One gets the impression too that the environmental delinquency in the business sector is, to an overwhelming extent, a function of its awareness that whether through a lack of capacity or an absence of will, enforcement is largely ineffective.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the various other regulatory entities can hardly deny that there are gaping holes in the environmental bona fides of several sectors of the country’s economy, those in the construction sector being the most glaring of them all.
Among the other sectors, those that impact on noise pollution stand out and again there is little that the EPA or the police, for that matter can do to put an end to the problem.
So that while fora like the one held on June 25, are good for discourse one has to wonder about the commitment of members of the business sector to raising their environmental profiles.
Of course we agreed with Executive Director of the Environmental Protection Agency Dr Indarjit Ramdass that business pursuits should strike a balance between profits and a mindfulness of environmental responsibilities. However, that point would seem to have gone over the heads of downtown traders who operate from tiny, cramped shops; auto body repair people whose businesses are run cheek by jowl with occupied dwelling houses and those entities that simply make noise for a living without even so much as an iota of consideration for affected people and communities.
Of course there is an EPA and there are environmental laws and penalties for breaking those laws. The problem is that those laws and the attendant penalties remain, in large measure, words on paper. Here, we draw our conclusions not from what the EPA has said it has done but from the number of glaring transgressions to which it is either unwilling or unable to pay any attention whatsoever.
Again, on the basis of evidence one has to ask whether there has been, over the years, any kind of meaningful collaboration between the EPA and the various business support organisations, which, presumably, are better positioned to preach the gospel of sounder environmental practices to their members.
As for the EPA, when one considers the particular economic phase through which the country is passing and the kinds of environmental challenges created by the sheer numbers of productive sectors that are high-risk polluters, the question surely arises as to whether the agency itself does not remain woefully underequipped to properly execute what, by any stretch of the imagination is a decidedly tall order.
