Kolkata: India can become the global leader in sustainable development, Taiwanese Nobel laureate Yuan Tseh Lee said at the 100th Indian Science Congress here Sunday.
“There can be no sustainable future of the world without a sustainable Asia, and no sustainable Asian future without a sustainable India. The time for sustainable transformation must begin today and India can take the leadership,” said Lee.
“Ours is a tremendous tradition of creativity and ingenuity and India has incredible resources to offer in helping Asia and the world to find different paths to sustainability,” Lee said at the ongoing centenary session of the Indian Science Congress.
He said India must not follow the Western approach towards development. “It can and must do better. What happens in Asia is likely to make or break the world’s sustainable future and what happens in India can make or break Asia’s sustainable future,” Lee said.
Emphasizing the need of the hour, he added, the world must go back to harnessing the powers of the sun as it was done at the beginning of human civilisation to deal with global environmental changes.
“We must return to sunshine to develop a more harmonious role with nature,” he said.
“Once in history we were the children of the sun and were dependent on it for our needs, but we shifted to fossil fuels. We must dissociate ourselves from them and turn back to the sun to deal with global environmental change,” Lee said at the centenary session of the Indian Science Congress here.
Laying emphasis on the East’s view of nature, the laureate brought to the fore flaws in the Western way of looking at nature.
“Eastern society has historically seen man and nature as one. The relationship between man and nature is that of harmony but since the industrial revolution, the Western view has become dominant which seeks to study, control and use nature,” said Lee.
Terming global environmental change as the biggest enemy of man, he said: “We face the biggest security threat not from armies on our borders but from global environmental change.”
“Globally we are spending $1.7 trillion a year on militaries, trying to protect our cities from enemies, but we are creating our enemy ourselves from global economic damage,” he added.