Hilmar Farid, PhD

Director General of Culture

This year’s World Environment Day is celebrated alongside several troubling anniversaries. The theme this time is “Only One Earth” with the slogan, “Living Sustainably in Harmony with Nature”. Independent environmental research institute the Global Footprint Network has found that by 2022, the world’s citizens needed 1.8 planet Earths in order to continue the current lifestyle. They would need five planet Earths if everyone lived like a citizen of the United States, 3.4 planet Earths if everyone followed the Russian lifestyle and 1.1 planet Earths if the Indonesian lifestyle. On this one Earth, humans consume more than the planet’s ability to sustain itself.

Lifestyle crisis

The environmental crisis is undeniable. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has reported that the past six years have seen the warmest global temperatures on record since measurements began in 1880, and the rate of sea level rise has reached a new record with an increase of more than double since measurements began in 1992. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) set 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels as the highest global temperature threshold. However, the WMO has predicted that in the next five years global temperatures will exceed that threshold. In fact, this has already happened in some areas today.

Humans are the symptoms of the crisis. With their current lifestyles, humans are destroying the planet. Wearing a pair of jeans means spending 26 tubs of clean water and eating a hamburger is tantamount to spending the carbon cost of traveling from Jakarta to Bogor by private car. Supported by extractive industries and giant-scale manufacturing, modern humans treat planet Earth like a giant shopping mall: Anything can be bought and stock will always be available. All of this indicates that the environmental crisis is basically a lifestyle crisis.

Modern lifestyle, to a large extent, is the result of industrial fabrication. In terms of clothing, for example, what was originally a need has now been transformed into a want. The clothing industry has been transformed into the fashion industry. People who do not follow the latest trends in the fashion industry are thus considered “out of fashion”. The emergence of the fast fashion business model since the 1990s has exacerbated this trend. According to Barnardo’s survey in 2015, 33 percent of 1500 respondents stated that they considered a garment to be “old” if it had been worn three times. All natural resources owned by planet Earth can be exhausted to serve the wishes of people who are afraid of being considered outdated. What unfolds here is a social landscape where anxiety is answered by undermining the biosphere.

Culture and cultivation

In the case of this lifestyle, nature and culture cannot be separated. This is seen, for example, in the relationship between culture and agriculture or culture and cultivation. Today’s monoculture agriculture has created a culture that is also characterized by monoculture. According to a Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report in 2021, since the 1900s, about 75 percent of plant genetic diversity has been lost due to the abandonment of vernacular farming practices in favor of large-scale food industry that produces uniform and high-yield foodstuffs. There are 80,000 edible plant species and more than 6,000 have been cultivated, but only four species consume 50 percent of the total human food source today, namely rice, wheat, corn and potatoes. As a country, Indonesia is the second biggest contributor of food waste in the world. The results showed that every Indonesian contributes 184 kilograms of food waste per year. If converted, this amount could feed 61 million-125 million people. This waste also makes up to 7 percent of the world’s total greenhouse gases. From an economic perspective, the loss is equivalent to a loss of 4-6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). From an environmental perspective, wasted food produces 1.7 gigatons of CO2.

In line with this monoculture of food sources, there is also an impoverishment of culture, because the disappearance of the diversity of local food sources means the disappearance of folklore about local food origins, which is, oftentimes, also the story of the origin of the community. Take for example the East Flores folklore about Besi Pare Tonu Wujo, a girl who created a garden of pumpkin (iron), jewawut (millet), wata (corn) and sorghum. As local food sources have disappeared, so have local folktales about their own history. Along with the destruction of forests due to extractive industries, public knowledge of medicinal herbs and culinary vernaculars are also destroyed. The environmental crisis is also a cultural crisis.

Uprooted from their cultural roots as the environments that supports those roots are damaged, modern humans have little choice but to adopt an unsustainable urban lifestyle. There is cultural urbanization, or urbanization in the realm of imagination, which further distances humans from the sources of knowledge needed to survive. The news that some rural people today consider instant noodles as their staple food is an illustration of this phenomenon.

How can we explain the fact that people who have lived in forests for hundreds of generations can starve in the middle of the forest? The destruction of forest ecosystems has led to the disappearance of traditional knowledge that enabled people to see forests as a source of food, a vacuum subsequently filled by the urban imagination about instant noodles.

Sustainable lifestyle

What we need today is a new lifestyle, a new culture for a more sustainable world. The Indonesian nation has never been short of sustainable cultural inspiration. Various traditional insights in the field of wastra (textile culture), natural dyes, local food sources and communal food management have never really disappeared from modern life. The spontaneity of residents organizing public kitchens during the pandemic, the practice of sharing a handful of rice for the community’s food barns and the practice of traditional weaving that are all organized collectively are still with us. These practices of co-management of all cultural common resources that continue to exist show that modern living arrangements can actually only work by relying on these often undervalued reproductive or caring jobs.

The spirit of gotong royong (communal assistance) that underlies such collective practices is the source of inspiration for our traditional culture. In that barn also lies the key to a more sustainable lifestyle. What we need, today, is a complete change in the way of life. To overcome the problems caused by the old lifestyle, we need to shorten the supply chain, minimize waste and carefully cultivate local potential. This means prioritizing the ecosystem of goods and services at the local level, based on each local community’s life context and honoring the local economy as a site of sustainability. For that, we need a cultural road: There needs to be a joint movement that brings together governments, civil society organizations and the corporate sector that are committed to sustainable development. This is also an issue that will be raised at the global level through the Group of 20 (G20) Culture Ministers Meeting which will be held in Borobudur on Sept. 13, 2022. Changing lifestyles to recover together after the pandemic requires mutual cooperation at the global level.

What we need on this World Environment Day are concrete steps. Policies will remain policies unless realized in tangible changes of people’s lifestyle. Thanks to the diversity of traditional cultures, we have a starting point to start this real step.

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