The Land Reclamation Act 2025

 

'The Mahaweli, which flowed close to our home, was quite a wide river when I was a child but I have noticed it becoming narrower as the years went by. The Mahaweli has on this occasion wrested back that property that human beings forcibly occupied. As for the mountains, they have resolved on its own a land issue, evicting people from properties they were squatting on.'

The above is the rueful observation offered by Kamal Marasinghe, my batchmate from Peradeniya University.

There was, is and will always be human activity. Human beings cannot exist outside of nature, although some may believe that they are somehow superior to it and that they can, at will, intervene in or encroach upon the natural world without suffering adverse consequences.

The earth has known all kinds of catastrophes from time immemorial. Humans have had little to do with tectonic shifts, meteors and such. We don’t even know the full cost that various species had to pay for such calamities. We know there have been floods, droughts and plagues throughout history that our forefathers did not precipitate but we do know that human activity has had a lot to do with some of the disasters in remembered history.

We saw the sheer force of Cyclone Ditwah. Could we have stopped it? Obviously not. Was there anything we could have done to make sure that Ditwah came and went without a single life being lost? Probably not. We cannot stop cyclones. We cannot ensure zero loss of life and zero damage to houses, roads, and other infrastructure.

On the other hand, there are things we can do and things we should not do so that damage is minimised. Why don’t we do what we should, or, put another way, why do we do what we shouldn’t? Perhaps its arrogance, but it’s more likely that natural disasters, though more frequent now than they were several decades ago (by the way we should ask ourselves ‘why?’), are the furthest thing in our minds when we fiddle around with the environment.

How can cutting a tree or two be bad, right? What’s wrong with filling a few perches of marshy land to build a house? What’s wrong with a housing scheme on the sides of that hill when it means shelter for so many people? What’s wrong with a massive dam right there when it can irrigate so many hectares of land and produce so many megawatts of power? What’s wrong with widening the road that cuts through those hills when it can ease all kinds of burdens of so many people? What’s wrong in digging under an entire city if the exercise can yield so many precious stones that can bring so much foreign exchange to the country?  

Individuals think like this. Prospectors think like this. Governments think like this. Well, not all the time of course, but such arguments are used often enough to brush aside those who are skeptical. The problem is that they add up.

And so, the cumulative actions of many individuals and the development ‘prerogatives’ of many governments can make ecosystems vulnerable to the point of collapse. Colombo, for example, is or was mostly a marsh. Even today, there are several low-lying areas in the district that are called ‘wetlands’ and are (supposed to be) protected. Those who are old enough and those who bother to dig up the data on the matter will understand that large extents of marshland have been filled for construction. And we get flooded and wonder why. Yes, part of it had to do with drainage but an important contributing factor is that there is no place for the water to go in the event of an above average deluge.

We have rivers. So we have catchments. We have river basins. There are ecosystems that are fragile and ecosystems that can be made fragile. There’s a breaking point in all things. Reach it and the world around us collapses. This happened.  

We don’t think of building houses on a riverbed, even if it’s dry; we know that the rains will come, the water levels will rise and our houses will be flooded. So we build on high ground. Solid ground. Or so we think!

There are obviously multiple factors that could make things bad if hit by a cyclone, but the scientists probably would tell us that there are certain non-negotiable no-no things and that the ‘no’ should be enforced.

Did this happen? We don’t know. We will have to wait on that, for now is the time to attend to relief. Rehabilitation, later, but after a thorough post-mortem along political, economic, administrative and ecological lines obviously.

The river swelled. The mountain obliterated house and village. Did we, as a species, trespass. Were we, as a species, blind to warning signs? How did the Mahaweli become narrower over time? What were hills like before they became dotted with houses? And that dotting, did it involve tree-felling?

We claimed the riverbanks. We claimed the mountains. As a species. A bit like Columbus claiming he ‘discovered’ a continent or Americans putting a flag on the moon. We can claim of course. There are state institutions that are there just for this. We didn’t ask the river. We didn’t ask the mountain. We didn’t think we needed to check whether mountain and river were happy about all this. We never expected river and mountain to assert themselves. They didn’t fill forms. They reclaimed. So to speak.  

We were humbled, as a species, by what could be called the ‘Land Reclamation Act, 2025’ as per Kamal Marasinghe’s musings. We should remain humble. It’s probably the only thing that can give us a half-chance of surviving the catastrophes we have called forth. 

[This article was published in the Daily News under the weekly column title 'The Recurrent Thursday']