7 July 2021
It would seem like a world gone awry and it has happened too frequently that now science appears sagacious, forewarning us homo sapiens of the coming apocalypse that is #ClimateChallenge. We had Canada a subArctic country reporting temperatures that would made ‘Madna’ of Mad Na fame from English, August, a scintillating novel about coming of age, through the prism of an IAS Probationer by Upamanyu Chatterjee, blush. We had Gulf of Mexico report flaming seas, due to disrupted piping from rigs offering a surreal Biblical imagery of waters emitting fires, the kind of promissory hell that must surely reckon with the faint hearted believer! And you have monsoons in India, fragmented into individual weather systems, local and focussed, where if it rains the weather is normal and when it stops, the unbearable humidity and sweeping heat that sets in makes one wonder if the weather is actually actively switching like a kid with fidgety fingers on the remote between Tom and Jerry and a Manga series, between Summer May and Monsoon July!
Should one not feel happy for the change politically in the USA, that we have a better chance, with President Biden than with Mr Trump at the helm of the world’s largest consumer of fossil fuels and outsized per capita carbon footprint, a country which can and should offer the best bet for science and technology to solve the #ClimateCrises? You can see how low the New Green Deal is on the priority of the present Congress that rebuilding American Infrastructure Better is more important. Even more important is how US politics is stuck with its ‘filibustering’, a simple cheat sheet that allows the Republicans to maintain their stranglehold, despite representing fewer and fewer Americans. In this political climate, where Jim Crow is creeping back and the SCOTUS is upholding portions of it as State rights, that even a future universal voting bill may not be able to dismantle, barrier to the vote from marginalised Americans is effectively a barrier to Climate Challenge reforms that are on the table.
Like the Indian Sparrow, the Saiga antelope and the Wild Boar of Fukushima show the key lesson for Holocene mammals like us Homo sapiens, that nature still possesses the chutzpah and the grit to skip, hop and jump, to revive themselves in ways and means if just offered the slightest of chances. A decade back, the sparrow in India was endangered and losing out from the way Indians now stored grain and built their homes. A series of conservative assistance measures and moves have helped them to come back, now one can see they not on window sills or shafts but hopping over compound walls on tiled pavements. Not as frequent but not as scarce. Like wise, the Saiga suddenly nearly disappeared in one of the biggest mass extinction records, just in 2015, laid low by something mysterious in Kazakistan, in their traditional grass lands. Zoologists are yet divided over what was the cause of such mass deaths, bacteria or amoeba, or was it climate change? The latest survey shows from the recorded few thousands in late 2015, the Saiga have bounced back to nearly a million in number, at 800,000 in April 2021. Just when you thought you could relax, comes news that their largest sanctuary is doing to be dissected by a massive rail and road project built by CCP China in this region. Saiga conservation has been a multi pronged approached much like Project Tiger in India and hence even as we take heart from their current status, the furrow lines deepen about their tomorrow.
In Fukushima, after humans left, the mountain boars came down, they even mated with pigs left behind in farms and they now ‘own the place’ unaffected by radiation visibly and even making a hybrid with the domestic pigs. Like Chernobyl earlier, Fukushima shows that while radiation is inhospitable for humans, animals and plants have different and poorly documented reaction to radiation, with visible re-wilding of affected areas.
What these examples cited in passing actually document is how in all of nature, there is a clear evidence from which humans cannot turn away. The evidence, that more than any act of randomness, more than any asteroid collision, or super volcanic eruption or mega earthquake that shifted continental plates and hastened their drifts, human intervention has posed the biggest challenge to biodiversity. As paleogeology and paleozoology, botany get increasingly scientifically documented by experts, the evidence much like carbon association with global warming is undeniable- humans have spelt the greatest danger to species, causing extinctions of the scale that is unprecedented in the very evolution of planet Earth so far! In this puzzle of our dominance on this planet, the one last piece we need fixing, is what happened to sister species of the Homos, the hominids including denesovians, neanderthals and other hominins, whose fossils and cave remnants remind us of their relative advancement eons ago, when we were a fellow species. Did the homo sapiens emerge as the dominant species of our planet by first exterminating our sister Homo species? Is it basic instinct as we evolved to deem it as some ‘God Given Right’ to decide the fates of species, adopting some while eliminating others?
While most species have ‘consciousness’ of some manner about their species, their genders and their herds, humans are perhaps the only animal species that have evolved to think and assume themselves as a distinct identity, one that is apart from ‘Nature’. As Science and Technology improved by leaps and bounds in the last two centuries, human potential for disrupting evolution and progression of other natural species of flora and fauna has grown equally, leaving most of Nature at our mercy, ‘as dead as a Dodo’! From a population perspective, for India and China to become as developed as America, our world would need ecological resources of Jupiter, not the dwarf pale blue dot that is our Earth. It was not that leaders did not know it, Mahatma Gandhi eloquently argued the case for nature in the context of human consumerism even as India was in the midst of a ‘Freedom Struggle’. He warned then when India was what is geopolitical South Asia now, with under 300 million humans, that if we consumed our way to American standards, the earth would be stripped of all her resources.
As always, prophets are sullied, misinterpreted or misunderstood. Gandhian Simplicity was not an advocacy of poverty. It meant clearly that mass production versus production by masses was and should remain a debate about resource sustainability. As Gandhi warned-‘There are two days in the year in which we cannot do anything, yesterday and tomorrow.’ If you see our environmental debate today, arguments are cleverly about actions that are possible only on these two clear dates, days that Gandhi warned us about. Either they want to lead us toward how Earth was in the past or what humans should have done in the past or they want to lead us to the future, when technology or randomness will retrieve this situation for us. The one day, when Nature allows us the option to act, we refuse. Today we are acting only in immediate self preservation, putting out fires that would otherwise consume us! We are not doing anything for sustainability and for posterity, because that we can do tomorrow! #FridaysForFuture which has run for several years now, is still an ‘awareness’ campaign only, with Greta the icon leading it, in her latest address to world leaders, not mincing words about how environmental cause still remained political grandstanding!
What the evidence before us is that a mere degree rise in average temperature of our earth has led to such drastic changes in climes. What evidence is before us, is how much of the fresh water is locked in ice and that ice cap was also reflecting the solar heat the earth was receiving reducing our ambient temperature! What the evidence before us is that despite the science, despite the know how, politicians and us, common folk going about our lives, aspiring for better tomorrows, will be held back by yesterday or lured by tomorrow, into doing nothing today about our earth! Could this be a mental block, a cognitive defect, one that actually led to disappearance of our sister species and is now taking possession of our own? The blindness to ‘today’, our species blindspot, that prevented Homos before us, and now bogs us? Is that why our ‘promised’ tomorrow never comes?
Post Script: There is a virus floating, mutating and generally singing its way to the Nature Bank of protein based invincibility as humans are caught in cross fires of their own making…If ever Nature wanted to whisper to us “Carpe Diem”, it was now. Can we hear Her?
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