COMMENT | Part One of this series set out the civic failures that have led to Kuala Lumpur’s rising temperatures and falling standards: no science, no press, and no public voice.

The natural response for many of Kuala Lumpur’s inhabitants is passivity and resignation, especially when all the people in positions of authority who are responsible for the rising heat, the mismanaged flood control, the exploding pipeline, the sold-off green lungs have given a speech about making KL a world-class city.

The evidence is that they never meant it, don’t know what it is, or simply don’t know how to enact it.

But we must reject this inaction. The destruction is not an unfortunate byproduct of development. It is development, as this system defines it, and it pursues private gain extracted from public ecology by people who pay none of the cost yet profit from it.

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