaweva-Jayaganga ecosystem as a cultural heritage site, in order to save it from destruction, and avert an impending conflict. This situation of impending conflict was also presented and discussed in a paper at a recent conference of the International League of Humanists in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Bosnia The conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina, part of the former Yugoslavia, a founding member of the NAM, has resulted in the destruction of a number of sites and monuments. UNESCO has established a mission in Bosnia to find ways and means to identify and restore some of the sites and monuments that were impacted in the war. The library in Sarajevo was one such monument, which I was able to see for myself during my recent visit to that historic city. The bridge in the city of Mostar is another such monument. This bridge, built in the sixteenth century, was such a remarkable structure that the whole city came to be named after the Bosnian word for a bridge, most. UNESCO has published a beautiful illustrated 288

318 document for the record, on Mostar. The lessons of the Bosnian conflict should be learned by all Sri Lankans, if only in order that our so-called development efforts do not result in the destruction of cultural heritage sites and monuments, of which there are a very large number, some dating back to the pre-christian era. Such destruction will almost inevitably become a new cause of conflict in Sri Lanka - sadly a strife torn country already - as discussed below. Indonesia The US multinational corporation that is planning to mine the Eppawala deposit to destruction in just 35 years, has a very unfortunate track record in a similar mining project in Indonesia. Unimpeachable reports suggest that a contributory cause of the recent unrest and violence in that country that finally led to the recent resignation of the President of Indonesia, included some of the activities of this corporation. Vice President Al Gore of the United States has shown awareness of and sensitivity to such environmental issues. An attempt has been made recently to bring the impending tragedy at Eppawala to his personal attention, because an US multinational corporation is involved. A similar destruction of a non-renewable phosphate deposit in the pacific island of Nauru has been vividly documented in a recent publication by a distinguished international jurist who, ironically enough, happens to be a Sri Lankan. The contribution of the US multinational corporation to the financial crisis in Indonesia on account of its activities, arising from the mining at Grasberg, which has been called the richest mine in the world, has also been documented. This report says that the corporation concerned is backed by an influential Pugwashite, Henry Kissinger, former US Secretary of State under President Richard Nixon. The Report also describes activities of the corporation in Sri Lanka: In Florida more than 200,000 acres have been strip-mined leaving behind land that looks like a car race track after heavy rains, fi lled with pits and gullies, mini-mountains of dirt and thousand hectare slime pits. Some 20 stacks of phosphor-gypsum, a waste material from phosphate mining, that tower ten stories high occupy 400 acres of the Florida landscape. The phosphate rock mined in Florida is shipped to Louisiana to be converted into fertilizer. This manufacturing process produces gypsum waste which contains trace amounts of radioactivity. Until 1972, the company simply dumped waste into the Mississippi river. When the newly created US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) banned this practice, the company began to stockpile the waste. In 1986 it asked for permission to resume dumping the 100 million tons of waste that had accumulated. The proposal resulted in a massive public outcry and was successfully opposed by the people of New Orleans. This Report, published in the USA, describes the proposed Eppawala project as follows:...the companies have proposed a $ 425 million new mine, which will be situated near the town of Eppawala and will relocate some 12,000 villagers from 26 villages. Buddhist temples, schools and a large number of government buildings also face destruction. A coalition of Buddhist priests, farmers, former politicians and ex-soldiers have told President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga that they oppose the deal. We will not leave; the government will have to use soldiers to remove us from our homes, Mahanama Kadawata Piyarathana, a Buddhist monk and President of the Committee for the Phosphate Deposits, told journalists. Conclusion The disastrous experiences in Indonesia are about to be repeated in Sri Lanka, as indicated in the above report, unless some unexpected intervention occurs. This appeal is being addressed to the 48th International Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, meeting in Mexico, a third world country, in the hope that Pugwash will add its voice and lend its support to avert this impending tragedy. 289

319 INTERNATIONAL LEAGUE OF HUMANISTS Founded in Philadelphia, USA, Founders: LINUS PAULING, Nobel Prize winner (twice); AVA PAULING, Nobel Prize winner; SOPHIA WADIA, Nobel Prize winner; AURELIO PECCEI, President of the Club of Rome; IVAN SUPEK, President of the Croatian Academy of Science and Arts; PHILIP NOEL-BAKER, Nobel Prize winner. WORLD CONGRESS OF LEAGUE OF HUMANISTS, SARAJEVO, May 23 25, 1998 Encouraged by the reception to my presentation at Sarajevo, Eppawala was brought to the attention of Pugwash at the Student Pugwash conference in San Diego, July 1998, and at the 48 th Pugwash conference in Mexico, September/October Working Group 2 Non-Nuclear Threats to Security, Report at the latter conference spelled it out as follows: A very interesting case study of the concession of a phosphate mine in north central Sri Lanka to a US multinational corporation lays out the complicated interactions of the international economic order, and the impact on local populations and cultural heritage of large-scale, short-term economic development projects. The case involved the imminent destruction of an ancient water and soil conservation ecosystem in the pursuit of short-term fi nancial benefi t, desired by the state on account of the Asian fi nancial crisis and its impact on the Sri Lanka currency. The displacement of population will likely increase tensions within Sri Lankan society and perhaps contribute to the sectarian violence. In an effort to head off the mining project, an appeal is being made to UNESCO, through its International Council on Monuments and Sites, (ICOMOS) to recognize the irrigation system as a cultural heritage site. An appeal was also made for help by Pugwash in lobbying UNESCO to add the Sri Lanka water way (called the Kalaweva-Jayaganga ecosystem) to the list of its protected sites. This approach - involving concerned citizens and conservation scientists in an effort to head off destruction of the environment and cultural heritage - may be an area where Pugwash could make a contribution. Thereafter three books authored by me were published by Sri Lanka Pugwash on Eppawala:Eppawala, Destruction of Cultural Heritage in the name of Development. Vishwa Lekha WTO, Globalization and Eppawala, after Seattle, Vishwa Lekha. March 2000 Pugwash, Globalization and Eppawala Pugwash Betrayed? Or Eppawala Betrayed? Vishwa Lekha. August

320 INTERNATIONAL LEAGUE OF HUMANISTS, SARAJEVO, 1998 Destruction of Cultural Heritage as a Cause of Conflict in Sri Lanka D L O Mendis Your Excellencies, Members of the Permanent Committee of the International League of Humanists, Fellow Delegates to the World Congress of Humanists Unity, Ladies and Gentlemen, When I was informed about the decision of the Permanent Committee of the International League of Humanists to award to you the highest humanistic prize, the Golden Charter of Humanism, for your personal contribution to the process of developing the humanist principles, I responded immediately as follows: I am moved and deeply touched by the great honour you have done me that I may not even deserve. In multi-ethnic multi-religious Sri Lanka, today there are many men and women who should be honoured and encouraged by such recognition as the Golden Charter of Humanism, but they are unsung, even unknown, like the Unknown Soldier in war. Only on their behalf, the Unknown Heroes and Heroines of Humanism in Sri Lanka, I may accept this honour, and I shall do so in Sarajevo, with all humility, at the Ceremony on May 24. On this unique occasion in my life, I wish to present this paper, the Abstract of which was sent in advance for publication in the proceedings of this conference, in order to bring to your attention yet another impending disaster in my disaster-prone country, Sri Lanka. It is a disaster that can be averted and must never be allowed to happen: the destruction of the ancient Kalaweva-Jayaganga ecosystem, part of the man-made water and soil conservation ecosystems of Sri Lanka. This is an unique cultural landscape that is both a site and a monument, as defined by UNESCO s ICOMOS program, that should be conserved and used as part of the cultural heritage of all humankind. It is in grave danger of total destruction on account of a proposal to mine to exhaustion a rare deposit of igneous phosphate, apatite, which happens to be located at a place called Eppawala in the heart of this ancient cultural landscape. The immediate apparent urgency for promoting this project is said to be the need to raise foreign exchange, which may be used in the ongoing civil war, described as a war for Peace. Let me first give you a sketch of the ancient man-made water and soil conservation ecosystems of Sri Lanka, which are located in the ancient regions of Rajarata and Ruhunarata (Fig. 1). These systems had been built over a long period of over 15 centuries, commencing in the mid first millennium BC, mainly in what is today described as the dry zone. They are commonly and 291

321 Figure 2 2 ft. Engineering Surveys showing Vetiyas incorrectly described as irrigation systems. In medicine, the word irrigation is used to describe the movement of water under pressure to flush out impurities, in the stomach for example. In agriculture, the movement of water from storage reservoirs or diversion channels, to the soil root zone of crops, is also described as irrigation. But the storage and distribution of water in the ancient ecosystems of Sri Lanka, seen in totality, is a conservation function, of which the irrigation function is only a part. The totality of conservation in these ancient man-made ecosystems of Sri Lanka, in the humid tropics, includes both water and soil. They were developed to retain runoff from heavy rainfall in the dry zone monsoon season between October and January, for cultivation of food crops through the remaining dry months of the year. Rapid runoff is wasteful of water, and also causes harmful soil erosion. In the unique ancient water and soil conservation ecosystems of Sri Lanka much of the rainfall was stored not only in reservoirs but in the upland soil itself, especially the soils 292

322 above, below, and around reservoirs. For irrigation and cultivation of rice in the lowlands, storage in small, medium and large reservoirs was used. For cultivation of seasonal highland crops as well as a wide range of perennial tree crops, an unique system of storage in the upland soil was used, facilitated by construction of numerous small earth embankments or bunds called vetiyas, to raise and divert runoff into the highland soils (Fig. 2). Many large reservoirs and channels are still in use after piece-meal restoration and rehabilitation that started in colonial times, but the vetiyas have never been systematically restored. In fact, it is considered possible that many of what are described in the upland areas on topographical survey sheets as abandoned tank are in fact abandoned vetiyas. The ancient systems in Rajarata, had been built to serve the regions around the capital city of ancient Sri Lanka, Anuradhapura in the Malwatu oya basin, first, and augmented from more southerly basins like Kala oya, later (Fig. 3). After the capital was moved from Anuradhapura to Polonnaruwa after the 8th century, these systems on the western seaboard of Rajarata may have suffered some neglect, while systems constructed near and around the new capital, Polonnaruwa, in the eastern seaboard flourished (Fig. 4). The composite picture of the ancient storage reservoir systems for lowland rice cultivation in the ancient Rajarata or King s country at this time was an inter-connected system of large reservoirs and channels (Figs. 5 and 6) feeding smaller reservoirs called village tanks (Fig. 7). Modern irrigation engineers looking at these maps often marvel and wonder how the management of water issues in such complex composite systems was ever achieved in ancient times. Due to a variety of circumstances, the systems suffered a final apparently irreversible decline after the reign of the King Parakrama Bahu in Polonnaruwa ( ). By the time the western colonial powers visited the country, for trade and plunder, most of these systems had already been overtaken by the tropical jungle. The Portuguese who captured the Maritime Provinces in 1505, had no interest in the remains of the ancient systems lying in the jungle covered interior. The Dutch who took over from the Portuguese in 1656, did discover and restore some of the ancient systems, lying near the coast in the northwestern, northeastern and southeastern regions of the country. It was left to the British who wrested the Maritime Provinces from the Dutch in 1796, to capture the unconquered Kandyan kingdom in the central hill country, and rule the whole island, until During the long period of British occupation, the first new administrative department to be set up was the Surveyor General s department. The next was the Public Works department, which had an Irrigation Branch, which was converted into a full fledged department in The Survey department undertook a most comprehensive topographical survey of the whole island, starting in the mid nineteenth century, which was completed in the 1920 s. These topographical survey sheets were originally plotted and published on a scale of one mile to an inch, but they have been recently converted to a metric scale of 1:50,000. These maps were used by R.L. Brohier to document a comprehensive history titled Ancient Irrigation Works in Ceylon, published in three volumes in 1933/34, which remains the standard reference work on the subject to this day. The evolution and development of the ancient systems over such a long period, their sustainability and stability over an even longer period, and their apparently final irreversible decline immediately after the reign of King Parakrama Bahu ( ), are still subjects for serious study by scholars and researchers from many different disciplines. Contributory causes for the final decline that have been identified include: invasions from southern India, internecine strife, destruction on account of war, elimination of a class of persons called kulinas who were responsible for the maintenance and operation of the systems, the advent of malaria, prolonged cyclonic rainfall, earthquakes, and the fall of the Vijayaraja empire and the consequent decline in foreign trade (Indrapala, 1971). My own addition to this list is the advent of hydraulic engineering during or after the reign of King Parakrama Bahu ( ). That king had a stupendous record 293

323 of reconstruction and rehabilitation of the ancient systems in his time, that are well documented. It is possible that by introducing a hydraulic engineering approach during the course of this accelerated development he started the final decline of the systems. This is of interest today on account of the recent Accelerated Mahaweli Development Project. For, as Kossambi once said to learn about the past in the light of the present, is to learn about the present in the light of the past. The contrasting concepts of a hydraulic engineering perspective and a water and soil conservation ecosystems perspective arises from the fundamental difference in how water is seen, as inanimate and active in the former perception, and as animate and passive in the latter. The consequences may be summed up as shown in Table 1. Restoration work was begun in colonial times, especially in the 19th century under the British and continued after independence in In the ancient Rajarata or King s country, the complex of interconnected large reservoirs and channels was only restored in piece-meal fashion, and the grand lietmotif of the ancient inter-related system of groups of reservoirs and channels was lost (Brohier, 1937) (Maps 3, 4, 5, 6). This is really an indication of the superiority of the ancient systems, in overall conceptual terms, as well as in the successful irrigation water management within the systems, as compared to the rather less elaborate modern systems. Of the small village tanks, in all parts of the island, some 8000 are shown on the 1:50,000 topographical survey sheets of the island, described as working, and another approximately 7000 are shown as abandoned. Restoration of small village tanks goes on to the present day. Restored works in various parts of 294

324 the country are now under the administrative authority of the Irrigation department (Arumugam, 1969), and the Mahaweli Authority of Sri Lanka. With this introduction to the water and soil conservation ecosystems of Sri Lanka, let me now describe the Kalaweva-Jayaganga cultural landscape which is presently under threat by the proposal to mine the Eppawala phosphate rock deposit to exhaustion, by a multinational corporation. The Jayaganga is indeed a masterpiece of creative genius, in the totality of its conception, as well as in details of its construction. In regard to the latter, for example, the first 17 miles of the channel from the sluice at Kalaweva (reservoir) has a gradient of only 6 inches in the mile or approximately 1 in 10,000 (Brohier, 1934, Vol. II, p. 8). It s width is about 40 feet throughout its 54 1/2 mile length to the reservoir at its end, Tissaweva. Even today, it is rarely that a water supply channel of this magnitude, is built with such a small gradient. The Kalaweva-Jayaganga ecosystem has been described as follows (Brohier, 1937, 70): The Jayaganga, indeed an ingenious memorial of ancient irrigation, which was undoubtedly designed to serve as a combined irrigation and water supply canal, was not entirely dependent on its feeder reservoir, Kalaweva, for the water it carried. The length of the bund between Kalaweva and Anuradhapura intercepted all the drainage from the high ground to the east which otherwise would have run to waste. Thus the Jayaganga adapted itself to a wide field of 295

325 irrigation by feeding little village tanks in each subsidiary valley which lay below its bund. Not infrequently it fed a chain of village tanks down these valleys - the tank lower down receiving the overfl ow from the tank higher up on each chain. The Jayaganga is a 54 1/2 mile long contour channel built at least 15 centuries ago, if not earlier. It s first 40 miles lie in the basin of the Kala oya (non-perennial river), after which it crosses the catchment divide and enters the Malwatu oya basin. The eastern or right bank of the Kalaweva basin above the Jayaganga drains into this contour channel as described by Brohier, above. This channel feeds cascades of small storage reservoirs, called village tanks, lying on its western or downstream side in the Kala oya basin. On account of the trans-basin supply of water to the Malwatu oya basin, the Kalaweva-Jayaganga ecosystem impacts on that river basin as well (Fig. 7) The history of the Kalaweva-Jayaganga ecosystem has been documented by R.L. Brohier (Brohier, 1934, II, 3-7). The history of the Malwatu oya basin systems has also been documented by the same authority (lbid, 10-12). Other historians and scholars have also contributed to our understanding of the ancient irrigation works or water and soil conservation ecosystems, before and after Brohier, who however remains the doyen of historians on these systems. 296

326 The Kalaweva-Jayaganga ecosystem is a living system, a cultural landscape that is as functional and productive as was originally intended. It is an outstanding example of human settlement and traditional land-use in Sri Lanka, representative of a culture that has a continuous unbroken documented history of more than two thousand years. At one time, modern hydraulic engineers had proposed that existing village tanks in the area were inefficient and should be replaced by channel irrigation and distribution systems. This was resisted by local villagers whose views ultimately prevailed, at least at that time (Mendis, 1997). The Kalaweva-Jayaganga is the principle artery in the complex of water and soil conservation ecosystems in the ancient Rajarata. It still functions, as it did some fifteen centuries ago, and is very much an integral element in the landscape. Since it passes through Eppawala it is under imminent threat on account of a proposal to mine to exhaustion in just 30 years a rare deposit of igneous phosphate rock, apatite, located in the heart of the system (Fig. 8). This deposit has 297

327 been used since 1974, to provide phosphate fertilizer for local agriculture, using an appropriate technology that does not harm the cultural landscape as the proposed new project most certainly will (Mendis, 1974). If continued in this manner, it will be possible to conserve this cultural landscape for centuries to come, while easily extracting all the needed phosphate fertilizer for local consumption, and even for export of some surplus. However, if the new proposal to mine to exhaustion the Eppawala phosphate rock deposit by a multinational corporation is implemented as planned, this unique man-made water and soil conservation ecosystem will be seriously damaged, if not totally destroyed. This gives a new urgency to the need to have this system declared as a World Heritage site or Cultural Landscape. There is a certain element of uncertainty relating to the presentation and promotion of the Kalaweva-Jayaganga cultural landscape, in so far as it should be conserved for future generations. This is probably due to the absence of a multi-disciplinary approach to its management, which has permitted business interests to propose the exploitation to exhaustion of the phosphate rock 298

328 deposit in a very short period of 30 years without any reference to the Cultural Landscape in which it is located. UNESCO intervention is therefore seen as an issue of great urgency. At the UNESCO World Heritage Convention meeting on Heritage Transportation Canal Corridors held in Ottawa, Canada, September 15-19, 1994 a paper on Canal Corridors in Sri Lanka was presented by Professor Leelananda Prematilleke. At this meeting of experts, Dr Henry Cleere of ICOMOS, made the following observation on Criterion (iii) of the six criteria laid down in the Operation Guidelines for implementation of UNESCO s World Heritage Convention: As presently phrased, this criterion relates essentially to archaeological sites and monuments. China s Grand Canal and the Jayaganga of Sri Lanka are examples of canals for which this criterion would be appropriate. For various reasons, follow-up on this recommendation has not been done, until present circumstances have given added urgency to the need to do so in respect of the ancient Kalaweva- Jayaganga cultural landscape. The Jayaganga really is: a human made water and soil conservation ecosystem ; and the term transportation canal corridor, hardly does justice to the totality of the Kalaweva-Jayaganga ecosystem which is a classic example of a cultural landscape. In conclusion, it is worth mentioning that the whole question of how the interconnected system of reservoirs and channels had been conceived and constructed in the ancient Rajarata, over a period of several centuries, still intrigues researchers and scholars. For example, Tissaweva at the tail end of the Jayaganga had been built in the third century B.C.(Brohier, 1934, 11, 10). 299

329 Kalaweva at the head end had been constructed in the fifth century (Ibid, 4). The historical chronicles, Mahavamsa and Culavamsa, describe the continuous functioning of the Kalaweva- Jayaganga system over more than a thousand years. One hypothesis for the development of these interconnected systems over many centuries is that a channel was usually built first, as a river diversion irrigation structure, below which a system of small tanks (reservoirs) and minor channels developed, around which the human settlements grew. Over a period of time, usually running into centuries, a substantial economic surplus was achieved and accumulated from the river diversion system of crop production. Some of this surplus was used in operation and maintenance of the ecosystems, and some for construction of the magnificent religious stupas, a few of which are recognized by UNESCO as Cultural Heritage Monuments. Thereafter the system was consolidated by construction of storage reservoirs at the tail end and/or the head end of the river diversion canal, thus completing the evolution and development of an unique cultural landscape. Conclusion The US multinational corporation that intends to enter into contract with the Sri Lanka government to mine to exhaustion the Eppawala phosphate rock deposit, has a very bad record in Indonesia that has been reported in the recent May/June 1998 issue of World Watch, the environmental journal published in USA. Subsequent to this publication, widespread civil commotion and rioting has broken out in Indonesia, and the latest news at the time of this writing is that President Soeharto has offered to resign, while students have taken over the Parliament building in the capital city. The following are some excerpts from the World Watch article: It is the richest mine in the world, with assets exceeding $60 billion, and the Indonesion government received $480 million in 1996 from the 10% stake it owns in the operation. But development of this remote site, which physically occupies more than 10,000 hectares, has taken a heavy toll on the local people and their environment. Each day the operation extracts more than 165, 000 tons of ore from the mountain - 98% of which is subsequently dumped into the Ajkwa river for disposal. The sediment load in the river is now fi ve times its natural concentration, and the mining wastes have contaminated thousands of hectares of forests downstream. Environmental groups have claimed that the tailings from the mine which contain dissolved arsenic, lead, mercury, and other potentially dangerous metals, have killed fish, poisoned sago forests (a traditional food source), and made the water dangerous to drink. Since mining first began, local communities have resisted the presence of [the multinational corporation], and the driving force has been a widespread resentment over what is perceived as a neo-colonial interference by outside interests At the moment-they do not have an avenue in which to express dissatisfaction short of basically going to armed confl ict... Deforestation of the country s vast rain forests spurs more confl ict and controversy that any other development practice... It is worth remembering that in rainforests in the humid tropics 95% of the nutrients are in the vegetative cover and only 5% in the soil, whereas in temperate regions the opposite is the case, with 95% of the nutrients in the soil and 5% in the (vegetative cover (Gore, 1992, 117). Destruction of rainforests therefore means removing inherent fertility, so that if the denuded land is used subsequently for crop (production fertility will have to be restored by use of chemical fertilizer (and fertilizer responsive seed, instead of local seed varieties), all usually imported. In Sri Lanka, the ancient peoples had developed an ecosystem that represents an active adaptation to nature, in contrast with modern agricultural and crop production systems that seek to dominate nature. With the final decline of these systems after the 12th century, the jungle overran the ancient civilization. The Dutch were the first western colonial power to discover the remains of these systems in the tropical jungles, and the British began systematic restoration, albeit on a 300

330 piece-meal basis. After independence in 1948, we continued restoration and reconstruction for few years, before launching on some altogether new schemes. The first of these, the Gal oya project, in fact was started before independence, modeled on the Tennessee Valley Authority, TVA. This was the clearest possible indication of our inferiority complex towards the west, because we did not have the knowledge (and confidence) to understand and realize that the ancient water and soil conservation ecosystems in Sri Lanka should be the model for sustainable and stable development in the west. Transfer of technology in the form of the accumulated wisdom and experience of ages should have been from us to them, not the other way around. Last year, on a visit to the Rocky Mountain Institute, USA, I was informed by the RMI Water group about destruction of the environment in USA by hydrologic engineers from the US Bureau of Reclamation, Denver, Colorado, as documented in Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner, which had been made into a five part TV film. Copies of both the book and the video film were presented to me by RMI. On my return to Sri Lanka I have tried to bring this to the notice of high-level decision- makers most of whom still turn to the USBR for inspiration, and turn their backs on the ancient water and soil conservation ecosystems of our own country. The process of convincing them is necessarily slow, and the lessons of experience from other so-called developing countries, like Indonesia, takes time to sink in. Hence the urgency of the situation facing us on account of the proposed Eppawala Phosphate rock project that will destroy the heartland of the ancient cultural landscape of the Rajarata, if it is allowed to be implemented as planned. In all humility, I seek the support of fellow Humanists, through the International League of Humanists, to help avert this impending tragedy. Thank you. References Arumugam, S. Water Resources of Ceylon. Water Resources Board, Colombo, 1969 Brohier, R.L. Ancient Irrigation Works in Ceylon, Government Press, Colombo, 1933/34 Brohier, R.L. Inter-relation of Groups of Reservoirs and Channels in Ceylon. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, (Ceylon Branch), Vol Gore, Al. Earth in the Balance - Ecology and the Human Spirit. Houghton-Mifflin Company, Boston, New York, 1992 Indrapala, K. (Ed.) The Collapse of the Rajarata Civilization and the Drift to the Southwest. Journal of the Humanities, University of Peradeniya, 1971 Mendis, D.L.O. Planning the Eppawala Phosphate Rock Project using Appropriate Technology. Transactions of the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka, 1974 Mendis, D.L.O. Meaningful Development - A Pugwash Perspective. Sri Lanka Pugwash, Kandy, 1997 World Heritage Convention: Heritage Transportation Corridors. Proceedings of an International Meeting of Experts. Chaffey Locks, Ontario, Canada, September 1994 World Watch, May/June

331 Pugwash Conference No. 49, 1999 South Africa as Leader of the Non Aligned Movement some issues from Sri Lanka: 1. Eppawala phosphate in Sri Lanka and Baja California Saltworks in Mexico 2. The National Engineering Research and Development Centre in Sri Lanka South Africa has been the leader of the Non Aligned Movement (NAM) since taking over the chair from Columbia in At the 48th Pugwash conference in Mexico, in 1998, a question was raised at the final plenary session, concerning the void created by the collapse of the former Soviet Union, leaving a single super power in post cold war global politics. Super-power politics in the cold war era was based on countervailing power that springs from the barrel of a gun, as stated by Chairman Mao long ago. But, the unique experience of Nelson Mandela in S. Africa seemed to bring back a long absent element of humanity in global politics. The question was whether this could create a resurgence of moral strength from the NAM under Mandela, as a force of countervailing power in global politics? The answer from the panel at Mexico was an unequivocal negative: in the real world, military power is real and irresistible; moral power in comparison is illusory. Nevertheless, moral power has been effective in such situations as when governments have been pressurized to release prisoners of conscience, for example. The very example of Nelson Mandela s lifelong struggle against the oppression of white supremacy adds to that of Gandhi s in another day and age. For these reasons, two examples from Sri Lanka are presented in this paper where some aspects of moral power are invoked: one to check the destructive plans of a multinational corporation in Sri Lanka, aided and abetted by the local comprador class; and the other simply in the cause of local engineering research and development seen as the corner-stone of non-dependent economic development. At the Student Pugwash USA meeting in San Diego, in 1998, several presentations in Working Group 8, on Science, Technology and Culture, touched on this approach to development. Rian Leith from South Africa presented the concept of Ubuntu, and the Collective Fingers Theory, as the philosophy underlying the new South Africa, also expressed in its motto Unity is Strength. Leith said that the Xhosa proverb umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu means I am because we are, and added: Ubuntu will continue to be entrenched in South African society mainly because of Mandela s successor Thabo Mbeki, and his visionary policy of an African Rennaissance. Deborah Hussey from USA, writing on Democratizing Science and Letting Ethics into the Lab. described the unethical activities of some multinational corporations that impact adversely especially on third world countries that are hard pressed to defend themselves. She said:..science can be brought into balance if we value collaboration as well as competition, the rest of nature as well as man, and the emotional as well as the rational; after all like the wave-particle, nature-nurture, and mind-body dualities, these distinctions are artificial and by no means absolute. Akifumu Fujita from Japan, discussed the development of Nuclear technology in Japan, after World war II ended with the needless atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He described how the Japan government had:... proposed a budget of 235 million yen (derived from U-235) for the building of nuclear piles. In protest at this undemocratic wav of making decisions the Science Council of Japan made an appeal to the public stating three principles for peaceful use of atomic energy. These three principles, democracy, autonomy, and openness were enacted in the Atomic Energy Act of December He went on to say that: the development of nuclear energy in Japan has been an undermining process of the Three 302

332 Principles under the domination of the USA in the global framework of the Cold War. Can the spirit of the Three Principles survive today? It can survive and it must survive. These examples from the Student Pugwash conference encouraged me to hope that the younger generation cares, and will try to correct some of the wrong trends of their elders. It is mainly for this reason that the following examples are presented in this paper. 1. Eppawala phosphate in Sri Lanka and Baja California Saltworks in Mexico A proposal by an US multinational corporation to mine to exhaustion in 30 years, a rare non-renewable igneous phosphate rock deposit in Eppawala, Sri Lanka, is before the Sri Lanka authorities. There has been public agitation against the proposal ever since it became public knowledge less than two years ago, long after negotiations had started, but apparently before an agreement had been signed. This was discussed at the 48th Pugwash conference in Mexico last year and mentioned in the Working Group 2 report. The Pugwash Newsletter, April 1999, announced the publication of my book titled Eppawala - Destruction of Cultural Heritage in the name of Development. At the SPUSA conference in San Diego, July 1999, on Social Responsibility of Scientists in the new Millennium, this topic was again discussed, and mentioned in the report of Working Group 8 on Science, Technology and Culture. In the case of the Baja California Saltworks in Mexico, a US multinational corporation has entered into an agreement with the Mexico government to build a Saltworks that will result in destruction of the last nursery of the grey whale. 34 renowned scientists, including 9 Nobel laureates have addressed an Appeal against this proposal that has been given publicity in the media. After the SPUSA meeting, attempts were begun in USA to bring the Eppawala proposal to the individual attention of these 34 scientists and seek their support against the proposal, on account of the adverse impacts on our cultural heritage in Sri Lanka, comparable to the adverse impacts of the Baja California project on the grey whale nursery, and the environment. This was discussed in Sri Lanka, August 12, 1999, at a presentation on Social Responsibility of Scientists - Eppawala phosphate and Baja California Saltworks, at which the Director- General of the Board of Investment, Sri Lanka, which is responsible for the Eppawala project, was present. He stated that the proposal to exhaust in just 30 years, the non-renewable resource which will last for over a millenium if used to supply local needs alone, was taken up because of the need for foreign exchange. He however disclaimed responsibility for the decision, passing it on to the politicians. It is known that hard currency is needed not only for normal development, but for purchase of ordnance for the ongoing ethnic conflict. Thus the issue is tied up with the most vital problem confronting Sri Lanka today, the separatist war. The situation then is that officials disclaim responsibility for such a far-reaching action. Politicians are blamed, but they do not take the people into their confidence at all. There is a need for outside pressures to be brought to bear on the Sri Lanka government by concerned scientists and citizens from around the world in a manner similar to the pressures brought on governments for release of Prisoners of Conscience, for example. Communications should be addressed to the President of Sri Lanka urging that the proposal for mining the Eppawala phosphate deposit to exhaustion in 30 years be abandoned. Further information will be made available at the 49th Pugwash conference in Rustenburg, S. Africa. 2. The National Engineering Research and Development Centre of Sri Lanka The need for an engineering research and development centre in Sri Lanka has been recognized for a long time. In the late 1960s attempts to start a Technology Development Centre in Kandy floundered, but the idea was not abandoned. In the early 1970s, outstanding engineering R&D work in the State Engineering Corporation in the decade of the 1960s, was identified as a possible nucleus around which to build a full-fledged National Engineering Research and Development centre. A Cabinet paper was prepared by this author in the Ministry of Planning and Economic 303

333 Affairs for formal approval by the government. After a three year period of internal maneuvering, lobbying, buck-passing, and dilly-dallying, a full-time Chairman was finally appointed in Meanwhile, however, the inspiration for setting up the Centre, the research and development work in the State Engineering Corporation, had taken a nose-dive. The reason was the enforced departure of the Chairman around whom the R&D work had been done, on account of a typical politically motivated witch-hunt, after a change of government in 1970, followed by the exit of many talented persons in his wake. Thereafter the NERD centre, under an inexperienced academic, functioned for three years from an office in Colombo, on the basis of research grants given for such activities as the manufacture of a dental chair, making a mockery of the whole concept of engineering research and development for national economic non-dependence. A project for the local manufacture of a low cost personal transport vehicle, and another for local development and manufacture of a two wheeled tiller, were done outside the NERD Centre at this time, in the Ministry of Industries, and the Ministry of Planning and Economic Affairs, respectively. For diverse reasons both these projects were later abandoned. With the next change of government in 1977, the former Chairman of the SEC was recalled to take over the NERD Centre, and activate it to equal or surpass the achievements of the former R&D section of the SEC for which he had been responsible. An extensive plot was obtained in a suburban Industrial Estate and the NERD Centre was soon in business as intended years ago. With the retirement of the Chairman his successor continued the good work and the NERD Centre recently celebrated its 25 anniversary with the opening of a Technology Park. This is the first of its kind in Sri Lanka and has tremendous potential for sharing and propagating local, indigenous, and transferred, science-based technology with practical applications in the economy. As a strategy for development, it is considered necessary to bring this to the attention of Pugwash and other foreign scientists, so that there could be mutual benefits from cross-cultural collaborations. Already such cross cultural exchanges have started. One example is a proposal from an organization in California for research and development for manufacture of a bladeless turbine. In this day and age, information is freely available on the Internet web pages. The web page for the Tesla Engine Builders Association (TEBA) has been very useful. Hopefully this will be a joint venture based in the NERD Centre, and other such projects will follow. Conclusion Finally, two other endeavours merit mention here. First is a project to set up a Science and Technology Centre at the Faculty of Engineering in the University of Peradeniya. This is an initiative of Faculty alumni, some of who are in good employment in foreign countries. It will be developed around a small Applied Mechanics laboratory set up over the years, as a labour of love by a distinguished faculty member Professor Mahalingam. The second, the singular endeavour of a Sri Lanka scientist. is the recently inaugurated Pemberley Study Centre, an unique international study centre on the lines of the Rockefeller Centre in Bellagio, Italy. Dr Brendon Gooneratne who will himself be a participant at this conference, has prepared a video presentation for the information of Pugwash scientists, some of whom he hopes will be future scholars at this Centre. My own hope is that the Centre will be the venue for many Pugwash Workshops in the future. The attention of Pugwash scientists is drawn to these endeavours. 304

334 Pugwash Conference No. 50, Cambridge, England 2000 The WTO, Globalization, and Conflict in Sri Lanka D L O Mendis Establishment of the open economy in 1977, in Sri Lanka, is associated with a now famous pronouncement by the Head of State: Let the Robber Barons come, a clear invitation to multinational corporations. The President also announced: I can do anything except make a man a woman, or a woman a man, thus implicitly assuring political support for the invited robber barons, from the beginning. Establishing the open economy in Sri Lanka in 1977 was a bold idea far ahead of its time in Asia. World Bank and IMF directed structural adjustment programs were introduced in Sri Lanka afterwards, whereas in many other countries, like India for example, IMF and World Bank inspired and directed structural adjustment programs have preceded the opening up of their economies. The cumulative effect of all this opening up is the process described as globalization. Globalization has not been correctly understood in Pugwash For example, at the 47th international Pugwash conference in Lillehammer, Norway, a draft Working Group report presented at a plenary session had reference to spontaneous globalization. It was pointed out that globalization is a recent buzz word, which means different things to different persons. As seen and understood in third world countries, it is by no means spontaneous, but deliberate, being the consequences of IMF and World Bank policies and strategies, like, for example, their structural adjustment programmes. (Mendis, 1997, 196). Significantly, despite this intervention by me at the final plenary session, the Pugwash Working Group report was not revised, and the term spontaneous globalization was retained in the final published version of the report, as follows: There is clearly an accelerating trend in global governance fed by both a conscious realization in many fields of human endeavour that humanity s needs cannot be met at the national level, resulting in attempts by governments to establish new international institutions, arrangements and law and by de facto, spontaneous globalization in economics, trade and communication. (Pugwash, 1997, 79). To anyone familiar with the work of the WTO, this statement is not acceptable. For, de facto spontaneous globalization simply does not exist; rather globalization is the result of the activities of the IMF and the World Bank, now supported by the WTO, the successor to the GATT. The dangers of the GATT were understood in India from at least the time of the Dunkel draft that started the socalled Uruguay Round in 1986, and protests were organized to raise public awareness. An example was the Third World Farmers Rally in Bangalore in 1993, which drew a massive crowd estimated at between 5 lakhs and a million people. Among the issues discussed at that meeting were biopiracy, and other forms of intellectual piracy under the GATT s trade related intellectual property rights (TRIPS). Many examples were given, of which patenting the neem seed was perhaps the most prominent. (In Sri Lanka, however, the impact of GATT was taken as totally benign in official circles, and there was hardly any conscience raising activity outside). The WTO has indeed been exposed as the modus operandi for multinational corporations to take control of the economy of a country, especially but not exclusively a developing country (Wallach and Sforza, 1999). Actually, the process had started quite a long time ago. In the USA for example it had been said that... government is weaker than the corporate institutions purportedly subordinate to it. This is the politics of capitalism. It is not at all expressive of a conspiracy, but rather of political forms and economic interests on a plane determined by the ongoing needs of corporate institutions... (Hacker, 1965, in Horowitz, 1970, 11-12). 305

335 In regard to conspiracies, an observation made by Senator Fulbright in a US Congress speech may be quoted. Referring to the US military-industrial complex he said: I do not think the military-industrial complex is the conspiratorial invention of a band of merchants of death. I almost wish it were, because conspiracies can be exposed and dealt with. But the components of the new American militarism are too diverse, independent, and complex for it to be the product of a centrally directed conspiracy. It is rather the inevitable result of the creation of a huge permanent military establishment, whose needs have given rise to a vast private defense industry tied to the Armed forces by a natural bond of common interest. (Fulbright, 1967, Proceedings of Congress, 36181). Another commentator observed:... explosions now taking place [in the underdeveloped world] are doing so in an anti- American, anti-capitalist, anti-western context. For many years these continents have been the happy hunting grounds for corporate adventurers, who have taken out great resources and great profi ts and left behind great poverty, great expectations and great resentment. Gunnar Myrdal points out that capitalist intervention in underdeveloped countries thus far has almost uniformly had the result of making the rich richer and the poor poorer... (Ferry, in Hacker, 1965, in Horowitz, 1970). The Eppawala phosphate rock project in Sri Lanka is a recent example of a typical intervention by a multinational corporation under cover of globalization. This was brought to the attention of Pugwash at the 1998 Mexico conference. (Mendis, 1999, 16). The response embodied in the report of the Working Group 2 was extremely positive: A very interesting case study of the concession of a phosphate mine in north central Sri Lanka to a US multinational corporation lays out the complicated interactions of the international economic order, and the impact on local populations and cultural heritage of large-scale, short-term economic development projects. The case involved the imminent destruction of an ancient water and soil conservation ecosystem in the pursuit of short-term fi nancial benefi t, desired by the state on account of the Asian fi nancial crisis and its impact on the Sri Lanka currency. The displacement of population will likely increase tensions within Sri Lankan society and perhaps contribute to the sectarian violence. In an effort to head off the mining project, an appeal is being made to UNESCO, through its International Council for Monuments and Sites, to recognize the irrigation system as a cultural heritage site. An appeal was also made for help by Pugwash in lobbying UNESCO to add the Sri Lanka waterway (called the Kalaweva- Jayaganga ecosystem) to the list of its protected sites. This approach - involving concerned citizens and conservation scientists in an effort to head off destruction of the environment and cultural heritage - may be an area where Pugwash could make a contribution. (Ibid, 16-17). This was later followed up by maximum publicity given by Pugwash to a publication on the subject, Eppawala - Destruction of Cultural Heritage in the name of Development, in the Pugwash quarterly Newsletter, April, Despite all this support, there were unmistakable signs that the multinational corporation involved in the proposed Eppawala project intended to ride roughshod over the protestations of local people in Sri Lanka. It was therefore considered necessary to make further presentations at both the Student Pugwash USA 20th anniversary conference in San Diego, 1999, and at the 49th international Pugwash conference in S. Africa, and seek renewed support to defend the very sovereignty of the Sri Lanka people, that was under threat. The presentation at the SPUSA meeting was well received, but the presentation at the Rustenburg conference met with a calculated rebuff. The paper was totally ignored in the Working Group report prepared by a rapporteur who had also ignored many of the other specific issues mentioned in other proffered papers (Pugwash Newsletter, Vol. 36, No. 2, p ). The working group report was in effect no more than a statement of the rapporteur s own perceptions on development as seen by comparison with his 306

336 own proffered paper. Since the Working Group report could not be discussed by members of that group at the final plenary, the report went unchallenged. Thereafter, a futile correspondence was started amongst members of this working group, by this author, using the , to seek a way to make amends. This effort came to nought on account of the rules of Pugwash which preclude any amendments to a working group report after it has passed the final plenary. The WTO Ministerial meeting was scheduled to be held in November/ December 1999 in Seattle, USA. Awareness of the dangers to sovereign nations that are destabilized by the WTO led globalization, led to anti-wto demonstrations, rallies, Teach-in conferences, and other awareness raising activities, before and after the WTO Ministerial meeting in Seattle. In the end the Ministerial meeting from which much had been expected by multinational corporations, the IMF and the World Bank, was effectively aborted. During and after the anti-wto rallies in Seattle, advantage was taken to give publicity to the Eppawala phosphate rock project. My book titled Eppawala, Destruction of Cultural Heritage in the name of Development (Mendis, 1999) was made available to interested persons. Response and support from a number of individuals and organizations was extremely encouraging. It was thereafter considered necessary to further consolidate the offensive against the multinational corporation involved in the proposed Eppawala project by putting together another publication. A new book WTO, Globalization and Eppawala, after Seattle, which is a collection of articles by eminent authorities on WTO and Globalization, as well as on Eppawala, has been the result (Mendis, Ed. 2000). The essence of the message in this book, released on World Water Day March 22, 2000, is that the very sovereignty of nations is threatened by the activities of the WTO and globalization. Hence the multinational corporation can ride roughshod over protestations of local people at Eppawala. However, Pugwash is concerned with causes of war and armed conflict, which is not necessarily the same issue. Another book is therefore under preparation to be titled Pugwash, Globalization and Eppawala - Pugwash Betrayed or Eppawala Betrayed? It is hoped to have this book published in time for the 50th Pugwash conference in August, The title of this book comes from another publication Buddhism Betrayed? published some years ago, which was later banned in Sri Lanka. The essence of the argument presented by the author of Buddhism Betrayed, an anthropologist, and the editor, a leading economist, was that development policy in Sri Lanka based on the triad of the small tank (reservoir), the Buddhist stupa and the paddy (rice) field was doomed to failure. It was also suggested that this policy was being promoted by Buddhist priests (monks) for their own ends; hence the title in which much significance was attributed to the question mark, in later discussions. At the 48th Pugwash conference in Mexico, a paper presented by an eminent Christian scholar carried a statement that violent conflict in Sri Lanka was being promoted by Buddhist priests (monks) although Buddhism was a religion of pacifism. Although I was not in the particular Working Group where this paper was presented, I took back to Sri Lanka a number of papers distributed at the conference, and was amazed that such a statement had gone unchallenged in that Working Group. It was not substantiated even by a footnote reference, and was no more than an opinion of the author. I therefore entered into a discussion with the author and other members of that Working Group on the challenging the veracity of the statement. The end result was that the author decided in the spirit of Pugwash as he claimed, to delete the offending sentence. I refrained from including in those discussions the following quotation taken from another study on war and conflict, which however merits inclusion in the present context: We the inheritors of the Judeo-Christian tradition, have preached peace and practiced war. The fact is that our civilization has for centuries practiced neither the Jewish teaching of justice under moral law, nor the Greek teaching of rational thought and behaviour, nor the Christian teaching of love, compassion and universal brotherhood. It has spawned crusaders, 307

337 inquisitors, conquerors and tyrants - Torquemadas, Napoleons, Hitlers, and Stalins - not a single prophet of brotherhood and peace. The Western World which we like to think of as the cradle of civilization has been the breeding ground of most of the fratricidal confl icts with which the human race has been affl icted during the past 2000 years (Coffi n, 1964, 27-28). It was apparent that in this instance the Pugwash meeting had been used for proselytizing, however subtle. Some remarks made by other participants in that Working Group in discussions suggested this. This will be further amplified in the proposed book. (see pp ) In Sri Lanka today, a so-called ethnic conflict is raging. It has now been recognized as an economic war waged against an elected government by a minority ethnic group of secessionists. Having started and become established as a long-drawn out civil war in the north and east of the country, it has now spread to virtually all parts of the country. The presence of comparatively large numbers of the minority ethnic group in all parts of the country while the majority is de facto excluded from large areas in the north and east, is given little publicity in slanted news reports abroad. Given both Pugwash lack of awareness concerning the nature of globalization, and the proselytization referred to above, it is not likely that Pugwash has seen through such misleading news reports. In these circumstances, steps have been taken to revive the Sri Lanka Pugwash Group and bring international Pugwashites to Sri Lanka. It is proposed to offer all facilities for a Pugwash Workshop to be held in Sri Lanka as early as possible within the Pugwash rules governing such activities. Meanwhile local Pugwash meetings will proceed as planned. In conclusion, passing mention should be made of a particularly deadly method now in use, the suicide bomber, against whom there is no known remedy. It is more deadly than the suicide cyanide capsule which has long been used by the terrorists, also known as liberation fighters by their secessionist supporters. One man s terrorist is another man s freedom fighter (David Carlton and Carlo Schaerf, 1981). Suicide bombers have succeeded in assassinating the Prime Minister of India, the President of Sri Lanka, and many other national and military leaders in Sri Lanka. Last December, the first real failure of such an attack was the attempted assassination of the President of Sri Lanka at a pre-election meeting in Colombo. The plot behind the assassination attempt has still not been exposed. To summarize, in conclusion: causes of war are deeply entrenched in socio-political realities that are often little understood by outside observers however well intentioned and however learned. In conferences of the prestigious Pugwash movement, there should be no room for such outsiders to promote their own ends and pursue their own private objectives, be they religious proselytizing or a search for consultancy opportunities in poor developing countries. References The Armed Society, Militarism in Modern America Tristam Coffin. Penguin books. Proceedings of the US Congress, Corporations and the Cold War Edited with an Introduction by David Horowitz. Monthly Review Press. Contemporary Terror. Studies in Sub-State Violence Ed. David Carlton and Carlo Schaerf. Macmillan Proceedings of the 47th International Pugwash Conference, 1997, p. 79. Meaningful Development - A Pugwash Perspective D.L.O. Mendis, Sri Lanka Pugwash Whose Trade Organization? Corporate Globalization and the Erosion of Democracy Lori Wallach and Michelle Sforza. Public Citizen, Washington, D.C. Eppawala - Destruction of Cultural Heritage in the name of Development D.L.O. Mendis, Sri Lanka Pugwash. Eppawala, WTO and Globalization, after Seattle D.L.O. Mendis, (Ed.) Sri Lanka Pugwash. Pugwash, Globalization and Eppawala - Pugwash Betrayed or Eppawala Betrayed? D.L.O. Mendis, Sri Lanka Pugwash. 308

338 Pugwash Conference No. 55, Hiroshima 2005 Science and Civilisation in Sri Lanka D L O Mendis Sirimalwatte, Kandy: Tradition says that this was a royal flower garden made by King Dutugemunu (164 B.C.); that there was a street between the city of Anuradhapura and the fl ower garden, so thickly peopled that a basket of flowers picked in the morning passed from hand to hand and reached the city in time for the evening offering. Background Apart from tradition, common in all cultures with ancient roots Lanka has an unique record of history, well documented from recognized historical sources, going back to the mid first millennium BC. Ancient chronicles and other sources, corroborated by contemporaneous rock inscriptions, many in the early brahmi script, others in Pali, Prakrit, Sinhala and Tamil, and at least one in Chinese, include the earliest Dipavarnsa, dating back to the 3 rd century of the present era, Mahavamsa or Great Chronicle dating to the 5th century, and Culavavamsa or little chronicle compiled in the 12th century, which continued the Mahavamsa record. This unique scholastic tradition is continued in the, University History of Ceylon series started in The ancient chronicles were recorded in blank verse by Bhikkhus, as they say at the end of each chapter, for the serene joy and enlightenment of the pious with numerous references to ancient sites and monuments, but with little information about science, technology, and engineering, as understood today. This lacuna should be filled by modern, scholars, motivated by such vibrant living monuments as the ancient water and soil conservation ecosystems that are still very much in use, but are now being destroyed by ignorance and technology transfer as will be shown in this paper, and the tallest burnt brick structures ever constructed on earth, like the Buddhist stupa Jetavanaramaya. This gigantic stupa, built nearly 20 centuries ago, and some other ancient sites and monuments, like the famous Sigiriya fortress in the sky described by Arthur C Clarke as the eighth wonder of the ancient world, are now being conserved with assistance from UNESCO. Having worked in the late 1980s at the Needham Research Institute, in Cambridge, England, with Dr Joseph Needham whose monumental Science and Civilisation in China is an abiding inspiration to scholars, the original idea for a comprehensive study on Science and Civilisation in Sri Lanka, was born at that time. The words of the Indian savant D D Kossambi: To learn about the present in the light of the past is to learn about the past in the light of the present, was further pragmatic justification for the proposed project. A Panel discussion was held in October 2003, at the Organisation of Professional Associations, OPA, Colombo, on Science and Civilisation in Sri Lanka an Idea whose Time has come. This was of course inspired by Needham s monumental work and was intended to supplement in the areas of science and technology, the sources of history included in the University History of Ceylon series. Admittedly this is a truly ambitious if not gargantuan long term undertaking. When Joseph Needham was posted to the British embassy in Peking (Beijing, today) in 1942, he was already a Fellow of the Royal Society, FRS, for his work in biochemistry, and having mastered a dozen or so languages, was well on his way to being elected a Fellow of the British Academy, FBA, as well. And, when he achieved this, he anticipated C P Snow s two cultures of the arts and the sciences. He spent four years traveling all over China, learning Mandarin and collecting material for a book on Science and Technology in ancient China, which he announced in 1946 would be published in one year. The first volume of Science and Civilisation in China came out in 1954, by which time Needham had worked out the whole concept of his monumental work and found collaborators as well, principally Professor Wang Ling, the great historian of China and the far east, at that time. Volume I also included the contents pages of six volumes to 309

339 follow, thus justifying eight years spent in its compilation since the first announcement was made in For the proposed Science and Civilisation in Sri Lanka project, it was felt that the scholarship in the Panel brought together in October 2003, collectively matched Needham and Wang Ling, in proportion to the smaller scale of the two countries history and geography, and the availability of data. This was reason for the optimism in starting the project, similar ideas for which had been announced in the past, in the Institute of Fundamental Studies, IFS, Kandy, and in the Sri Lanka Association for the Advancement of Science, SLAAS. Neither had, taken off, despite some publicity and expenditure incurred in the IFS in the former instant, and some publicity among SLAAS members in the latter. The present proposal has also been brought to the attention of SLAAS members through its Science and Technology Advisory Committee, STAC. It is agreed that the ancient water and soil conservation ecosystem, better known as ancient irrigation systems, is the foundation base of the ancient so-called hydraulic civilization of Sri Lanka, by far the most important aspect for the study, together with the ancient medical systems. Both these ancient systems, the former technological and the latter scientific according to current terminology, have functioned effectively sustaining the population in varying measure through the ages from the late first millennium BC down to the present day. As a result, there is interest in study of ancient science and technology in the west today. The structure and contents of Volume I will follow to some extent the structure and contents of the University History of Ceylon, and will also contain a preview or forecast of later volumes to come, as was done by Joseph Needham in his first volume. It is intended that future volumes will include Medicine, Agriculture, Art and Architecture, among others. Contents of Volume I will be the Geographical background by Professor C B Dissanayake; the Pre-historical background by Dr Siran Deraniyagala; and a comprehensive study of the Ancient Water and Soil Conservation Ecosystems of Sri Lanka by Dr C G Weeramantry and D L O Mendis. Major themes of this study will be active adaptation to nature and passive adaptation to nature, as seen in these systems, as described in the following analysis by Professor Carl Mitcham, where cultivating has been described by researchers like R L Brohier, and constructing by others, like Ananda Coomaraswamy for example in his Medieval Sinhalese Art. Professor Carl Mitcham wrote: Cultivating versus Constructing Aristotle was the first to suggest a fundamental distinction between two types of making action, cultivating and constructing (see Physics, a12-17; Politics a2; and Oeconomica a b2). Cultivation involves helping nature to produce more perfectly or abundantly things that she could produce of itself, and includes the technai or arts of medicine, teaching, and farming. Construction entails reforming or molding nature to produce things not found even in rare instances or under the best of circumstances, as with carpentry. As Andrew G Van Melsen (1961) restates this distinction: `In farming, although man performs all kinds of preparatory tasks, such as clearing, plowing, and sowing, nature itself has to do the rest. Once his preparatory task is done, man can only sit down and wait. It is the inner growing power of living nature which performs the work. (pp ) By contrast, The craftsman gives natural materials forms which would not naturally arise in them. The technical object is something which is not cultivated but constructed, i.e. its component parts are arranged in an artifi cial pattern. The fashioning of these parts forces them into forms and functions which are not naturally present in them. (p. 236) 310

340 Thus, `in the work of construction there is a far more direct intervention in the natural order than there is in the work of cultivation (p. 236). Another version of this distinction might contrast technological actions that are in some way in harmony with nature with those that are not. The environmental and alternative technology movements can be interpreted as reviving this cultivation- construction distinction: intermediate or soft technologies assist or imitate nature by acting in harmony with it, whereas hard or high technologies depend on conditions and processes not found in nature. The former can also depend on renewable resources whereas the latter use up nonrenewable resources. Note too how the difference at issue could be read as restating distinctions already present in terms of artifacts (tools versus machines), while pointing toward the possibility of another between types of technology as volition (the aim of harmony or peace versus control or domination). Many of the ancient irrigation works in Sri Lanka have been restored starting from colonial times, but some major new irrigation and multipurpose projects have been super-imposed on ancient schemes, notably Gal oya, Uda Walawe, and Lunugamvehera, with a climax of sorts reached in the more recent Mahaweli development project. These modern projects have had some adverse results as discussed below. History of Engineering in Sri Lanka A History of Engineering in Sri Lanka series was started in the Institution of Engineers, to honour past Presidents of the Institution with Felicitation or Commemoration volumes. A History of the Railway, felicitated BD Rampala, and Innovation and Self Reliance, felicitated Dr ANS Kulasinghe. S Arumugam was commemorated with Water for People and Nature, published jointly with Sri Lanka Water Heritage. Engineers, especially some younger members who are supportive of the History of Engineering in Sri Lanka series, are expected to become involved and contribute to the Science and Civilisation in Sri Lanka project. They will then learn about the present in the light of the past and avoid the mistakes of their forebears especially on projects in the southern area of Sri Lanka. For example, when the new Uda Walawe reservoir in the south was selected from a map titled the Water Resources Development Plan, 1959, engineers failed to follow the principles of modern water resources development planning, as spelled out by Kuiper: 1. Defi ne the purpose of the engineering project. Formulate its useful end which makes the creation of the project a desirable objective 2. Plan the project in accordance with its established purpose. Investigate alternative proposals, and select the project that will most effectively fulfill this purpose 3. Design the project in the most efficient manner and in accordance with appropriate criteria of safety 4. Construct the project according to its design, while applying suitable standards of workmanship 5. Operate the project, thus bringing the useful end of the engineering plan into concrete existence. The second principle in the above, viz: Plan the project in accordance with its established purpose. Investigate alternative proposals, and select the project that will most effectively fulfill this purpose, was simply ignored when first Uda Walawe, and then Lunugamvehera reservoirs were selected from the Water Resources Development Plan, 1959, for investigation and construction, in , and Water Resources Development Plan, 1959 The Water Resources Development Plan, 1959, did not take adequate account of the ancient irrigation works in the island. It shows a number of sites for new large reservoirs identified 311

341 by examining the one mile to an inch topographical survey sheets showing contours at 100 ft. intervals, based on land surveys, which incidentally are an outstanding achievement of the British colonial period. Sites for new large reservoirs were found on these topo sheets, without special reference to the ancient irrigation works to prepare the Water Resources Development Plan, Ancient small reservoirs and channels, collectively called minor or village irrigation works, were omitted, and only the largest ancient reservoirs and channels were taken account of, on the (wrong) assumption that they were an early stage in development of irrigation systems, and are `inefficient. Irrigation design engineers at that time misled themselves into believing that the ancient irrigation works had evolved in four successive stages, according to a hypothesis to justify this, as follows: 1. Small tanks from which water was baled out. 2. Small village tanks. 3. A large reservoir that submerged a number of the small village tanks built earlier. 4. Diversion of a flowing river to augment the large reservoir. One reason why this hypothesis is untenable, is that a small reservoir, now called a village tank (after the Portuguese tanque), was the heart of the living ancient village, and the name of a village is still often synonymous with the name of the small tank. Submerging small tanks therefore meant submerging village settlements, which is absurd. But by and large engineers are not knowledgeable about our history. Location of Uda Walawe reservoir, which submerged a large number of ancient small reservoirs or village tanks, was determined by joining the 300 ft. contours on either side of the Walawe ganga (river). The full supply level, FSL, was fixed at 290 ft. msl, after a water balance study, to match the quantity of water available from the average seasonal flow in the river at the site, with the estimated area of cultivable land in the river basin below. There is a single use of irrigation water for crop production in this system, but if Kuiper s second principle had been followed, an alternative upstream site at Ukgal Kaltota near the 500 ft. contour would have been investigated, and selected for construction. This site would command ancient small - scale systems, with reuse of irrigation water in the downstream river basin in minor village works, as in the ancient system, achieving far greater water use efficiency. This has been discussed in many Pugwash conferences. Under development in Southern Sri Lanka R L Brohier showed that chains of small` tanks depended on interconnected large reservoirs and channels, in the Kalaweva- Jayaganga irrigation system in western Rajarata, the ancient king s country: The Jayaganga, indeed an ingenious memorial of ancient irrigation, which was undoubtedly designed to serve combined irrigation and water supply canal, was not entirely dependent on its feeder reservoir, Kalaweva, for the water it carried. The length of the bund between Kalaweva and Anuradhapura intercepted all the drainage from the high ground to the east which otherwise would have run to waste. Thus the Jayaganga adapted itself to a wide field of irrigation by feeding little village tanks in each subsidiary valley which lay below its bund. Not infrequently it fed a chain of village tanks down the valleys - the tank lower down receiving the overflow from the tank higher up on each chain After the large irrigation and multi-purpose Walawe project was built without considering alternatives, another large reservoir in the southern area, selected from the Water Resources Development Plan, 1955, Lunugamvehera reservoir on lower Kirindi oya, was built without regard for scientific principles of water resources development planning ignoring a better alternative upstream site at Hurathgamuva. Lunuganvehera investigations were done by technocrats in the Irrigation department and bureaucrats in the Ministry of Irrigation, during the closed economy, , defying 312

342 written directions given by the Ministry of Planning and Economic Affairs, to investigate the Hurathgamuva site as well. When government changed after free and fair general elections in 1977, the techno-bureaucracy put up Lunuganvehera to the new government for implementation as a fait accompli. When representations were made by engineers in the Ministry of Planning concerning this, a Committee of five engineers was appointed by the new Minister of Irrigation to advise him, and they recommended by a simple 3 to 2 majority that the already investigated Lunugamvehera reservoir project should be constructed to save time. No questions were asked as to why the alternative site at Hurathgamuva had not been investigated, when specific directions had been given to do so. As time passed Lunugamvehera reservoir project became A Colossal Monument to Technological Folly, as anticipated in a newspaper article in 1982, when the project was yet under construction. The deep underlying reasons for that gloomy forecast due to the incorrect location of the new reservoir, were known to peasant farmers in the area, but they were never consulted when the reservoir site was first identified in the Water Resources Development Plan Damage to natural and human made ecosystems in the area due to this project being far too near the sea were dramatically exposed after the December 26, 2004 tsunami. Pugwash and the tsunami of December 26, 2004 As early as December 29, 2004 a proposal was submitted to the Pugwash Council to have a Pugwash international conference in Sri Lanka, in December 2005 / January 2006, to commemorate the tsunami. But, since dates for annual Pugwash conferences are determined several years in advance, a Sri Lanka conference could only be held in Since this date is too far in the future, a Special or Extraordinary international Pugwash conference in Sri Lanka in February 2006, is now under consideration by Pugwash Council. Meanwhile, virtually every concerned citizen is involved in some post tsunami activity. My wife and I went south as soon as the A2 road was restored in just one week. Later I was in a team of medical doctors to Batticaloa and Trincomalee districts in the east, and then I was a member of a government appointed team in the Matara district in the south, the Team Leader being my wife. (Purely volunteer work, no nepotism!). Others included two environmental engineers, one from the World Bank, the other from TAFREN, the government s Task Force for Rebuilding the Nation. I was also on the first train to Matara on February 20, and I am also involved with Engineer V Tharumaratnam (Tharu) whose Miniwell Systems do water related projects. Tharu also visited the so-called uncleared areas under the control of the LTTE, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in the north and east. His present assignment in post tsunami work for the Singapore Buddhist Association is funded by the Singapore Red Cross, with myself as Adviser. He visited Singapore in this connection and appraised them about some unspoken difficulties faced by us in our work here. Tharumaratnam, though not a Pugwashite himself, is remembered by Pugwash for his offer to fund an international Pugwash conference in Sri Lanka, as Cyrus Eaton did when he started the Pugwash movement with the first conference in his birthplace, Pugwash, Nova Scotia, Canada, in Tharu s offer was accepted by the Pugwash Council, for the 1983 conference, after a visit by Joseph Rotblat who met local scientists at several meetings in Colombo and Kandy. It was not to be however, on account ofunexpected opposition from a small but influential group of local scientists, and a Sri Lanka Pugwash Symposium on Tropical Agriculture was held instead. It has been stated many times over that the tragic events of July 1983 that has led to a protracted conflict in Sri Lanka, may not have occurred or would have been dealt with differently if it did occur, if that international Pugwash conference had been held in Sri Lanka in At one of the first post-tsunami meetings in the Urban Development Authority, I said that we had observed everywhere that coconut trees had withstood the tsunami impact, and suggested that new housing on the sea front should be built on circular columns with the space underneath 313

343 used for beaching the boats and storing accessories. Tharu and I had built a pioneer house of this type on a hillside in Kandy more than 40 years ago. A researcher from the Swaminathan Institute Chennai, Dr Kavesan confirmed at a UNHCR meeting in Colombo that traditional housing on beaches in S. India, are on stilts, but our suggestion has not been accepted. Post tsunami restoration work in Sri Lanka meanwhile has been very slow, and is fraught with bureaucratic red tape, close to corruption. A Joint Mechanism, JM, for work in LTTE controlled areas, and its successor P-TOMS or Post Tsunami Operations Management Structure has added to the confusion. One reason for this is absence of an institutional setup in government for long term perspective planning and plan implementation. This goes back to when the open economy was introduced and the Ministry of Planning and Economic Affairs was abolished, in January and with it my own position of Adviser (Techniques). A top government spokesman actually said that there was no need for government planning because hereafter the market will decide everything! The Ministry of Finance was re-designated the Ministry of Finance and Planning but the important Divisions of Perspective Planning and Plan Implementation in the erstwhile Ministry of Planning and Economic Affairs were wound up instead of being relocated in the new Ministry. Another important aspect of attempts at post tsunami restoration in Sri Lanka, is the polarization of forces representing and supporting government policy, and those opposed to it. Government early announced a sea front safety zone 100 metres from the sea, within which no buildings were to be constructed, presumably for the safety of citizens. This was disputed, particularly because height above mean sea level was not included in the alleged safety regulation. The significance of this omission was personally experienced by this author and the Team Leader for the Matara district, just before 12 midnight on March 20, 2005 when an alarm was given on national radio of another approaching tsunami. Together with thousands of others, we took off inland, looking for a temple on high ground rather than distance from the sea. It was only after another official radio announcement was made at 3.00 am that this was a false alarm, that people started returning. The 100 m. rule has been given a sinister interpretation as an attempt to save the beaches for the tourist industry, at the cost of the local fisher folk who occupied most of it earlier, and are now in temporary camps, housed in tents or wooden shanties, without proper water supply and sanitation. Permanent housing seems a long way off as at now, in most areas. Inroads into the fisher folk s right to the beaches had already been made by entrepreneurs and affluent locals, well before the tsunami, and the value of sea front properties had steadily increased. A 100% tax on foreigners purchasing property had been introduced by the government that took office in 1994, and when this was repealed by the successor government in 2001, it led to a storm of protests. This tax was re-introduced by the government that took office after the general elections in Successive Sri Lanka governments have been trying to build fisheries harbours, since the 1960s or even earlier. In India after the tsunami, an established political movement called the Fisher peoples co-operatives, led by a charismatic Catholic priest Rev. Thomas Kocherry of Kerala, took quick action to restore sea front property, to the fishing communities, on the basis that they are beach fisherman who do not need fisheries harbours. This movement is affiliated with MONLAR, the Movement for protecting Land and Agricultural Resources in Sri Lanka. Monlar is affiliated with the World Social Forum, WSF, started in Puerto Niegro, Brazil, in 2001, to oppose the World Economic Forum, WEF, the group of rich capitalist countries that traditionally meet in Davos, Switzerland, every year. After some protests in Davos, the location for the WEF meeting has also been moved elsewhere. After the WSF had met in Brazil every year from 2001 to 2003, the venue was shifted to Mumbai, India, in Thereafter the need to set up more decentralized Social Forums in all parts of the so-called Third World has been recognized and steps are being taken towards this end. Consequently, a well organized two day seminar was held in Negombo, Sri Lanka, June 4-5, 2005, to discuss common problems and set up an Asia - Pacific Social Forum. Thomas Kocherry gave a stirring presentation on the rights of the fisher people, justifying their claim to the beaches, 314

344 as against the claims of speculators, entrepreneurs and property developers. This brought to mind the situation in Cuba under General Batista that led to his violent overthrow by Fidel Castro, Che Guevera, and their comrades in The Negombo conference was followed by another on June 6-7, to discuss the World Trade Organisation, with the same participants and a few more, from non tsunami affected countries from Turkey in the west to Japan in the east, and even a few land-locked countries, making a total of 147 nations. It was found that there was some interest and potential support for the Science and Civilisation in Sri Lanka project, amongst a few participants. For example, an European participant from Indonesia, was interested in the connections between Borobodur in Java, and Kandarodai in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, a notable item in our project. Political background The political background in Sri Lanka needs mention. Universal adult franchise had been granted by the colonial rulers in 1931 just two years after women had achieved the vote in Britain. The Westminster model of parliament came into existence after Ceylon gained political independence in A tradition of free and fair general elections began, with the incumbent government being defeated at the polls at every general election from In this tradition, the electorate gave, the new United Left Front coalition a two thirds majority of seats in parliament at the July 1970 elections. However, within less than a year after taking office, the new government was surprised by an attempted armed insurrection of disgruntled youth in April 1971 that was suppressed, allegedly with an excess of brutality. Thereafter a Republican constitution was introduced in 1972, under the ancient name, Sri Lanka. At another free and fair general elections in 1977, there was a sharp swing, the new political right of centre government commanding 140 seats in a 168 seat Parliament. A Presidential system of government was introduced in 1978 and the old division of powers between Legislature, Judiciary and Executive, was changed. A new system of voting at elections primarily for the party and a preferential vote for the individual was also introduced, to prevent recurrence of the big electoral swings seen in 1956,1970 and 1977, when incumbent governments were simply routed. The general result is not satisfactory because the President is effectively above the law of the land, and because the voter cannot easily identify the politician who represents his electorate as a Member of Parliament. All this contrasts with the Indian polity, where national planning is practiced through the mechanism of a recurring five year plan, since independence. Approaching the new millennium, with a renowned nuclear scientist, Abdul Kalam, as President, India went a step further setting up TIFAC, the Technology Information Forecasting and Assessment Council, at the highest level of government in 1998, for long term national planning. Although India is a regional power with vast manpower and material resources it has also had to face problems that Sri Lanka did not face in the early post independence period, so much so that many older Sri Lanka elites wistfully recall the good old days under colonial rule. After the tsunami, India announced that they did not need any foreign assistance, and in fact assisted Sri Lanka one of the first countries to do so. An important aspect of the confusion in the polity in Sri Lanka today, is the influx of foreign aid agencies and multinational corporations in the name of development. One of the most endangered areas is the water sector where by definition the ancient water and soil conservation ecosystems are the most important, and vulnerable component. This has been the subject of many presentations by me at international Pugwash conferences. There is also danger of privatization of water against the better judgement of local experts, on account of pressures from foreign multinational corporations backed by government reliance on the WTO. In British times, R L Brohier spent a lifetime studying the ancient irrigation works, publishing what is recognized as the most authoritative book on the subject, Ancient Irrigation Works in Ceylon, in three volumes in 1933 / 34. An Annex in Volume II, reproduces a 1855 report of three British surveyors who had discovered seven adjacent ancient reservoirs, collectively called Kothabadhanijjara or Parakrama Sagara. 315

345 The Governor of Ceylon, Sir Henry Ward, had personally satisfied himself about the accuracy of the three surveyors report, and his inspection Minutes, including that report, was published in the Ceylon Almanac in According to the ancient chronicle Culavamsa, King Parakrama Bahu 1( ) had constructed three gigantic reservoirs called seas of Parakrama, of which the first, Parakrama Samudra, has long been identified, and restored. Parakrama Sagara was the second, but its discovery by the colonial surveyors remained buried in the Ceylon Almanac, 1857, till Brohier re-published it, and thereafter the report was again confined to oblivion. These reservoirs are located in the eastern part of the ancient Rajarata or King s country, with its capital at Polonnaruwa from where Parakrama Bahu had reigned over the island. Golden Age of engineering There was a burst of creative engineering activity in the period , described as the Golden Age of engineering in modern Sri Lanka, before and after the achievement of Dominion status in 1948, but local engineering enterprise and endeavour went into decline thereafter. In the United Left Front, ULF, government of , the closed economy was definitely a cause, and after the advent of the open economy in 1978, it was the other extreme, the advent of the robber barons, who were blithely invited by the new President who for reasons known only to himself said Let the Robber Barons come. After the advent of the open economy, ancient Parakrama Sagara became a victim of the biggest modern development project in Sri Lanka, the Accelerated Mahaweli Development project, launched in 1978 to complete in five years a development program that had been planned in 1966 for a 30 year period beginning in It was well behind even that modest time schedule at the time the new government took office in The Mahaweli river is the longest river in the island with a basin area of about 4000 sq. miles, out of nearly 25,000 sq. miles total area of Sri Lanka. The Mahaweli project is an irrigated agriculture and hydro-power development program involving construction of a number of large reservoirs selected from the Water Resources Development Plan, One of these new large reservoirs, Moragahakande reservoir and its associated North Central Province or NCP canal, was in such a location as to destroy forever the ancient Parakrama Sagara. After the issue was taken up, there was a name change to Upper Elahera canal, which deceived no one, and more recently there are rumours, of further changes, but the invariable ultimate objective of borrowing a large sum of money, euphemistically called foreign aid, remains unchanged. In the context of the ongoing ethnic conflict, at least one ill-informed VIP observer thinks that the Moragahakande reservoir and NCP canal will send good Sinhala water to Tamil areas, so that any opposition to the project is viewed from that perspective. In the now established tradition of intolerance to alternative thinking, alternatives are not considered. Only ideas and concepts from foreign sources, especially the World Bank and IMF, are given attention. Attempts to establish the economic and ecological sustainability of the ancient Parakrama Sagara, as against the inevitable environmental disasters that would result from the modern Moragahakande and NCP canal, even worse than Lunuganvehera, have not met with success. Hence serious study of ancient Parakrama Sagara may remain in the realms of academic research like the Science and Civilisation in Sri Lanka project, perhaps with little hope of ever being implemented. Just as the proposed Moragahakande reservoir project will destroy the ancient Koththabadhanijjara now lying unrestored in the eastern region of Rajarata, another project that would have a disastrous, destructive impact on the living heritage of our ancient water and soil conservation ecosystems, is the Eppawala phosphate project, which will destroy the western region of ancient Rajarata. Pugwashites are familiar with this project, and support given in Pugwash meetings is documented in three books published in Sri Lanka. Pugwash and Eppawala The Eppawala phosphate rock (apatite) deposit was identified in a geological survey in Rajarata in the early 1970s (Figure 5). After the abortive insurrection of 1971 job opportunities 316

346 for youth were urgently needed. The Ministry of Planning started a project for quarrying, crushing and grinding Eppawala apatite, on a labour intensive basis for plantation crops, with conversion to soluble phosphate fertilizer for seasonal crops like rice, later. Some research was done at the time in the University of Peradeniya. However, the project was taken over by the Ministry of Industries and Scientific Affairs, and the longer term objectives were forgotten. Instead of progressive development of technology locally the idea was born in the 1980s that transfer of technology from a multi-national corporation was necessary to produce soluble super-phosphate. The idea was pursued by decision makers in Colombo without reference to the people of Eppawala, who became aware of it only in the 1990s, when surveyors arrived to mark out a project to mine the apatite to exhaustion by two US and Japanese multinational corporations in just 30 years! Local people led by the Ven. Mahaman Kadawala Piyaratne Nayake Thera, protested, and filed a Fundamental Human Rights case in the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka in The Supreme Court in a historic Judgement on June 2, 2000 put the project in abeyance. Meanwhile Eppawala was brought to the attention of Pugwash at the 20th Student Pugwash conference in San Diego, July 1998, and at the 48th international Pugwash conference in Mexico, September/October At both these Pugwash meetings there was gratifying understanding of our problems, and maximum support was offered. The Working Group 2 Report at the Mexico conference spelled it out as follows: A very interesting case study of the concession of a phosphate mine in north central Sri Lanka to a US multinational corporation lays out the complicated interactions of the international economic order, and the impact on local populations and cultural heritage of large-scale, short-term economic development projects. The case involved the imminent destruction of an ancient water and soil conservation ecosystem in the pursuit of short-term fi nancial benefi t, desired by the state on account of the Asian fi nancial crisis and its impact on the Sri Lanka currency. The displacement of population will likely increase tensions within Sri Lankan society and perhaps contribute to the sectarian violence. In an effort to head off the mining project, an appeal is being made to UNESCO, through its International Council on Monuments and Sites, (ICOMOS) to recognize the irrigation system as a cultural heritage site. An appeal was also made for help by Pugwash in lobbying UNESCO to add the Sri Lanka water way (called the Kalaweva-Jayaganga ecosystem) to the list of its protected sites. This approach - involving concerned citizens and conservation scientists in an effort to head off destruction of the environment and cultural heritage - may be an area where Pugwash could make a contribution. The Pugwash Newsletter of April 1999 carried an announcement about the first in a trilogy of Eppawala books, Eppawala Destruction of Cultural Heritage in the name of Development. (see box). This also had the result that a Nobel Laureate Philip W Anderson of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, joined the campaign to save Eppawala, giving us much needed support in the USA. Dr. C G Weeramantry, who will be giving the Dorothy Hodgkin memorial oration at Hiroshima, on July 26, 2005, is a former Vice President of the International Court of Justice, The Hague. His contributions are without precedent in that he introduced new perspectives of a common universal human heritage, where previous World Court judgements reflected only western legal and cultural perspectives. For example, he has shown that the great jurist Grotius had been anticipated by Arab jurists, Avicenna and Averros, by as much as eight centuries! Judge Weeramantry s Separate Opinion in the Case Concerning the Gabcikovo - Nagymaros Project, called the Danube Dam Case, includes a definitive study of the ancient water and soil conservation ecosystems of Sri Lanka, commonly called the ancient irrigation system. This was quoted and discussed in the first book in the Eppawala, trilogy. The Supreme court s Eppawala judgement also quoted from that Separate Opinion, describing these ancient systems as water and soil conservation ecosystems. 317

347 Dr Weeramantry s book Nauru, Environmental Destruction under International protection, is a single volume abridgement of eight volumes prepared by a Committee chaired by him at the request of the Nauru government. This is recognized as a watershed in the history of environmental law, just as the Eppawala case is recognized as a landmark in Sri Lanka. The Nauru case was later heard in the World Court, and won, but the story of Nauru island does not end there. The islanders are now in penury with their traditional way of livelihood destroyed. This will also be the fate of Eppawala if the phosphate mining is done as planned. Again, in the second volume of Dr Weeramantry s four volume classic Justice Without Frontiers, there is a chapter titled the Problem of Appropriate Technology, where he describes the circumstances under which a developing country can find itself at the receiving end of a technology misadventure, with a concluding statement on the Nauru case. Reference to this chapter shows that the Eppawala project in Sri Lanka, is a comparable misadventure of this type. This was an example of what Dr Weeramantry has described as the developing worlds role is that of passive receiver of technology. He says that since Technology has an even more intimate interaction on society than pure science, we should ensure that technological choice should turn in the direction of technologies which liberate the many rather than strengthen the few. Despite all this, a recent front page headline in local newspapers on 2nd March 2005, referred to a Public Enterprises Reform Commission, (PERC) advertisement calling for Expressions of Interest (EOI) in respect of the Eppawala phosphate rock deposit. PERC is a state organization set up under the World Bank s structural adjustment program, and follows policies favourable to foreign investment. Thus the Eppawala project was being revived, despite the judgement in the Fundamental Rights case, because very important persons, VIP s, are interested in it, with support from equally or more important foreign vested interests. However, open discussion is still possible and maximum advantage is being taken of this. On his retirement from the World Court, Judge Weeramantry set up WICPER, the Weeramantry International Center for Peace Education and Research in Colombo, where young scholars are privileged to do research work under his guidance. It is possible that the Science and Civilisation in Sri Lanka project may come under the wing of WICPER after publication of the first Volume, in which the major topic will be the ancient Water and Soil Conservation Ecosystems of Sri Lanka, co-authored by Dr Weeramantry and myself. Conclusion This paper, with a wide background of information, is being presented at the 55 th international Pugwash conference in Hiroshima, July 2005 to identify Pugwashites who may be interested in the Science and Civilisation in Sri Lanka project. One Pugwashite who has already shown interest is Professor Caesar Voute a former UNESCO director, a fourth generation Dutch settler in Indonesia, (but now living in Bulgaria), who is very knowledgeable about Borobodur which is related to Kandarodai in Sri Lanka mentioned above. Eppawala - Destruction of Cultural Heritage in the Name of Development A Sri Lanka Pugwash Group publication Eppawala is the story of the concession of a phosphate mine in north central Sri Lanka to a US multinational corporation that analyzes the complicated ramifications of large-scale, short-term economic development projects for the cultural heritage oflocal populations. The case involves the imminent destruction of an ancient water and soil conservation ecosystem, and the magnificent religious edifices in Anuradhapura, in the pursuit of short-term financial benefit, desired by the state on account of the Asian financial crisis and its impact on the Sri Lanka currency. The study concludes that the displacement of the local population will likely increase tensions within Sri Lankan society and perhaps contribute to the sectarian violence. In an effort to head off the mining project, an appeal has been made to UNESCO, through its International Council for Cultural Monuments and Sites, to recognize the indigenous irrigation system (known as the Kalaweva Jayaganga ecosystem) as a cultural heritage site. Sri Lanka Pugwash would welcome the help of other Pugwash groups in lobbying UNESCO to add the Sri Lanka waterway to the list of its protected sites. contact: D.L.O. Mendis, Sri Lanka Pugwash, pugwash@sltnet.1k] 318

348 Art, Truth and Politics 2005 Nobel Literature Prize Lecture by Harold Pinter The Nobel Peace Prize for Literature in 2005 was won by the British author Harold Pinter. In his Nobel lecture he delivered a scathing criticism of the war in Iraq, thus emulating Judge Dr C G Weeramantry who was the first to publish a book on the illegality of the US actions in Iraq. Pinter was later reported as having charged British Prime Minister Tony Blair with being a war criminal, no less, and I was informed about this news item by Dr Weeramantry. Unknown to most of us, Harold Pinter s Nobel Lecture on December 8, 2005 had been an appropriate prelude to the Sir Joseph Rotblat Memorial ceremony at the Royal Society on December 9, and the UN Humanist day on December 10. The Nobel lecture - Art, truth and politics In 1958 I wrote the following: `There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false. I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false? Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost. I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did. Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or an image. The given word is often shortly followed by the image. I shall give two examples of two lines which came right out of the blue into my head, followed by an image, followed by me. The plays are The Homecoming and Old Times. The first line of The Homecoming is What have you done with the scissors? The first line of Old Times is Dark. In each case I had no further information. In the first case someone was obviously looking for a pair of scissors and was demanding their whereabouts of someone else he suspected had probably stolen them. But I somehow knew that the person addressed didn t give a damn about the scissors or about the questioner either, for that matter. `Dark I took to be a description of someone s hair, the hair of a woman, and was the answer to a question. In each case I found myself compelled to pursue the matter. This happened visually, a very slow fade, through shadow into light. 319

349 I always start a play by calling the characters A, B and C. In the play that became The Homecoming I saw a man enter a stark room and ask his question of a younger man sitting on an ugly sofa reading a racing paper. I somehow suspected that A was a father and that B was his son, but I had no proof. This was however confirmed a short time later when B (later to become Lenny) says to A (later to become Max), Dad, do you mind if I change the subject? I want to ask you something. The dinner we had before, what was the name of it? What do you call it? Why don t you buy a dog? You re a dog cook. Honest. You think you re cooking for a lot of dogs. So since B calls A `Dad it seemed to me reasonable to assume that they were father and son. A was also clearly the cook and his cooking did not seem to be held in high regard. Did this mean that there was no mother? I didn t know. But, as I told myself at the time, our beginnings never know our ends. `Dark. A large window. Evening sky. A man, A (later to become Deeley), and a woman, B (later to become Kate), sitting with drinks. `Fat or thin? the man asks. Who are they talking about? But I then see, standing at the window, a woman, C (later to become Anna), in another condition of light, her back to them, her hair dark. It s a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author s position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to define. You certainly can t dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man s buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your hands, people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort. So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time. But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot. Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice. He must be prepared to approach them from a variety of angles, from a full and uninhibited range of perspectives, take them by surprise, perhaps, occasionally, but nevertheless give them the freedom to go which way they will. This does not always work. And political satire, of course, adheres to none of these precepts, in fact does precisely the opposite, which is its proper function. In my play The Birthday Party I think I allow a whole range of options to operate in a dense forest of possibility before finally focussing on an act of subjugation. Mountain Language pretends to no such range of operation. It remains brutal, short and ugly. But the soldiers in the play do get some fun out of it. One sometimes forgets that torturers become easily bored. They need a bit of a laugh to keep their spirits up. This has been confirmed of course by the events at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad. Mountain Language lasts only 20 minutes, but it could go on for hour after hour, on and on and on, the same pattern repeated over and over again, on and on, hour after hour. Ashes to Ashes, on the other hand, seems to me to be taking place under water. A drowning woman, her hand reaching up through the waves, dropping down out of sight, reaching for others, but finding nobody there, either above or under the water, finding only shadows, reflections, floating; the woman a lost figure in a drowning landscape, a woman unable to escape the doom that seemed to belong only to others. 320

350 But as they died, she must die too. Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority ofpoliticians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed. As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true. The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it. But before I come back to the present I would like to look at the recent past, by which I mean United States foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. I believe it is obligatory upon us to subject this period to at least some kind of even limited scrutiny, which is all that time will allow here. Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified. But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now. Although constrained, to a certain extent, by the existence of the Soviet Union, the United States actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked. Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America s favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as `low intensity conflict. Low intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued or beaten to death the same thing and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in US foreign policy in the years to which I refer. The tragedy of Nicaragua was a highly significant case. I choose to offer it here as a potent example of America s view of its role in the world, both then and now. I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s. The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They 321

351 raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity. Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. Father, he said, let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer. There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch. Innocent people, indeed, always suffer. Finally somebody said: But in this case innocent people were the victims of a gruesome atrocity subsidised by your government, one among many. If Congress allows the Contras more money further atrocities of this kind will take place. Is this not the case? Is your government not therefore guilty of supporting acts of murder and destruction upon the citizens of a sovereign state? Seitz was imperturbable. I don t agree that the facts as presented support your assertions, he said. As we were leaving the Embassy a US aide told me that he enjoyed my plays. I did not reply. I should remind you that at the time President Reagan made the following statement: The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers. The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution. The Sandinistas weren t perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilised. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated. The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of health care and education and achieve social unity and national self respect, neighbouring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things. There was of course at the time fierce resistance to the status quo in El Salvador. I spoke earlier about a tapestry of lies which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a `totalitarian dungeon. This was taken generally by the media, and certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic or official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the government, two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala. The United States had brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of successive military dictatorships. Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of the Alcatl regiment trained at Fort Benning, 322

352 Georgia, USA. That extremely brave man Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people died. Why were they killed? They were killed because they believed a better life was possible and should be achieved. That belief immediately qualified them as communists. They died because they dared to question the status quo, the endless plateau of poverty, disease, degradation and oppression, which had been their birthright. The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. `Democracy had prevailed. But this policy was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened. The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven. Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn t know it. It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn t happening. It didn t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis. I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It s a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, the American people, as in the sentence, `I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people. It s a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words the American people provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don t need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it s very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US. The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn t give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain. What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days - conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead? Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only 323

353 tolerated but hardly thought about by what s called the International community. This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be the leader of the free world. Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally - a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man s land from which indeed they may never return. At present many are on hunger strike, being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anaesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture. What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States has said: to criticise our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You re either with us or against us. So Blair shuts up. The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading - as a last resort - all other justifications having failed to justify themselves - as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people. We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East. How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice. Therefore if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in the dock Bush has warned that he will send in the marines. But Tony Blair has ratified the Court and is therefore available for prosecution. We can let the Court have his address if they re interested. It is Number 10, Downing Street, London. Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don t exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. We don t do body counts, said the American general Tommy Franks. Early in the invasion there was a photograph published on the front page of British newspapers of Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a little Iraqi boy. A grateful child, said the caption. A few days later there was a story and photograph, on an inside page, of another four-year-old boy with no arms. His family had been blown up by a missile. He was the only survivor. When do I get my arms back? he asked. The story was dropped. Well, Tony Blair wasn t holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other mutilated child, nor the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It dirties your shirt and tie when you re making a sincere speech on television. The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of harm s way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot, in different kinds of graves. Here is an extract from a poem by Pablo Neruda, I m Explaining a Few Things : 324

354 And one morning all that was burning, one morning the bonfires leapt out of the earth devouring human beings and from then on fire, gunpowder from then on, and from then on blood. Bandits with planes and Moors, bandits with finger-rings and duchesses, bandits with black friars spattering blessings came through the sky to kill children and the blood of children ran through the streets without fuss, like children s blood. Jackals that the jackals would despise stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out, vipers that the vipers would abominate. Face to face with you I have seen the blood of Spain tower like a tide to drown you in one wave of pride and knives. Treacherous generals: see my dead house, look at broken Spain: from every house burning metal flows instead of flowers from every socket of Spain Spain emerges and from every dead child a rifle with eyes and from every crime bullets are born which will one day find the bull s eye of your hearts. And you will ask: why doesn t his poetry speak of dreams and leaves and the great volcanoes of his native land. Come and see the blood in the streets. Come and see the blood in the streets. Come and see the blood in the streets! * Let me make it quite clear that in quoting from Neruda s poem I am in no way comparing Republican Spain to Saddam Hussein s Iraq. I quote Neruda because nowhere in contemporary poetry have I read such a powerful visceral description of the bombing of civilians. * Extract from I m Explaining a Few Things translated by Nathaniel Tarn, from Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems, published by Jonathan Cape, London Used by permission of The Random House Group Limited. 325

355 I have said earlier that the United States is now totally frank about putting its cards on the table. That is the case. Its official declared policy is now defined as full spectrum dominance. That is not my term, it is theirs. Full spectrum dominance means control of land, sea, air and space and all attendant resources. The United States now occupies 702 military installations throughout the world in 132 countries, with the honourable exception of Sweden, of course. We don t quite know how they got there but they are there all right. The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning. It is developing new systems of nuclear force, known as bunker busters. The British, ever cooperative, are intending to replace their own nuclear missile, Trident. Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama bin Laden? You? Me? Joe Dokes? China? Paris? Who knows? What we do know is that this infantile insanity - the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons - is at the heart of present American political philosophy. We must remind ourselves that the United States is on a permanent military footing and shows no sign of relaxing it. Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government s actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish. I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose the following short address which he can make on television to the nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously attractive, a man s man. `God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden s God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam s God was bad, except he didn t have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don t chop people s heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don t you forget it. A writer s life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don t have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection unless you lie in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician. I have referred to death quite a few times this evening. I shall now quote a poem of my own called Death. Where was the dead body found? Who found the dead body? Was the dead body dead when found? How was the dead body found? Who was the dead body? Who was the father or daughter or brother Or uncle or sister or mother or son Of the dead and abandoned body? 326

356 Was the body dead when abandoned? Was the body abandoned? By whom had it been abandoned? Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey? What made you declare the dead body dead? Did you declare the dead body dead? How well did you know the dead body? How did you know the dead body was dead? Did you wash the dead body Did you close both its eyes Did you bury the body Did you leave it abandoned Did you kiss the dead body When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us. I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory. If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us the dignity of man. 327

357 42 nd Pugwash Conference, Berlin, 1992 THE WORLD AT THE CROSSROADS Towards a Sustainable, Livable, Equitable World Philip B. Smith and Samuel E. Okoye Summary and Recommendations Just as there are many possible variations of the wrong fork of the crossroads, there are also many along the right fork. We are not so pretentious that we think that we alone have the right answers. The chapters of this volume are meant to be signposts, not detailed itineraries, on the road to sustainability, equity and liveability. The authors hope that they will be of some value in bringing humankind onto the right fork. Considering the diversity of cultural and geographical backgrounds from which the authors have come to this enterprise, it is not surprising that there are points of disagreement between them. Most remarkable, however, is how broad the areas are on which there is agreement. This is a positive sign for the future. Agricultural policies Even though no one can say what the earth s carrying capacity for humanity is, it is obvious that reducing it further is not desirable. Yet it is clearly being reduced to the extent that humanity degrades land and lowers its productivity, impoverishes the diversity of life, exposes its surface to increased UV radiation and alters bio-chemical cycles by emitting excess greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere. Meanwhile the human population is headed towards doubling its size, unless social, political, and economic reform measures are taken which will lead to slowing its growth. In the second half of the twentieth century agricultural techniques and economic regimes foreign to both land and people have been imposed upon many poor countries by the combined power of international agencies and a native elite acculturated to Western concepts. The consequences have wreaked havoc on both social structures and food sufficiency. On the other hand, in one case at least (Peru), serious study has made it possible to resurrect an ancient production technique capable of providing high yields under even harsh, unfavourable conditions. Much more work along these lines must be undertaken, proceeding from an attitude of respect for indigenous knowledge of proven value. Recommendations * Globally, food production must be substantially increased to match the expected medium-term expansion of the human population by roughly a billion a decade. * In most developing regions an urgent task is to improve food storage and transportation facilities. * Much more research and extensive field trials in alternative farming and herding systems must be undertaken. * Recognition of the value of indigenous knowledge that has proven to lead to sustainable agriculture in the past, even when it is not entirely understood, visa-vis imported Western agricultural concepts, is an important element of the revision of attitudes necessary to put agriculture in the tropics on a sustainable and socially equitable basis. * Green revolution yield techniques must be applied to crops other than the big three wheat, rice and maize. Tropical crops on which a large portion of the world s poor depend, have until recently been neglected by plant breeders. Biotechnology could considerably speed up the process of developing higher yield varieties. * Economic and agricultural policies can make or break the adequacy and sustainability of a nations food supply. Greater social investment in agriculture, especially in parts of Latin America and Africa can remedy lagging food production for domestic consumption. * Reforestation and restoring local control over resources may be keys to making areas of land degradation (e.g. deforestation and soil erosion) more sustainable. In many arid and semi-arid regions, reversing land degradation processes, improving and extending irrigation systems and improving livestock productivity will all be necessary elements in putting these regions on a sustainable basis. 328

358 Energy policies In line with the goals of this book, the achievement of an equitable world order in the course of the next century is assumed in the discussion of energy policies. It is clear that continuation of the present energy policies of the industrialized countries is a dead-end road. Even leaving aside the tremendously increased demand from developing countries which is inevitable if an equitable world is reached, the existing known and speculative reserves of fossil fuels will be exhausted in less than a century by the industrialized countries alone if present growth trends continue. It must also be realized that the transition to renewables will cost a share of what now remains, so that any further delay in initiating the transition could lead to a cul de sac in which the possibility of ever carrying out the transition will have been sacrificed in order to satisfy the immediate demand for energy. Because this point of no return will be passed before actual scarcity begins to drive prices up, the market mechanism is inadequate to provide an indicator of impending danger. Nuclear energy, itself a non-renewable source, will not play a major role in effecting the transition, although under certain circumstances it could play a minor role. This conclusion is reached purely on the basis of energy availability considerations, and is not related to either the burning technical questions of the safety of nuclear plants and the disposal of nuclear waste, nor the political problem of nuclear-weapon proliferation. These conclusions can be drawn independently of assumptions concerning the greenhouse effect. Even if the transition is taken to hand immediately it will not succeed unless there is a simultaneous substantial annual decrease in energy use per service and/or a significant annual decrease in the level of affluence (i.e. the average availability of services per capita) of the richer countries. These two desiderata work in the same direction and the division of effort between them can be influenced by policy decisions. The issue of simpler life styles is also relevant to the question of how much energy per capita can actually be used without causing irreparable damage to the eco-system as a whole and to eco-diversity in particular. The permissible energy use per capita recommended here, 1.5 kw (continuous), must not be taken as a precise number; there are far too many approximations and imponderables, to make the calculation of a precise number feasible. It can only serve as a rough guideline for policy. Such a drastic reduction below present levels in Europe and North America would demand a reorganisation of infrastructure, but it is entirely erroneous to think that this would mean a return to the stone age. It cannot be denied, however, that many everyday luxuries such as air travel at the present level would be impossible. The transition therefore becomes partly a cultural problem of how it might be possible to reshape institutions in the affluent countries so that the insatiable hunger for more, so characteristic of these societies today, could be sublimated towards spiritually more satisfying goals. Differential taxation policies will be essential in shifting priorities. It must be made clear that this would not mean an increased tax load the funds would flow back to the taxpayer through subsidies of and rewards for ecologically sound developments. The way in which this is done is critical for acceptance by the public. It is unnecessary to wait until all countries do this. A single country or region could go it alone ; the temporary disadvantage in competitiveness would soon be turned into an advantage because the development of low energy-intensive technology would be stimulated, making the country or region a leader in ecologically sound technology. We envisage, in our energy scenarios, that in an equitable world everyone on earth will have access to modern sources of energy, including modern forms of biomass energy conversion. In the meanwhile fuelwood, crop residues and dung will remain basic sources of, in principle, renewable energy for large segments of mankind. The levels of use in the world are extremely diverse, as are the social circumstances responsible for the biofuel entitlements of different segments of populations, so that policies intended to ensure a continuing supply of this important source of energy must not be based on aggregate calculations. Policies, to succeed, must be based on the local context, but integrated at national and international levels. 329

359 Recommendations All sails must be set to effect the transition to renewable energy sources as rapidly as possible. The efficiency with which energy is used in the industrialized countries to provide services must be continuously increased, and/or the level of services must be continuously decreased. Intense research efforts must be directed towards the increase of the efficiency of energy use, and the results must be made available to developing countries. The adoption of simpler, more satisfying life styles of the affluent must be stimulated by, on the one hand, differential taxation policies, and on the other by educational measures. An effective measure in the category of education can be the stimulation of the idea of a personal energy budget or eco-budget making energy conservation into a game instead of a sacrifice. To make this game playable research is needed to determine the real energy costs of all of the components (activities and goods) of people s daily lives. The proceeds from differential taxation policies, which should raise the cost to the consumer of fossil fuels by a factor of at least three, should be placed in an eco-fund or eco-trust which would flow back to the taxpayer in such a way as to reward ecologically sound developments. This is necessary to make it acceptable to a public accustomed to wasting energy. In order to arrest irreversible destruction of bio-diversity, and incidentally to slow down global warming and the exhaustion of fossil fuel stocks, the total per capita energy consumption must finally be reduced to around 1.5 kw (continuous) per capita a factor of four below the present level in Europe and a factor of more than six below the present level in the United States and Canada. In order to maintain a renewable supply of biofuel, until modern sources of energy are universally available, policies to stabilize its use and renewal must be built upon the local context, but integrated at national and international levels. The economic and political dimensions Economic theories (whether of planned-economy or free-market type) advocated and implemented today are based on outmoded (nineteenth-century) concepts. These theories perceive the environment as a reservoir which serves as an infinite source of materials and energy for human activities, and as infinite sink for all their end products. They ignore the fact that all real productive power is derived directly or indirectly from nature, and perceive capital as a primary factor in production. This stimulates a view of life in which only things count that can be expressed in monetary terms. All of the values that make life worth living are thereby devaluated to zero. This view of life has very negative consequences for the goals of sustainability, equity and liveability. Modern economic theory, conceived as a study of production and consumption of (scarce) goods, has in the course of its development become in practice a formalization of greed. In addition, as ridiculous as it is mathematically, economic theory justifies the idea that endless economic growth is a normal and even necessary characteristic of society. There is therefore a great need for a transformation of, particularly Northern, economic institutions to facilitate a shift away from pro-growth concepts that stimulate people s hunger for more. The point is that the very goal of economic growth does not alleviate the sense of scarcity, but in contrast, exacerbates it. Hence an important requisite of the transition process from unsustainability to sustainability is the examination of the link between consumption and needs. Because the North has set the rules which carry within them the seeds of unsustainability, it is at present irrelevant to speak of economic or other measures that must be taken in the South to achieve sustainability. Indeed the South, if it is to survive, must abide by these rules, so that initiatives for change must originate in the North. The global enclosures movement (illustrated by UNCED) now taking place will not in contradiction to the tenets of conventional economic theory create sustainability, because there is little assurance that the existing institutions are 330

360 capable of, or even have the goal of, preserving the commons. Another kind of enclosures movement, the colonisation of the future, is implied in the rapid depletion of the remaining natural resources. No political remedy for this colonialism is possible because future generations cannot be politically empowered; self-restraint of the present generation is the only answer. Self-restraint is also an essential element in creating a sustainable, equitable and liveable world order within the lives of the present generation. It is sad to see that the tendencies toward free-trade and the market economy, dominant in the world today (e.g. GATT and NAFTA) are pushing in the opposite direction: i.e. towards a world governed by acquisitiveness, hardness, and aggressiveness. The existing international values are not of a high ethical standard. Partly because the international system is perceived to be basically anarchic, immoral values of might, greed and profit travel almost unhindered under the cover of national interest or ideological rhetoric. Indeed, much of the reality of prevailing geopolitics and the global economy is that a zero-sum game is being played between the industrialized and developing countries: what one side wins the other must lose. As long as this is the way the game is played, there is little hope of real change. There is, therefore, a need to incorporate the goals of sustainability, equity and liveability into Realpolitik. This requires optimal knowledge of the complexities involved, careful planning, diplomatic skills and the ability to combine local, global and regional interests in well-planned scenarios. The more sustainability, equity and liveability are valued positively in national societies, the more that they will be at stake in politics, both at the national and the international levels. The ability of political actors to serve these interests is already part of the struggle for power. The globalisation of geopolitical factors has gone so far that there are no state-centric or nationalist tracks towards sustainability, equity and liveability. But international coordination, imperative as it is, only makes sense when focused on local circumstances. The most serious problems of today from starving to civil violence, from deforestation to deadly infant diseases, from toxic pollution to terrorist killings, from soil degradation to child prostitution, from flooding to political violence all have characterizing and critical local dimensions. Their solutions require a variety of international agreements and national resolutions, but cannot do without the knowledge, work and care of local people and communities. Sustainable management of local resources requires efforts and care, which will be provided if people connect the protection of the environment with direct and sure benefits, in particular to satisfy their pressing needs. Such a link between environmental protection and benefits for the populace is assured when people have access and tenure to environmental resources. No problem is truly global, because the consequences of every global development will be felt differently in each of the millions of communities. on earth. But given the chance, people will react in a way that is advantageous for themselves and for their immediate environment. That is why empowerment of local people is an essential element in achieving sustainability. But while international coordination and empowerment of local people are the key to a better future it is, in the last analysis, the national governments who, due to their special tasks as tax-collectors, law-makers, monopolizers of legitimate police and military forces and providers of social security, occupy a strategic position between the local and the global level and are therefore in a position to either become powerful catalysts of, or formidable obstacles to change. The global family is a divided community of rich (Northern) and overwhelmingly poor (Southern) societies. The economy of the South is still plagued by the debt crisis with the attendant curse of poor human development. In both North and South alike, military expenditure, high both in absolute terms and as a fraction of total state expenditures, constitute an important parameter in any discussion of global socio-economic development.roughly the same percentage of GDP goes to military expenditures in the South as in the North. If the present high level of military expenditure is hardly affordable in the North, it is sheer folly for the South to have achieved this kind of parity. Indeed recent studies suggest that military expenditures have had a negative effect on past economic development, particularly in the South. In spite of this, military 331

361 expenditures in the South are on the rise and this is affecting the possibility of the South ever bridging the development gap between it and the North. The North is not entirely blameless in this affair because it is the major producer and vendor of most of the world s weaponry today, and at the same time is equally responsible for the present socio-economic arrangements that produce so much inequity between the North and the South. Recommendations The existential dependence of humankind on its special and highly diversified environment requires new rules of the game, in which recognition of the superior values characterizing the joint system of man and his environment are built in. The sustainability of the earth s ecosystem should be regarded as such a superior value. It is necessary to revise the principles of economics to allow economy to develop as a human activity without violating the essential conditions of sustainability of the earth s eco-sphere. It must be widely recognized that it is nature in the first place, and not capital, that furnishes all real productive power. To this end, a partial incorporation of nature into the monetary value system may be helpful. Although such a financial assessment of external nature will prove to be insufficient, it could nonetheless be an important instrument in moving the global economy towards sustainability. Economic growth of a more balanced and equitable kind is as essential as social justice, if absolute poverty is to be eliminated, and equity is to achieved. The greatest need at the political level is for insights into ways in which the institutions in the rich countries can be reformed so that a steady-state economy does not lead to collapse, and the integrity of the commons can be maintained. In order for developing countries to escape rapidly from the indignity of their poverty, a new ethical code is needed that allows for some redistribution of wealth, and that must embody principles opposite from those towards which the world is now moving (GATT and NAFTA). Hardness, competitiveness and aggressiveness must give way to gentleness, sharing and compassion. The ultimate aim should be a sustainable development strategy that discounts the need for endless growth and ensures that the needs of the present generation are met without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Empowerment of local populations is important for effective environmental protection and the realization of well thought-out national plans and international agreements. Policies should be adopted to reverse the tendency towards centralization of environmental control, particularly when this leads to interference by international organisations in the management, by local communities, of forests and wildlife. To give political clout to the agenda defined by the leading question: how can every human being live a decent life within a world order that is symbiotic with the rest of nature?, the following steps and policies should be implemented: - In the realm of public opinion, political parties, the media and scientific offices and governmental departments must provide optimal public information on the risks and opportunities of present developments and their alternatives. In addition, public awareness of the role played by international organizations must be enhanced in order that their (dis)functioning be at stake in domestic politics. - The coordinating role of international organisations is crucial because of the globalisation of geopolitical factors, but only makes sense when focused on local circumstances. - In order for governments to become catalysts for change they should welcome and stimulate the process of international organisation for its ability to overcome the inconveniences of the state system in the realm of environmental and demographic issues. They can also facilitate The translation of international initiatives and developments by setting up compensation programmes for domestic losers. Domestic burden sharing, i.e. the creation of safety nets, will enhance public and business support for reorganising unsustainable production modes and recasting life styles. 332

362 To achieve a sustainable, equitable and liveable world, it makes sense for both the South and the North to redirect, through disarmament, a considerable portion of the resources now channelled into the military sector into human development. Such disarmament is in its own right, of course, an important goal from the point of view of peace and security. Health policies A most important factor in human development is health. A key aim should be health care which stimulates human development without prejudicing the capacity of the environment to support life on earth. Though there is a clear link between ill-health and poverty, there has also been a pronounced increase in life expectancy in developing countries over the last thirty years. International data show that a low average per capita income (5,000 US-dollars per annum or less) can be compatible with a long life expectancy (about seventy years), but the elimination of outright poverty is essential. A relatively equitable distribution of income within a country and the provision of education and basic health care contribute to prolonged life expectancy. If development is meant to improve the quality of human life, conventional economic data, such as GNP, are poor indicators. The Human Development Index (HDI) is more promising. It combines life expectancy, educational attainment and income and can be used to compare countries. Future threats to health include the impacts of global warming, stratospheric ozone depletion, population growth and the spread of HIV. The transfer of wealth from poor to rich countries via debt repayments, the transfer (dumping) of (toxic) waste and other forms of pollution are major barriers to sustainable health conditions. Recommendations A more equitable income distribution: Given that poverty lies behind much of the world s illhealth, redistribution of wealth is a necessity both between and within countries. The promotion of family planning: Whilst global population growth is at an unprecedented level, overall fertility is now falling, albeit slowly, almost everywhere. A number of countries have shown that a rapid fall in population growth is feasible without coercion. The United Nations have advocated the universal right to reproductive health care, including family planning. Three hundred million couples still lack access to adequate family planning. The development of primary health care: In 1990, a number of goals were adopted by the World Summit for Children which, if achieved, would significantly reduce under five death rates amongst children (by one third or to a level of 70/1,000 live births) and death rates amongst women (halving of maternal mortality). Many of them can best be achieved through primary care services. These include: the eradication of polio, the elimination of neonatal tetanus by 1995, a ninety percent reduction in measles cases, virtual elimination of Vitamin A and iodine deficiency, education of all families about the importance of exclusive breast feeding for the first 4-6 months of a child s life, basic education for all children, access to pre-natal care for all women, the provision of a trained attendant during childbirth and referral where appropriate. The organisation of district health systems: Health systems can be organised around defined populations in the form of districts. District health systems include primary care and hospital(s) and aim for an integration of the two with appropriate mechanisms for planning and management to ensure efficient use of limited resources. In this way, uncoordinated vertical programmes dealing with specific problems such as tuberculosis, diabetes, nutrition, and mother and child health, should be able to be incorporated into a more comprehensive and flexible health care system without loss of effectiveness. The improvement of public information and education: Whilst no cure or effective vaccine for HIV infection is currently in sight, much more could be done to limit its spread by public 333

363 education about methods of transmission and encouraging the use of condoms. Promotion of increasing use of condoms might also help to reduce unwanted pregnancies, providing condom use does not displace more effective means of contraception. Education programmes about sexual health could be linked to expansion of literacy and basic education programmes. Population There is no doubt but that the prospects for the future would be brighter if there were fewer people on earth. At present almost half of the primary production of photosynthesis is appropriated by mankind. Yet the number of people living on earth is only one facet of the many problems which confront humanity. It cannot be considered separately from the interlocking relationships between the economic, political and cultural policies under which people live, the majority in poverty. Population growth is a symptom of a maladjusted world order. It is illusory, therefore, to prescribe solutions that focus solely on birth rate/death rate ratios. It is the societal context that counts. There is too little recognition that the idea that people must limit the number of their children. especially when population control programmes are tainted with mandatory sterilisation, is patronising and constitutes an inadmissible interference with basic rights. The concern expressed by many in the North over the environmental threats of runaway population growth in the South does not ring quite true. The most important threat to the environment is the exhaustion of natural resources and the production of pollution in the affluent societies, rooted in the ideology of consumerism. Education programmes that help close the gap between men and women, primary health care programmes that give children a better chance fora healthy, productive life, and family planning programmes set up to give families more control over the number of their children should be carried out in a context of the creation of a more just society, not the context of controlling population. The bottom line When all is said and done it is human beings themselves who are, by their behaviour, sawing off the limb that they are sitting on. Given the current rates of resource depletion and pollution, is it possible to change society sufficiently quickly to avoid catastrophe? Achieving or not achieving sustainability, equity and liveability depends ultimately on human behaviour as shaped by the values and institutions of society. In order to reach solutions to the multitude of problems delineated above, the prospectives with which people view the world must be extended, and behaviour patterns must change. Prospectives must be extended in time, taking account not only the world as we want it to be in ten year s time, or in our own lifetimes, but as we want it to be generations ahead. Prospectives must likewise be extended in space, because what happens elsewhere matters. It will also be necessary to change both individual and institutional behaviour. It will be necessary to alter the balances between assertiveness and cooperation, and between male and female values. This is possible provided we can integrate a global perspective with respect for local diversity in knowledge and traditions, and achieve changes in the goals and values of both policy makers and populations. This does not mean aiming for uniformity global interdependence can and should embrace local diversity. To achieve this there must be changes both at the grass-roots level of public opinion and in the minds and modes of action of policy makers and business leaders. 334

364 The Threat of Privatization of Water in Sri Lanka V. Tharumaratnam (Reproduced from Pugwash, Globalisation and Eppawala - Pugwash Betrayed? or Eppawala Betrayed?) This concluding chapter is another exercise in whistle blowing. It deals with a most important issue now facing the country, as described in the title. Unbeknown to most good citizens, attempts are being made to take control of the primary basic need, water, by some multinationals. This trend towards privatization of water is of course part of globalization, as mentioned in the first volume 1, and described in some detail with examples from Canada and India in the second volume 2 of this trilogy on Eppawala. The Narmada struggle in India is of special importance to us in Sri Lanka, and yet how many of us know what really goes on there? The news media does not really give us all the news; we need to use the electronic media to learn about the heroic struggles of the oppressed and the dispossessed, as in the case of the Narmada Bachao Andolan 3. The author of this chapter, V Tharumaratnam, has been associated with Pugwash from the very beginning of the Sri Lanka Pugwash Group, when he offered to fund an international Pugwash conference, and later funded a Sri Lanka Pugwash Group Symposium on Tropical Agriculture, in 1982, as described elsewhere. The forces that he as a practising engineer is now confronting 4, virtually single-handed, many others hardly know the existence of like the rapporteur in the Lillehammer Pugwash conference who wrote blithely, about spontaneous globalization. Some of those who may know, do not really seem to care, judged by their inaction. It is hoped that publication of this book will help change all that, even as whistle blowing with publication of the earlier books contributed to the struggle to save Eppawala. Unfortunately, in Sri Lanka there seems to be an inadequacy of positive decision making for the welfare of the people in all walks of life, and hence the continued deterioration of society. For example, consider the following: We are undertaking water supply projects using a technology for abstracting water through wells with horizontal galleries. This can reduce the cost of water to as little as one tenth of that prevailing now. Because it delivers water near the point of use, there will be further reduction through reduction of transmission losses - often a whopping 50%.. These de-centralized systems are also far less vulnerable compared to conventional centralized water supply systems. The water abstracted also often requires little or no treatment at all. Pumping and distribution costs are also reduced. Most people consider the Water Board as the experts on water. They therefore refer to the Water Board for advice or comments. For this reason it was essential to execute some work for the Water Board to obtain acceptance of the technology. A number of projects for which the Water Board had run out of solutions and the people were pressing for action, came up for tender. We tendered for these projects offering our solution as alternative offers at half to one third the cost of other offers. The Water Board awarded these contracts to us on the following new conditions on the grounds that the technology was new and not proven. For a technology to claim benefits over and above that of existing technologies, the technology of necessity has to be new. It is the duty of the professionals to assess and encourage these technologies and determine which are most appropriate. In this way they can be in the forefront in the fight against the handing over of our natural capital to money-grabbing multinationals. 335

365 There must be something radically wrong with a system which creates such fear among the professionals as to make them impose conditions which effectively prevent the emergence of new technologies which will offer sustainable development in the country. If such decisions are not being made, there is no need for professionals to run an organization such as the Water Board. Technicians and operators will suffice at considerable cost saving. In the case of the technology offered by us the conditions imposed by the Water Board were: 1. Payment only against production of water with no interim payments. 2. Additionally, requirement for a performance bond. 3. Requirement only for a specific quantity and quality of water 4. Requirement that only test in the dry season - not defined - will be acceptable. 5. Requirement that the well be a water retaining structure, - because we had referred to the method as wells with horizontal galleries. 6. Imposition of liquidated damages. --- in short every possible condition to make it difficult for a new technology to establish itself and bring with it the benefits available. Conditions 1 and 2 are equivalent to a performance guarantee of 105% or the cost of failure of over 125%. Condition 3 requires us to have Divine powers. Condition 4 makes it a contract without a time scale. Condition 5 is equivalent to asking one to swim not just with hands and feet tied, but also nose and mouth firmly closed. Nevertheless, we accepted the conditions because we were certain of our technology and its benefi ts. All new technologies carry a share of risk and if, in addition, the body which should be promoting new and sustainable technologies openly exhibits skepticism, this translates to fi nancing diffi culties in an already diffi cult fi nancing environment. We pump tested the Horana contract which was for 2,600 cu m/day and recorded a yield of over 3,500 cu m/day or 50% more. Still we are not being paid in full because of Condition 4 requiring a pump test in the dry season. The construction was delayed primarily because of financing difficulties. The Kosgama contract has also been delayed because of financing difficulties. However the well will be ready for pump testing by the end July. The Yatiyantota contract will be completed by the end of August. Engineering contracts are entered into with the intention of completing the project and not as a test of skills between the Contractor and the Engineer To this end when a Contractor encounters any difficulties such as a cash fl ow problem the Engineer often finds means to alleviate such difficulties and not as a chance to impose contract penalties which are intended only for errant Contractors. To realize the great importance of their work, employees of the Water Board must be in empathy with People who have to walk miles to fetch a pail of water, Or are not sure from where and when their next meal will come. All are dependent on water. It is this resource we should at all cost prevent falling into the hands of the multinationals, who will have no qualms about maximizing profits from what is a basic necessity of life, whatever the consequences to others. 336

366 As somebody said, What next? Privatize air? 5 If water is allowed to be privatized surely there is nothing to stop air being privatized too. There is in fact a good reason for privatizing air - to reduce global warming. I do not know the numbers; but I wonder how much carbon reduction we can expect if we can halve our exhalation. The savings can be used to manufacture consumer goods to create riches for the multinationals. SUSTAINABLE WATER SYSTEMS FOR SRI LANKA Sri Lanka will never achieve sustainability in water supply so long as it continues only with the conventional wisdom of surface supplies through impoundment and diversion. In any case Sri Lanka is running out of rivers to impound or divert using hydraulic engineering concepts in design, instead of the concept of water and soil conservation ecosystems. The latest conventional system costs over Rs. 75,000 per cubic meter supply per day. Even to meet the interest payment alone at 12% on this investment the water rate will have to be over Rs per cu meter. This happens to he the present commercial rate for water. If we allow for operations, replacements and losses, the minimum rate will have to be over Rs per cu meter. The aims of the water decade are a sick joke. Just to provide potable water for the growing population will require over one Billion Rupees per year at current costs of water. If our technology is not stifled with debilitating conditions, the cost of water systems can be reduced down to a fifth to a tenth of the cost of conventional systems in Sri Lanka, which will bring the cost of water to sustainable levels. At various times we have submitted proposals for water for various areas. Supplies to which are unthinkable using conventional technologies, because of ruling costs. Some of these areas are Colombo 6, Gampaha district 7, Southern Development area 8, Kandy 9, and many small towns like Gampola 10 for example. Most of these supplies can be constructed on a Build and Operate basis without the need for foreign aid or external finance, it there are no debilitating conditions and the need for water at sustainable costs is appreciated. The present trend seems to be water at costs that offer attractive profi ts to multinationals who get the contracts. DEVELOPMENT BANKS Development Banks in Sri Lanka seem to think that emulating the economic models of the economically developed countries should be their goal. To this end they provide products and services and proudly advertise these at great cost. They seem to have forgotten the country in which they live or the people they, are said to serve. One manager of the National Development Bank (NDB) told me proudly that their loan recovery ratio was over 95%. This performance seems to be in line for a country where the benefits accrue to a few while the rest subsist on slave labour, prostitution, and the sale of the nation s natural capital. What is amazing about this claim from a senior bank manager is the fact the Bank describes itself as being National and Development. For those not familiar with the Sri Lankan economy: the largest foreign exchange earner is remittance from foreign employment abroad, and housemaids are the largest category of workers with the lowest incomes. In obtaining employment these workers are exploited at every stage, first by the local money-lender for the employment agency fees, then by the employment agent, and finally by government through various fees intended ostensibly, to protect the employee. A major occupational hazard for these housemaids is known to be sexual harassment by employers. Over 500,000 housemaids are employed abroad. If 1% of these workers willingly or not are used for sex purposes this will make the Sri Lankan Government one of the largest suppliers to the sex trade. Sadly, a woman heads the government at the present time. 337

367 The NDB has taken no action to expunge the misrepresentation caused by its name. The Registrar of Companies has also not considered it fit to ensure that the National Development Bank changes its name in line with its new business objectives. So the misrepresentation by the NDB continues: more accurately it may even be termed fraud. We tried to obtain financial assistance from the NDB to manufacture equipment to dehydrate agricultural produce using heat-pumping technology 11. We had established that the method was more energy efficient and produced a dehydrated product retaining the original nutrients because dehydration was at low temperature. Introduction of low cost dehydration techniques in rural areas will reduce farm-gate losses, increase producer incomes, stabilize prices, and almost certainly reduce rural farmer suicides. The NDB did not think the project was viable and certainly the lives of a few yokels worth saving. So we wasted many, hundred hours of effort answering stupid questions. Hot-air dryers operated by electricity and fuel are available at several times the capital operating cost. These are imported. One importer of such equipment boasted that he could obtain a leasing facility from the NDB within a week. In a seminar organized by Ag - Ent for small scale agricultural enterprises, a number of small entrepreneurs were heard berating the NDB manager attending it, for wasting their time and money in providing information required by the NDB, and eventually not receiving the funding. Very rightly these speakers said that there should be clear-cut criteria and time scale for the funding so that they need not waste their time and money if they could not meet them. What these speakers did not realize is that a large number of applicants are necessary for the NDB bureaucrats to maintain their positions, although they know from the outset that they will disqualify most of them. Conversely they need to fund only a few well-to-do applicants to maintain a high loan recovery ratio. In short, one must have money, to be able to borrow money. So, we have a national development bank that is neither national nor development oriented, actively contributing towards Sri Lanka being governed by the multinationals and the WTO. Their job then becomes easier, having to lend only, to those who can do without borrowing. That the NDB is not a development bank was categorically stated by both Mr. Ranjit Fernando, the CEO, and Mr S.K. Wickremasinghe, the Chairman, at separate private meetings with them. The only problem is that this has not been stated in public to remove the misconception in the pubic mind about a bank bearing the high sounding names of National and Development. For the introduction of the water technology we applied to the venture capital arm of the NDB for funding. This is a joint venture with the Commonwealth Development Corporation. After many weeks of financial analysis we were told that the funding required was too small and in any case the project was not viable. On the other hand in a British aid funded report on water privatization, water companies from the UK and France are short listed as being the only companies with the necessary experience to undertake privatized water projects in Sri Lanka 12. These companies have already established their presence with agents stating their intention to work with or more accurately for them. Presumably these companies through the goodness of their hearts will undertake a privatized water that is not viable bringing their experts to run these privatized enterprises when Sri Lankan water engineers are much sought after the world over (I once assisted a State Water Authority in an African country to recruit over fifty Sri Lanka engineers). Privatization and control of water or Blue Gold 13 by the multinationals is not an occurrence in a moment of time. It is a well thought out long term plan: 338

368 First, ensuring there is no local competition by denying the sources of funds to local companies. This is done through control of the financial institutions under various guises. It seems this has been achieved in Sri Lanka. Secondly, ensuring that the cost of water remains high by excluding relevant sustainable technologies. For this the Water Board is the unwitting tool while the financial institutions are the most willing. Thirdly, the organizations for the take over come in, for which agents or surrogates have already been identified or are queuing up for servitude. Our foreign workers can take heart in knowing that they are not alone in servitude. Our captains of finance and others supporting privatization are also in servitude with the difference that their servitude extends to their souls and integrity - if they have these. (Perhaps, even to call them thieves or pimps may not be far wrong). The NDB, (perhaps it is still substantially owned by the government?) does not appear to care about not living up to expectations - other private financial organizations have found it prudent to create an image of public concern through the promotion of sports and a variety of other activities. PRIVATE /COMMERCIAL BANKS To call the financial organizations in Sri Lanka, banks would be a travesty of the use of the word bank. At best they are pawnbrokers and perhaps licenced deposit takers. Whether the licencing protects the deposits of the public is a moot point. Advertising practitioners claim, in defence of the barrage of advertisements, that advertising gives the consumer a choice. We already have banks that do not provide banking services in spite of their making the public believe otherwise. The little service commercial banks provide is with such incompetence that it can only be supported by the high charges they make. We are now witnessing a bank take over bid in Sri Lanka which may concentrate power in the hands of a few, and become equivalent to creating a multinational that will stifle competition and remove what little choice customers have in an already incompetent sector of the economy. In contrast to all this, in a country like the UK, for the banking services we now receive, the Chief Executive Officer would have been dealing with our complaints almost on a daily basis; and if no action was forthcoming the banking Ombudsman would have been dealing with them. Such recourse does not seem feasible here. THE THREAT OF PRIVATIZATION OF WATER IN SRI LANKA Hitler picked the bones of the DEAD, removing their teeth, spectacles, and any other valuables. The dead would not have felt a thing. Yet the hue and cry still reverberates around the world. The multinationals are picking the bones of the LIVING. Yet those who made an issue of the deeds of Hitler are deafening in their silence or are actively promoting the multinationals. Do we have a Nuremberg for them? Unfortunately those who suffer due to the multinationals will not have the billions in hank accounts stashed away. 339

369 Endnotes 1 Sri Lanka Pugwash Group, 1999: Eppawala - Destruction of Cultural Heritage in the name of Development Vishwa Lekha 2 Sri Lanka Pugwash Group, 2000: WTO, Globalization and Eppawala after Seattle. Vishwa Lekha 3 Sri Lanka Pugwash Group, 2000: WTO, Globalization and Eppawala after Seattle. pp for example 4 The Fellowship in South Asian Alternatives, described it thus: Global capital, too, seeks quick returns, not bottom-up initiatives necessary for self-reliant change. The centralised culture of the institutions controlled by such capital is neither equitable nor benign. The hubris of technology and global capital ignorant of the contradictions inherent in their approach, guide the large water resource projects and drives a wedge between the investors and the mass of users dependent on water resources... Thanks to the colonial legacy, the South Asian elite continues to borrow ideas and practices from a bygone era of the West. Imtiaz Ahmed, Ajaya Dixit, Ashis Nandy, 1997: Water, Power and People - A South Asian Manifesto on the Politics and Knowledge of Water, p.4. 5 See Sri Lanka Pugwash Group: Eppawala - Destruction of Cultural Heritage in the name of Development, pp , and WTO, Globalization and Eppawala after Seattle, pp Miniwell Systems Ltd. 27-May-99, Colombo Municipal Council: Proposal for Water Supply for Colombo 7 Miniwell Systems Ltd. 27 Oct, 1998, N.W.S&D.B - Proposal for Water Supply at Biyagama and Malwana 8 Miniwell Systems Ltd. 28 February, 1997, Southern Development Authority -Water for Development in the Southern Area 9 Miniwell Systems Ltd. 20 July, 1998: Kandy Municipal Council - Proposal for Augmentation of Kandy Water Supply 10 Miniwell Systems Ltd. Oct, 1998: N.W.S &D.B - Proposal for Augmentation of Gampola Water Supply 11 See this book, Sri Lanka Pugwash Group: Pugwash, Globalization and Eppawala Pugwash Betrayed? Or Eppawala betrayed, p See Sri Lanka Pugwash Group, 1999: Eppawala - Destruction of Cultural Heritage in the name of Development, pp , and WTO, Globalization and Eppawala after Seattle, pp Blue Gold, Maude Barlow. International Forum on Globalization publication. 340

370 Health Principles Reflected in Ancient Ruins Dr C. G. Uragoda The existence of sound medical principles in ancient times is reflected in ruins that have survived. This is not surprising for a civilization to which belonged the earliest concept of a hospital where a number of patients could be collectively housed in a special centre with attendant advantages to the sick. Assyria, Babylon and early Egypt had systems of medici ne which were older than Ayurveda, but. neither countries nor China had hospitals in those remote times. Ancient hospitals Ruins of hospitals have been excavated in relation to the ancient, monasteries of Mihintale, Alahana in Polonnaruwa and Medirigiriya. The ruins at Minintale, which date back to the ninth century, are perhaps the oldest of any hospital in the world. These leading monasteries were institutions of university status, and it is tempting to think that these infirmaries functioned as teaching hospitals, a concept that is in consonance with modern medical education. These ruins demonstrate a characteristic plan for a hospital, namely a central courtyard with cells around it for sick monks and an adjoining outer courtyard surrounded by rooms used for common amenities such as taking of meals, bathing and preparation and storage of medicines. Some artefacts which would have had medical uses have come to light. Surgical instruments such as scissors and knives were found at Alahana. A quern used for grinding medicine was unearthed at Minintale. This item of equipment consists of two similar circular stones between which the herbs were crushed when the upper one was rotated over the lower half. Two blue glazed jars of Persian origin found at Mihintale, and pieces of ceramic at Alahana suggest that imported containers were used fir purposes of storage of medicines. However, the hallmark of an ancient hospital was the stone medicine trough. Medicine trough Altogether six medicine troughs have so far been discovered in Sri Lanka, and these were at Anuradhapura (two), Mihintale, Alahana; Medirigiriya and Dighavapi. These structures at first intrigued archaeologists till their purpose was realised. These were used in ancient times for immersion therapy where patients were placed in them and immersed in medicinal fluids for ailments such as fever, skin disease and rheumatism. These stone troughs, referred to in Sinhala as Beheth Oruva, have been carved out of a single rectangular stone slab which had been scooped out to conform to the configuration of a human body. When the patient positions himself in the trough, almost the entire volume of its concavity would be taken up by his body, and therefore very little of the medicinal fluid would, be required to immerse him. In this way, the human configuration of the trough ensures economy in the volume of the precious medicinal fluid needed for treatment. The medicine trough therefore employs sound principles of hydraulics Sanitation There is convincing archaeological evidence that an efficient system of sanitation existed, at least in principal monasteries and palaces in ancient Sri Lanka. Some of the archaeological remains point to the adoption of sound scientific principles in the construction of sanitary facilities, a fact which is not surprising in a people who evolved a sophisticated irrigation system. There is a little doubt that the emphasis placed by both Buddhism and Ayurveda contributed to the observance of sanitary habits. The remains of several toilet complexes in ancient Buddhist monasteries have come to light, and some of them which have been conserved give an idea of the engineering capability of the designers. Each complex consisted essentially of a urinal stone and a soakage pit. Many of these 341

371 urinal stones had elaborate decorative motifs carved in relief on them. Some of these, such as the urinal stone near Ruwanweliseya in Anuradhapura, depict a shrine in which the open doorway has been utilised as the orifice of the urinal stone. These stones have intrigued archaeologists, who in trying to explain the reason behind the elaborate dressing of such utility structures, have invoked religious reasons in support of their theories. A beautifully carved urinal stone, with a drain leading to a terracotta soakage pit behind it, was discovered at Galabadde in the Eastern Province. Recent excavations at Alahana Pirivena in Polonnaruwa too brought to light a toilet complex in which one room was used for bathing and the other as a toilet. Two soakage pits, built of bricks, were found behind each of these two rooms. Bricks lining the interior of the pit were laid with wide spaces filled with plaster, an arrangement that would have facilitated soakage of water. Remains of toilets have generally been discovered in ancient monasatic sites, but the one at Panduwasnuwara was attached to a corner of the palace. A stone conduit drained the water from the toilet floor to a circular brick built pit lined with rings of terra-cotta. A stone slab once sealed this seven foot deep pit, but treasure hunters had smashed it under a mistaken notion that it hid valuables. In some instances, drainage water, instead of running into a. pit, was led into an earthenware pot or a series of pots, placed one above the other, behind the urinal stone. In the latter arrangement, the pot below was larger than the one above, and there was a hole at the bottom of each pot. It may be seen that toilets were attached to the living quarters of monasteries and palaces. Their very situtation demanded that they should have been free of smells. The arrangement of drainage, as could be pieced together from existing remains, would have ensured this requirement. Water The populous areas happened to be in the dry zone of today, and it is a tribute to the ancient system of irrigation tanks and channels that the little water that flowed through it was harnessed to yield maximum service to the people. Water for drinking and personal hygiene would have come from this system as well as from wells. Several old wells have been discovered in the ruined cities. These wells were lined with brick, rubble or dressed granite, thus ensuring as clean a supply of water as possible. The remains of ancient baths at Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa and other ancient sites, which are noteworthy for their artistic appearance, demonstrate an engineering arrangement by which clean water was led into them from neighbouring tanks and channels by means of under-ground pipes of stone or terra-cotta. While some of the large Buddhist monasteries were built in cities, such as Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa, hundreds of smaller ones were scattered in remote sites which have since been claimed by the jungle. One of the constant features of these monastic sites was the presence of a naturally occurring water-hole, which in the first place probably would have determined its original choice as a site for a monastery. The most enduring water-holes are found in the outcrops of gneiss rock, the caves of which provided monks with a puritan abode. Often, the rock slab sloping gently towards the hole, provided a catchment area for rain water, and its depth ensured a water supply through months of drought. In areas where rivers, tanks and channels were not available, wells provided the main source of water. Remains of wells have been discovered in ancient sites other than the ruined cities. At Kudaram alai, which was an ancient habitation now falling within the Wilpattu National Park, the remains of a well were discovered near the coastline. It was lined with cylinders placed one above the other in a stratified fashion. These perfectly circular cylinders made of baked clay were approximately 3 feet in diameter, 18 inches in height and 13/4 inches in thickness. It has been suggested that this clay lining helped to keep the water cool. The period of the site has been assigned to the eleventh century AD. 342

372 Drainage Ancient builders were aware of the principles of drainage of water. Many of the ancient Dagabas had provision for drainage of rain water. The ground immediately surrounding an ancient dagaba was usually at an elevated level and it served as a stage for worshippers to make their religious observances. In order to provide an egress for rain water that fell on the Dagaba and its precincts which were surrounded by a parapet wall, stone drains a few feet long were fitted through holes made in the wall. These ancient gutters which have survived are a common sight at these historic monuments. At the ruins of the Mihintale hospital, a cubicle has been identified as a bathroom that served sick monks by means of an outlet drain. Similar drains too have been demonstrated at Alahana in Polonnaruwa. One of the most interesting items of engineering skill in drainage is to be seen in the hundreds of jungle girt rock caves which many centuries ago provided homes for Buddhist ascetics. On the brow of each cave was chiselled a drip ledge which interrupted the flow of rain water and directed it to dribble downwards vertically, instead of allowing it to flow along the under surface of the roof into the living quarters of monks. Some of these drip ledges are found at great heights, and the fact that artisans had to toil at such dizzy elevations indicates the importance attached to this concept by ancient builders. The drip ledge has now become the hallmark for identifying ancient caves that provided habitation to monks. Burials and Cremations There is archaeological evidence that burial and cremation of the dead were practised even in pre-historic times. In 1956, a Stone Age burial site containing several skeletons was discovered at Bellan Bandi Palassa. In the Iron Age burial site at Pomparippu, earthenware urns contained bones, sometimes of several individuals in the same vessel. In the case of children, the stains on teeth indicated that cremation had taken place before burial. These sites constituted virtual cemeteries. An interesting example of a burial was discovered during excavations near the bund of Tissawewa at Tissamaharama. A large, wide-mouthed chatty or earthenware vessel that was unearthed contained a number of calcined bones. It is believed that these remains belonged to the fourteenth century AD. 343

373 Supporters of the Sri Lanka Pugwash Group The following supporters of the Sri Lanka Pugwash Group gave us their spontaneous support for the Regional Pugwash Workshop on Learning from Ancient Hydraulic Civilizations to Combat Climate Change. We are deeply grateful to them for their kind generosity which made the conference an outstanding success. We look forward to their continued support in the years to come when we hope to hold an international Pugwash Conference during the term of office of Jayantha Dhanapala as President. Mr Nahil Wijesuriya, is a Marine Engineer by profession and also obtained a HND in Mechanical and Production Engineering from the Leicester University. He was the Deputy Technical Manager of the Ceylon Shipping Corporation and the Deputy Chief Engineer of the Colombo Dock Yard. He is presently the Chairman of East West Group of Companies and a Director of East West Enterprises Limited, Wijesuriya Holdings (Private) Limited, East West Properties Limited and People s Media Network (Private) Limited A Television and Radio Broadcasting Company. He was the founder of East West Haulage Limited The largest Heavy Haulage Company in the late 1970 s., East West Clearing and Forwarding Limited The largest Customs Clearance House in Sri Lanka., East West Information Systems Limited (now known as EWIS) The first IBM agency in Sri Lanka., Extra Terrestrial Vision Ltd. (ETV) The First 24 hour Terrestrial Television Channel., East West Bunkering Services Limited First offshore bunkering Company with 35,000 Tanker placed offshore., Offshore Marine Services Ltd. Salvage and towage of ships in distress in the Indian Ocean., East West Containers Limited The first container freight station outside the port premises., Land and Building Limited Pioneer developer of the Nawam Mawatha business complex with the construction of the IBM Building., In 2008 he took a controlling interesting in Hotel Services Ceylon Ltd., the owning company of The Ceylon Continental Hotel the first 5 Star Hotel in Sri Lanka. Mr Pesi Pestonjee, is a shareholder and Director of Abans Group of companies. He still works although retired, and was happy to support the Pugwash regional workshop on account of his respect for the ideals of the Pugwash conferences, and his lifelong friendship with the Secretary / Convenor of the Sri Lanka Pugwsh Group. 344

374 Ariyaseela Wickremanayake, is the Chairman / Managing Director (Owner) Master Divers Pvt Ltd., Pelwatte Sugar Industries Ltd. Chairman Mawbima Lanka Foundation. Director Bogawantalawa Plantation Ltd., Elpitiya Plantation Ltd. Former Chairman National Livestock Development Board, State Engineering Corporation. Former Member of Council, University of Ruhuna. International Awards - Actualidad / 21 st Century 2001 in France, Best Image of Industry & Commerce - Europe 2002 in Belgium, Worldwide Quality Award 2002 in Mexico. Publications WHY HAMBANTOTA (Regarding Port of Hambantota) Selvam Canagaratna, a journalist by profession since 1954, is currently Chairman & Managing Director of the Ceylon Printers Group of Companies. He maintains his links with journalism, contributing a weekly column to The Sunday Island. V. Tharumaratnam, a long-standing friend of Pugwash had offered to fund an international conference in Sri Lanka. After Joseph Rotblat had visited and met local scientists in Colombo and Kandy, Pugwash Council approved Pugwash conference No. 43 to be held in 1983 in Sri Lanka. This was aborted by a small group of local scientists and the Sri Lanka Pugwash Group organised a Symposium on Tropical Agriculture in 1982 instead, funded by Tharumaratnam. 345

375 Resolutions 1. A River for Jaffna proposed by Jayantha Dhnapala seconded by D L O Mendis. 2. Southern Area Plan proposed by K. Suppiah, seconded by Ari Wickramanayake. 3. Congratulations to Mohan Munasingha - proposed by Aiichiro Mogi, seconded by D L O Mendis Usawa. 4. Sequel to this Workshop to be held in India - proposed by Professor Morwanchikar and seconded by G D Deshpande. 5. Creating more awareness on climate change - proposed by Gamini Kulathunga and Professor H Sriananda and seconded by Udula Bandara Awasdahamy. 6. Lessons to be learned from qanats - proposed by V Tharumaratnam and seconded by DLO Mendis. 1. This Pugwash Workshop resolves to recommend to the Government of Sri Lanka that the project known as A River for Jaffna that was started some fifty years ago, and almost completed, but is now in a state of disuse and abandonment, should be restored without delay, as a most important step towards including Sri Lankans of the Jaffna peninsula in the development and enjoyment of the natural resources of the country,thereby contributing to early achievement of a durable peace. Proposer - Ambassador Jayantha Dhanapala, President, Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs Seconder Engineer D L O Mendis, Secretary / Convenor, Sri Lanka Pugwash Group 2. The Southern Area plan that was presented at this Workshop should be taken up for study and implementation so that the lessons to be learned from the ancient hydraulic civilizations may be applied to modern projects with a view to combating climate change. Proposed by K Suppiah. Seconded by Ariyaseela Wickremanayake 3. This Pugwash Workshop offers congratulations to Sri Lanka Pugwashite Professor Mohan Munasinghe, on his unique achievement, as Vice Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in sharing the Nobel Prize for Peace, 2007, with Al Gore former Vice President of USA. Proposed By Aiichiro Mogi. Seconded by D L O Mendis. 4. In as much as some of the greatest ancient civilizations were in India, it is considered appropriate that there should be a follow up in an Indian centre on the various discussions at this Workshop, on learning from ancient hydraulic civilizations to combat climate change. Proposed by Prof R S Morwanchikar. Seconded by G D Deshpande 5. This workshop resolves that: If humanity is to avert the looming disaster of irreversible climate change resulting from attempts by man to subvert nature, it has to revert to the philosophy of respect for and collective co-existence with the rest of the natural ecosystem that has been the dominant philosophy of earlier civilizations. Proposed by Gamini Kulatunge and H Sriananda. Seconded by Udula Bandara Awsadahami 6. Ancient hydraulic civilizations include those based on qanats in arid and semi-arid regions of the earth and there are lessons to be learned from the qanats many of which are still in use, to combat climate change. Proposed by V Tharumaratnam, Seconded by DLO Mendis. A

376 EPILOGUE D L O Mendis This Epilogue completes the regional Pugwash Workshop on Learning from Ancient Hydraulic Civilizations to Combat Climate Change with the Resoultion on the facing page. This was in a sense a sequel to the Symposium on Tropical Agriculture held in 1982, and it should be followed by a Pugwash conference in 2009 or 2010 (perhaps on a theme related to Agriculture and Food Security), while Jayantha Dhanapala is Pugwash President. Successful completion of this Workshop was personally most gratifying to me as I completed 30 years in Pugwash this year, 2008, and count participation in sixteen Pugwash meetings in this period, (incidentally most of them at my own expense). This is longer than most Pugwash Council members, but I have never asked for or been invited to serve on the Council. I set up the Sri Lanka Pugwash group in April 1981 (Dhanapala volume pp ) after my friend Engineer V Tharumaratnam, offered to fund an international Pugwash conference. That offer was accepted after Joseph Rotblat visited Sri Lanka, and Sri Lanka was earmarked for the 1983 conference No 33 by the Pugwash Council. It was not held however because of objections made by a few influential local scientists at the eleventh hour (see Minutes of Inaugural Meeting of Sri Lanka Pugwash group in J-D volume p ). The Symposium on Tropical Agriculture was held in 1982 instead but it was not recognized as a Pugwash activity. The renowned scientist Professor Roger Revelle represented Pugwash Council at the Symposium which was reported by him in the Pugwash Newsletter as a great success. When Al Gore shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change he acknowledged his debt to Roger Revelle as his teacher. The number of Sri Lanka Pugwashites has been limited to just 17 of whom five are now deceased. When I took the initiative to set up the Sri Lanka Pugwash Group, in April 1981, I was described as a private businessman in an article titled The Sri Lanka Pugwash Group? The generous Supporters of this workshop listed on pages 344 and 345 could be described thus! Joseph Rotblat personally invited me to give an address at the AGM of British Pugwash in London in April 1996, to celebrate the award of the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize to him and the Pugwash conferences. My presentation titled Environment and Conflict in Sri Lanka is Chapter 13 in the Jayantha Dhanapala felicitation volume. Also, Professor Robert Hinde was so kind as to invite me to participate in the Memorial Service to Sir Joseph Rotblat at the Royal Society on December 9, (see Annex to the Introduction in the J-D volume). Over the years Sri Lanka Pugwash has published ten books, organized numerous seminars and talks at the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka, the Sri Lanka Association for the Advancement of Science, the Agrarian Research and Training Institute, the National Science Foundation, the Institute of Fundamental Studies, and many other local science centres. Also, when local scientists have been nominated and invited to Pugwash conferences, Sri Lanka Pugwash has always tried to help find the necessary funding. At the 53 rd Pugwash conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada in 2003 a strange incident took place at the plenary session when representatives of national Pugwash groups were invited to meet the Secretary General of Pugwash, Paulo Cotta Ramusino. I was present as the Secretary / Convenor of the Sri Lanka Pugwash Group, but I was not allowed to speak and the mike in my hand was taken away by the Chair of the Pugwash Executive Committee, Professor Marie Muller. After patiently sitting through the meeting in silence, I asked Paulo the reason for his ugly action. Without batting an eyelid he said, presumably by way of explanation: There are no Tamils in Sri Lanka Pugwash! Once again, I said nothing but turned on my heel and went away to report this unsavoury incident as soon as possible to the President of Pugwash Dr M S Swaminathan, and to Jayantha Dhanapala who was due to present the Dorothy Hodgkin Memorial oration at this conference (Chapter 8, pages in the J-D volume). Dr Swaminathan, who happens to be 347

377 a Tamil from Taminadu, India, made no comment at all when I told him what had happened, but Jayantha Dhanapala advised me not to make an issue of it at the conference, but that we could deal with it later. This whole incident and its aftermath is described in Chapter 14 of the J-D volume referred to above (pages ). I had participated in the Halifax conference at my own cost, amounting to well over one thousand five hundred US dollars. Later, I was told by a friend that if I was an US American I would have sued the Secretary General of Pugwash for recovery of these costs, with damages also added for pain of mind. This is mentioned because of late there has been some publicity about the poor financial state of Pugwash which runs offices in Rome, Washington DC, Geneva, and London. I should perhaps advice the Secretary General from my own experience, how to create goodwill and find financial support, (perhaps to also have a Pugwash office for President Jayantha Dhanapala in Sri Lanka). But Paulo Cotta Ramusino should first tender a long overdue apology for his strange behaviour in Halifax, and also tell Pugwash about the source of his (wrong) information. (In a related issue I am curious to know who was responsible for corrupting the Sri Lanka Pugwash website with pornography, which Jeffrey Boutwell cleaned up when I reported it to him). The so-called ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka has assumed global proportions, and it is totally against the spirit of Pugwash to behave in the way the Secretary-General did at Halifax in And, lest it be forgotten, Jayantha Dhanapala should not be embarrassed by this unexplained incident, during his term of office as President of Pugwash. Else it may turn out that Pugwash Council has offered him a poisoned chalice, as the saying goes. I did not attend the 57 th Pugwash conference in Bari, Italy, October 20 26, where Jayantha Dhanapala took office. Those were the very dates, of the 101 st Annual sessions of the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka, at which I was presenting a paper. However, we were able to find generous supporters for a very successful Pugwash Workshop. My one regret is that Paulo Cotta Ramusino and Marie Muller did not attend. They could have learned a lot about Sri Lanka in a comparatively short time to clear the cobwebs in their minds. However, I was glad that the Executive Director Jeffrey Boutwell did participate in another Pugwash meeting in Colombo in February 2008, and visited Kandy with the new Chairman of Sri Lanka Pugwash, Professor Arjuna Aluvihare, even though at that time I was in the USA on a personal visit! In conclusion, I repeat that with the election of Jayantha Dhanapala as Pugwash President for , and the escalation of violence in Sri Lanka, Paulo should reveal the sources of his wrong information. Pugwash must be cleared of association with this partisan action of its Secretary-General even at this late stage. The Halifax incident cannot be just forgotten, and Dr M S Swaminathan, now a Member of the Raj Sabha in India who was Pugwash President at that time, should also tell us what he knows about it. Joseph Rotblat and others have often said that Pugwash is not a secret society, but there is a question of publication of these Proceedings that Paulo may try to use in self-defence. Proceedings of Pugwash Conferences edited by Joseph Rotblat carried statements that the material in this volume is for the recipient of these Proceedings and not for publication, and that Participants in Pugwash conferences attend as individuals, in their private capacity, and represent only themselves. The conflict in Sri Lanka is between a rebel group of Tamil separatists and the lawfully elected government of Sri Lanka, representing all communities, and the Secretary- General of Pugwash identified himself with the separatists group at the Halifax conference. He cannot hide his nakedness, behind any fig leaf of protocol on this issue. Conclusion The theme of the Pugwash regional workshop was Learning from ancient hydraulic civilizations to combat climate change; but discussions that started with a paper by Aiichiro Mogi from Japan on the Commons developed into a philosophical foray on the subject virtually as a sub-theme in the workshop, as was discussed in the Editorial Overview. Amongst the Background 348

378 papers, a number of presentations at Pugwash conferences by me deal with the stability and sustainability of the ancient water and soil conservation ecosystems in Sri Lanka, as against the intrinsic instability and lack of sustainability of new modern schemes that have been imposed on them in the name of development. In the process, there has been extensive destruction of the Commons in the southern area of Sri Lanka. Annex I in this Epilogue is an extract taken from the Arumugam Commemoration volume which describes the evidence by the scientist Richard Feyman at the inquiry into the NASA space rocket Challenger disaster, and a comparison with the destruction of traditional ecosystems in the southern area of Sri Lanka. It is interesting that a case in the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka at the time this volume was being prepared for publication, illustrated the significance and importance of the Commons. The first installment of that Judgment in the Water s Edge case that is being serialized in the newspapers, and two independent editorial comments on that judgment are given in Annex II to this concluding chapter. In the light of the Water s Edge judgment there may be a possibility of taking a similar case to the Supreme Court concerning the destruction of the ancient commons in the southern area by the wrong location of Lunuganvehera. It passing, in the case of the Eppawala phosphate rock public interest litigation case initiated by the Ven. Eppawala Piyaratne Thera of Galkanda Mahavihare, Eppawala, supported by environmentalists in Colombo, a now much cited landmark judgment was published by Sri Lanka Pugwash in the third of a trilogy of books on Eppawala (Mendis, 2000). ANNEX I (From Water for People and Nature, Arumugam Commemoration volume pages ) Top-down Design Richard Feynman, the maverick physicist who served on the official panel reviewing the Challenger explosion, noted the inevitability of more failures and embarrassing surprises if NASA did not change radically the way its big projects were designed. He called the procedure top-down design and contrasted it with bottom-up design that has been normal engineering practice for centuries. In bottom-up design, the components of a system are designed, tested, and if nec essary modifi ed before the design of the entire system has been set in concrete. In top-down mode (invented by the military), the whole system is designed at once, without resolving the many questions and confl icts that are normally ironed out in bottom-up design... Furthermore, as Feynman pointed out, the political problems faced by NASA encourage if not force it to exaggerate when explaining its reasons for needing large sums of money. It was apparently necessary [in the case of the shuttle] to exaggerate: to exaggerate how economical the shuttle would be, to exaggerate how often it would fly, to exaggerate how safe it would be, to exaggerate the big scientific facts that would be discovered. The shuttle can make so-and-so many flights it ll cost such-and-such; we went to the moon, so we can do it! Until the foolishness of top-down design has been dropped in a fi t of common sense, the harrowing succession of fl awed designs will continue to appear in high-tech, high-cost public projects. The relevance to our problems in design of mega-reservoir projects Uda Walawe, Lunuganvehera, and Moragahakande, without considering alternatives, may be summarized as follows: 349