From left to right: Jasleen Kaur (Community Development Worker at PICS), Charan Gill (CEO of PICS), Baba Balbir Singh Seechewal, Harpreet Johal (Climate Change Campaigner at the David Suzuki Foundation)
Jack Layton's death marked a huge loss for Canada. Although I never had the privilege of meeting Layton, I was inspired by and agreed with his vision for Canada. Layton fought for social justice, but he also saw the incredible importance of looking after our planet. He understood that the economy and the environment are integrated, not two separate issues as many politicians would like us to think.
David Suzuki has urged us to honour Jack Layton by carrying on his vision. "No great movement is dependent on one or a few people," Suzuki said. I recently had the pleasure of meeting someone whose vision would have fit well with Layton's. Not Canadian, not a politician, but an environmental leader from Punjab, India.
Baba Balbir Singh Seechewal is Punjab's most famous eco-activist. So when the Progressive Intercultural Community Services (PICS) invited me to meet him at an event they were hosting, I was pretty stoked.
Seechewal passionately shared his experience about cleaning up the Kali Bein, a 160-kilometre river that many Sikhs in Punjab consider sacred. Over the past few decades, the river had become a dumping ground for waste, which has contaminated groundwater, causing diseases and leaving farmlands desiccated. In 2000, Baba Seechewal set out to clean the river with the help of local volunteers, in keeping with a Sikh tradition known as kar sewa.
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The project was big. Seechewal motivated volunteers from dozens of villages to work together and revive the river. Locals were encouraged through a public campaign to find alternative disposal methods and treatments and to appeal to governments to stop dirty water from flowing into the river. Their efforts have greatly contributed to the clean and thriving Kali Bein we see today.
It is comforting to know that people like Seechewal continue to educate and encourage people to take positive action in their community, even if it is 12,000 kilometers from us. And although Seechewal has never met Suzuki, it is wonderful to see that both share a vision for a healthy, clean environment, a vision that Layton would also have been proud of.
"Water is water. Be it of Punjab's white Bein or Kali Bein, or be it of rivers like Satluj, Ganga, Yamuna and Godavari. Be it water in India or any other country — it is needed by everyone," Seechewal said. It only makes sense that we all do our part to save the planet, regardless of where we live.
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1 Comment
6:53 AM
I have never heard of Seechewal's work…stuff like this should be on our world news.
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