Reviving authentic sustainability of indigenous Sri Lankan clay housing

DAILY mockery is indulged in, somewhere upon planet earth at any given point of time, through theoretical rhetoric by political leaders, academics and others on protection and conservation of the environment. Repetitive bombastic statements that are often never followed up in action, are especially amplified on 5 June, the date modern man has designated as his day to wake up to the abyss that he has dumped the environment in (being quite happy to descend back again into his nightmarish developed stupor the morning after).

- BY SURYA VISHWA

Amongst the avalanche of token comments and crocodile tears, we cannot find anything worthwhile being done to conserve the rich earth borne knowledge nature had bestowed upon us humans.

We who have made our environment a horror of concrete that cohabits with its terrifyingly choking cousin of convenience; plastic, no longer seem to recollect that our forefathers once lived in homes that were directly representative of the pristine nature of the earth. In Sri Lanka, as this edition will show, clay housing was the genuinely sustainable base that kept both the occupant (humans) and the host (planet earth) healthy and in a stress-free mode. Today the way we live in prison-like unsustainable conditions puts both humans and the earth into mood swings, which when occurring in humans is depression and when manifested by earth are landslides, earthquakes and cyclones. Ancient man was mindful of this, considering the earth to be a living, breathing patron which man was keen not to make an enemy of.

The modern global education system in its myopic, inane and becuffed eugolising of the deathly apathetic rote existence that we called development has ignored the need to re-trace traditional knowledge. Traditional/indigenous knowledge is connected to all sectors that has from age to age helped man to live in accordance with the edicts of mother earth.

We today focus on Sri Lanka's pre-colonial housing that used the purest of earth's resources; clay. Reverting to clay housing supports promoting human wellbeing and contributing to the non-pollution of the environment. Current day construction is a contributor to earth pollution, air pollution, climate change, sea and water pollution and overall landfill waste.

Therefore as our mass communication based duty the Harmony Page this week pay our attention to the traditional science of clay based construction. Clay-made housing requires specific expertise. We today focus on this re-education.