Recently, my university came together to celebrate a day that could have been just another checkbox for ranking metrics or media optics. Instead of confining Earth Day to a calendar event, we did something remarkable: we pulled together all our resources to see what we could do for a day dedicated to the planet that we inhabit. Quite fittingly, the last act was an alpona made with dried leaves.

My colleague Moniruzzaman Shipu’s artwork made me think of the fleeting nature of all our efforts. This year, we consciously avoided overuse of the paint-based alpona, the quintessential Bangalee folk motif. These designs, tinged with toxic lead-heavy street paints and synthetic glues, are a terrible beauty. While they adorn our festive seasons, alpona designs quickly turn into unsightly scars under traffic, lasting in their true forms only a day or two. What remains is difficult to remove and harmful for breathing. Instead, Shipu’s art was crunchy, organic and temporary. It was a protest against our obsession with permanence and a reminder that sustainability is not simply a product that you buy, but a mindset and a lifestyle that you adhere to.

As I looked at those leafy designs, I couldn’t help but reflect on the performative “greenness” we often import from the West. This year’s Earth Day motto—“Our Power, Our Planet”—shares a similar irony. As a small, soon-to-be developing country, we don’t have the power to attack and secure an oil source before blockading the supply chain of fuel for others. Our powerlessness is evident in the long queue as our fuel reserves start depleting in response to a clash of the titans in a faraway land.

The alpona made with dry leaves instead of paint on the ULAB campus. PHOTO: COURTESY

When the “moral North” (a phrase borrowed from Lord Byron’s critique of England) uses its compass to export environmental concerns as a compliance issue before purchasing our products, I can’t help but reflect on the cycle of double standards. A foreign guest, for instance, came wearing a “Fair Trade” dress. For most of us in a country like Bangladesh, those “sustainable” shops are luxury labels that we can’t afford. We don’t always build sleek and expensive formulas for ourselves. In the North, recycling is a conscious, often trendy, choice. For a country like ours, recycling is not a trend; it is the default survival mechanism for the poor. Think of our sarees becoming quilts, quilts becoming baby wrappers or dusters, and eventually fuel for kitchen ovens.

This brings us to a challenging question: what does Earth Day really mean for us? Is it just another date to make word salad? Is it about capturing the moment with environmentally friendly optics?

Take the glass carafes at high-level meetings, for instance. The water is transported and circulated in plastic bottles, only to be decanted into glass bottles to signal “eco-consciousness.” Could we explore the possibility of implementing a proper recycling alternative? Changing the system is challenging. It requires a significant amount of investment. Therefore, we stick to easy eco-aesthetics. The same thing happened when we tried to avoid PVC banners. We found ourselves trapped in a niche market of “green products” that are far too expensive for average citizens. The issue was discussed at a panel participated by industry experts; the verdict was we need policy-level interventions. Subsidies and soft loans for green products and tariffs on non-sustainable products—we need the carrot and the stick to go green. We need occasions to excite our imagination to tackle the climate crisis. 

Our CSE students, thus, participated in a hackathon to come up with some green-solutions-based apps. Our business students did surveys on consumption to measure carbon footprints. Our sustainable club ran a workshop on making nature-based soap using aloe vera, neem or turmeric. Our media students did installation art on recycled materials, showed films and documentaries they made, and made interactive graffiti to create awareness. Our literature students shared examples from literary texts. 

Earth Day at ULAB was a week of radical imagination. Instead of a “celebration,” students were engaged in a week-long immersion involving 38 distinct programmes organised by various schools, departments, and clubs. We embraced Earth Day not as a distant concept but as the opportunity to stocktake our resources and ideas. The campus became a laboratory for what Amitav Ghosh calls the “crisis of imagination.” For Ghosh, at its root, the climate crisis is a failure of our stories and our art. We first need to imagine a world that doesn’t rely on the destructive habits of the last century. Then, we must share that imagination through storytelling.

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Performance by ULAB students on their campus on the occasion of Earth Day. PHOTO: COURTESY

Accordingly, our students and faculty participated in a wide array of interventions. There were letters to nature, where students articulated their grief and hope for a changing climate, and poetry slams that gave voice to the ecological anxieties of the Gen Z. There were discussions on eco-texts by teachers and students of the Bangla and English departments. A “Trashion Show” was held, transforming discarded materials into a spectacle of accountability.

The GED department organised a talk on the Buriganga River, and our students went to the nearby Turag River and took a solemn pledge to protect rivers. Our environmental science department held a talk on deforestation. They also made a GI-based (geographical indication) map of the campus for tree plantation that puts the right roots in the right soil for planned foliage and blooming.

We had representatives from China and Sweden, among others, to see what other nations are doing to make Earth a sustainable place. The EEE department discussed renewable energy. We talked about two major components of the climate crisis response: mitigation and adaptation. Throughout the week, we aligned ourselves to the global SDGs while practising how to live.

Some might look at these 38 programmes—the talks, the walks, and the workshops—and see them as fleeting, like the leaf alpona. Then again, they were designed with care, with a hope that the ideas would be blown away by the breeze to germinate in other places. Through the GI-based plantation or the discussion on green governance, we have started training a generation of leaders who should not be fooled by “greenwashing.” We want them to know that a glass bottle filled with water that arrived in plastic is a lie. We want them to know that green labels used as a bargaining chip by the West are a lie. The real sustainability comes from our own culture, our own memory, our own heritage. These products may resemble a soap bar made from plants or artwork created by an artist using dried leaves. We have started nurturing the imagination needed to tackle the planetary crisis. We have started a green convo to know our planet and our power, the motto of this year’s Earth Day.

Dr Shamsad Mortuza is vice-chancellor at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB).

Views expressed in this article are the author's own. 

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