Throw a party and carry on polluting!

COMMENTARY

The story she retold sounds hilarious - perhaps because of that ironic twist. Janphen Panpiriya recalls a big event held on World Environment Day last year near her community in Ban Chang district, Rayong: A garbage collection fanfare organised by a few industrial factories which ended with a dozen kids being hospitalised.

"They [the organisers] wanted to improve their companies' image as being socially responsible," said Mrs Janphen. "They sponsored the food banquet, the big tents and what-not. The children were invited to help clean up a nearby beach. After that they had fun dipping themselves in the sea (which Mrs Janphen claims is polluted by waste water released from the factories), only to develop severe rashes and had to be sent to a local health station for treatment that same evening.

"Of course the local media never reported on the sickness incident. Their close ties to certain businesses are a given fact."

Today, June 5, a variety of campaigns to save our planet Earth will be kicked off around the kingdom (and the world). Established by the United Nations General Assembly in 1972 to mark the opening of the Stockholm Conference on Human Environment, World Environment Day is a laudable initiative to raise public awareness about the fragile state of ecological health; what's considered to be an urgent issue will vary from year to year. From water shortage to the greenhouse effect and climate change, the espoused agendas have eased their way into several pertinent policies, public discourse, as well as publicity stunts.

And along came the proliferation of campaigns to promote the planting of trees, the use of cloth shopping bags instead of plastic, and power-saving light bulbs, recycling, bicycling, turning down of air-conditioners' temperature, etc, etc.

It all seems a win-win approach. Corporations feel sponsorship of such events constitutes good governance, that they are "paying back" to society which has helped make them super rich. Individual consumers can see themselves as ordinary heroes (and heroines) whose everyday actions have made the world a better place to live in. The government, through organising the annual WED event (at the noisy, tree-less and electricity-guzzling Impact/Muang Thong Thani), can smugly comfort themselves that they are already fulfilling their duty up to the same par as the international community.

Somehow, though, such multiple feel-good jubilation has covered the more sombre, gritty details. Over the last couple of years, we have witnessed several so-called "victories" by victims of environmental pollution in the judicial realm (even though the high-profile lawsuits are actually a tiny, tiny fraction when compared to the total number of complaints). On many occasions, announcements of those legal triumphs (usually after years of protracted court trials) have inadvertently prompted a shutdown of any remaining public interest in the issues. They are instantly cast as passe, the last episode (of a rather boring saga), something finally done and over with. Few would continue to pursue to find out what eventually transpired regarding both the defendants and plaintiffs, and the community at large.

Take the plight of the Karen at Lower Klity village in Kanchanaburi. Do you know that after the Central Administrative Court's verdict last year which ordered the Pollution Control Department to pay 743,000 baht to 22 victims of the lead contamination caused by a mine (and that was a discounted rate, for the court had cut down by half the estimated extra food costs that each villager had to pay, initially proposed at 700 baht per month for a period of 22 months), the PCD continues to appeal the case, thus refusing to issue the compensation? Neither has the state agency undertaken any rehabilitative measures to dredge the concentrated lead residues from Klity stream.

At present, the mobile medical unit of Kanchanaburi drops in to provide check-ups and treatment at the community once a year!

Frankly speaking, the Klity case is far from being complicated: there is solid proof of who the culprits are, how the environmental crime was committed, and what are the victims' demands for assistance.

And yet the authority concerned chooses to drag its feet, stubbornly denying its complicity (in its negligence to enforce the laws in the first place and to go after the wrongdoers), and thus allowing ordinary citizens to languish on their own.

Maybe throwing a lavish banquet to celebrate World Environment Day is a much easier task to accomplish.

• Vasana Chinvarakorn is a senior writer for Outlook.