Why Inner Mutur?

A part of the training given to LCEJ members is to develop a deep awareness of the dangers of speed. The speed of a plane, the speed of a car, the speed of a motorcycle, even the speed of a bicycle puts our brain to sketching modes, erasing unnecessary details and recreating a pleasurable landscape. On a LCEJ field trip, in order to wake up from that floating mood, the driver regularly stops and lets us walk on the road, on the beach, or on the street, and suddenly that same brain realizes that it has been fooled. The nice winding roads are bordered by sandy roadsides peppered with plastic bags and toxic waste, the nice sandy beach is just hiding discarded flipflops, plastic bottles and nets, and the borders of streets are waste dumps. 

Entering Mutur is entering a city that is polluted. Little streams of water along which kids are playing are natural garbage cans, and no one seems to realize that this is dangerous. No one realizes because, in part, Sri Lanka has entered a phase of its history where intolerance is obsessive and blinding. Dreams of a Buddhist Sri Lanka, or a Muslim Sri Lanka, or ... distract the population from seeing the true dangers and focuses on the speedy creation of monolingual, mono-religious, mono-... societies. 

Inner Mutur is at the critical point where, if something is not done, the city will lose its multi-religious, multi-lingual and multi-ethnic characteristics. We often do not like diversity or multiplicity because it slows down the pace of decision and transformation. However, in order to reflect on ways to solve the environmental crisis, it is exactly that slowing down that is an asset for effective solutions.

The Mutur Recycle Reuse Project aims at maintaining minorities in Mutur and transforming those minorities into agents of change for an eco-friendly mode of life.