by Goolbai Gunasekara

“Environment” is probably the most popular word in the world at the moment. Buildings are built on a ‘going green’ basis. Companies advertise the fact that their products and indeed even their new surroundings have all ‘gone green.’ New factories would not dream of being constructed without an environmentalist telling them how to set about it.

The subject forms part of school syllabuses. For example, Geography in my time used to be all about mountain ranges, national rivers, varied climates and the diversity of vegetation. No longer. I picked up an OL Geography text the other day and found it was as incomprehensible to me now as Science texts used to be in the past. The Geography syllabus is now so vast it has become a specialized subject and with good cause, for there is no doubt that our planet is heavily under siege thanks to the stupidity of man himself who has brought it to the brink of tragedy. It cannot be stressed strongly enough how urgently necessary it is to halt the destruction of the soil.

All this brings to mind the work of one man who was a well-known personality of my youth (nay even earlier for I was around five when I received my first jak seed from him). He is not even mentioned by most people today who have moved on to new heroes of Sport and Politics, and yet this man’s work, in my opinion, is one of the most valuable contributions made to the population of this country albeit in a quietly caring yet passionately concerned way.

The Dias name is a well-known one in Visakha Vidyalaya, the foremost Buddhist Government Girls’ School in Colombo. Mrs. Jeremias Dias was the philanthropist who donated the prime land on which Visakha stands today. She is revered as the school’s Founder.

Her son, Arthur Dias naturally took a great interest in this fledgling Buddhist Girl’s School that my American Mother headed for 12 years at a time when it was still a private school and the Government had not taken over most schools and forced them willy nilly into the Free Education System.

His brother, Mr. Charles Dias, took over the managership of the school after the great National leader, Sir Baron Jayatilleke was appointed Sri Lanka’s High Commissioner to India and could no longer act as Manager. This gave his brother, Arthur, the forum he needed to popularize his dream of having a Jak tree in every garden of Sri Lanka.

At every Visakha Prize Day Arthur Dias would be on stage alongside his brother (and my mother) with a box of specially packeted jak seeds on the Prize table. His own mother, Mrs. Jeremias Dias’s portrait, presided over all these doings on the Visakha stage and one assumes that she instilled these ideas of future staple foods for Sri Lankan populations into her sons along with her ideas of running the highly successful Dias estates in which Jak trees abounded along with plantation crops.

Every Visakha Prize winner was handed a Jak tree seedling and sometime during the evening Arthur would give a talk to the audience about the nutritional value of the Jak fruit which would serve as a standby were famine ever to hit our fruitful land. I have just planted two jak trees myself outside our garden on a vacant swamp land in the hope it will feed someone, sometime in the future. Mr. Dias would be proud of me.

The Dias Walauwe was in Panadura, and not content to popularize his vision in Visakha alone, he had his helpers standing at the bus stands in the city handing out these precious seeds to passengers.

And if all this sounds excessively obsessive, Arthus Dias went further. He petitioned the British Government of the time to pass a law that no Jak tree could be cut down without the permission of the authorities. Governments then (even British ones) were not ready to pass such requests without first ignoring them, later grudgingly reading them and finally agreeing to the excellence of the scheme.

To this day this law is still in operation and is rarely disregarded.

If Arthur Dias had this kind of influence in one school I wonder if schools of today could not popularize some aspect of the environment that would benefit the food chain of Sri Lankan. In the future we face droughts, floods and even famines.

That sturdy Jak tree has saved many a village family from hunger. What could it not have done for the Bihar famine of British times in India! Imagine a Jak tree in every home feeding the starving population of Bihar that Churchill was deliberately starving.

I have no idea if new Jak trees continue to be planted in our island. I think it an inspired idea if schools were to hand out these seeds at prize givings and other functions. Not only will the work of a far-seeing man be perpetuated but the country will surely benefit tremendously by this highly tasty addition to its food supply. Of course, more than half the recipients of these seeds will toss them in the nearest wastepaper basket but there will be that small percentage of citizens who will actually follow through and plant them.

The outlook of future world food supplies is bleak. We are told that pollution of the seas will be so great that fish will be contaminated thus putting a stop to one source of food. Animals will also be likewise polluted by the air and all sorts of poisonous gases, so meat is out.

Ergo, vegetarianism is on the cards. Let us begin getting used to it and just to make life easier for us, Sri Lankans, let us begin planting Jak trees. Arthur Dias’s dream may save us.

(Excerpted from Principal Factor first published in Lanka Market Digest)