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When hell freezes over, Malaysia will not be spared

COMMENT | The United States has been hit by the Polar Vortex, a phenomenon of extreme cold, with fatal winds blowing from the Arctic and spreading into the Western Hemisphere. In the last few days, the 'Windy City' of Chicago felt like Siberia. There were numerous deaths, with the temperature falling to as low as -31°C.

'Polar Vortex' sounds beautiful. Ice cold, classy. Yet deadly. As if beauty is a fatal wound. For two days, it was a frozen hell.

I thought of my beloved country, Malaysia and what it is doing in the discussion on sustainability that we are currently plagued with. I thought of the polls in Cameron Highlands and what we need to do urgently. Here are my musings, as I wait for the sun to shine brightly again next week.

We are so busy judging people religiously, we cannot see environmental issues developing and our surroundings crumbling rapidly. Is our educational philosophy founded upon sustainability, human rights, peace and justice? Or is there no vision for humanity?

Politicians must start promising to clean up rivers, plant more trees, promote green technologies. Be mature in campaigning. Haven't we had enough pollution and congestion not to want to produce a third national car, which is probably going to be fossil fuel-based?

I call upon rulers, politicians, and corporations to start crafting sustainable policies rather than decide who gets to control GLCs. Greed will kill us all. Enough talk of who stole how much money. Get to work on comprehensive sustainable policies. But do we even know what that is?

Our future shock

We are living on borrowed time, on a borrowed Earth, yet we want to bring everything beyond the grave. We have to be reborn with radicalism. Any country that does not have a sustainability policy will be doomed to destroy its citizens. Demand your government to show one.

Each nation must create its own environmental warriors, fighting the state and corporations who continue to despoil nature. We are ravaging this Earth as if there is no limit to growth, as those in the Club of Rome once said.

Pushed by the global elite who worship free enterprise and neoliberalism, and who are interested only in huge profits, our lives are sped up. And with that, the velocity of our destruction is guaranteed. Slow it down. We must visit the graveyard...

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