19 July 2021
What must convince the ‘folk’ that climate change is catastrophic, than a few gallons of rain that wash away their very life time’s efforts to build a ‘nest’? In Germany and Belgium, reeling from ‘unprecedented’ deluge in 48 hours, valleys were washed away, well laid towns were converted into mud slats, intersecting into ‘sink holes’ and the slush and slurry was more dampening and draining on the psyche of the survivors than even the down pour itself.
In town and country, turn by turn, the unseasonal or the unprecedented has become a typical weather headline. Why it was perhaps not noticed as much earlier was perhaps, these were not back to back stories, it did not give the modern humans a taste of what the Puranic legend offered to denizens of Vrindavan, when their little boy wonder Krishna scoffed at their idea of Indra Puja and ordered them to worship the nearby Gowardhan hill. I hope, now when it pelts over human settlements, humans every where, can feel a sense of precipitative petrification, a sense of being washed away by it all, by rain pelting, hammering, disgorging, not water, but aqueous spearheads of munitions that exploded on contact, stinging and prying loose, the earth, the metal, the wood and the very skin! It is as if Samvartaka, the legendary commander of Dark Clouds, was rubbing with glee his hands as he was finally ordered after the Tretas to come after humans in Kali!
It does not need schooled mathematics to understand what would happen if a year’s rain fall came crashing in a day or two, now we know that several years rain is coming down upon us in a few weeks. What sapiens need to know is that unlike their cousins the hominins, neanderthal or denisovian or other, their chances of coasting through this roller ride is rather slim. The biggest proof of how humans are dysfunctional is here before our very eyes, when we want to get back to ‘normal’ in the midst of a raging pandemic where a mystery bug emerged from known places, whose transmission and pathology were increasingly clear by every passing day, and yet, it outfoxed us, outran us and is now making our public health authorities run in circles trying to contain it! As my current read is ‘Kindred’ ( Kindred- Neanderthal Life, Love, Death & Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes) it is very clear that the more than half a million year run that Neanderthals had on our planet, which began slightly ahead of us, then ran for copious lengths alongside us, the climate was not like the Holocene stability that we were blessed with for the last 10000 years. The last 100000 years of our geological run too only saw milder changes, in contrast with the previous 500000 years, and since the past can invoke assumptions that are erroneous to our present, the evidence for marine isotope stages and how the last interglacial epoch, known in scientific terms as MIS 5e and labelled as Eemeian or Ipswichian, is not comparable with what we have today, even though the average surface temperature of our planet was 2 degrees warmer than it was when temperatures were first scientifically recorded by us humans a few decades ago. This interglacial epoch was roughly 120000 BCE as accepted in climatostratigraphy- the field that uses isotopes to look back at past climatic conditions.
So if we take a leaf out of the neanderthals I could summarise this much for easy understanding-
The neanderthal groups that encountered severe weather changes that made Europe ‘African’ or Equatorial in climate or tropical or subtropical over continental scale, did offer pockets of nurturing for which there is lithic evidence. It is also not yet clear to us, if the neanderthal populations that have left their fossils for us across Europe where these have been more extensively studied, were one continuous evolving population and actually several successor seeds of neanderthal populations, through lithic technology and use of flakes, scrapes and knapping have been mapped into Levallois and Quina, it is still possible that these techniques were not transmitted but naturally derived by successive ways of hominins. Even otherwise, as you read Kindred, you realise that looking at the Neanderthal as a human relative is a perspective where you want to offer discounts that you offer early humans. So you want to think of a contiguity from the earliest cave dweller to the moon lander. Even so, if you see how the Neanderthal lived, his or her normal was simply living out each day as new. There was no pattern to that ‘normal’ that would have led to activity that was not purposed toward securing survival, that was not essential, for neither the climate nor the resources were to offer such margin. In fact, one feels awed reading about early lithic art, craft and imagery the neanderthals left behind, for it showed that even with such pressures on them, they made time to indulge in finery, in refining their senses, in art and craft! Can you imagine a Picasso working on a canvas that was his for only a few moments and that too while on his feet for much of a weary day? While they snatched and treasured whatever leisure they had, our hominin cousins, would have envied the way, we sapiens developed a system of civilisation that afforded through division of labour, exploitation of others and social hierarchies, that possibly contributed to our modern world where leisure is a primary vocation of the species. So much that in the midst of our current pandemic, we find that our soccer and cricket tournaments must go on, that we must take our holidays to everywhere as planned, and our way of life must return to our ‘determined normal’ ASAP. Definitely that was not the Neanderthal way, which was why perhaps they survived as long as they did, in a period when climate was always changing?
We can use the tug of ‘normalcy’ to drive our efforts to take on the climate challenge. We can assure ourselves that this limit of 1.5 degree average surface temperature rise that we think is ‘manageable’ is because it was managed by both our ancestors and neanderthals, even as tomorrow, the science may show us the frightening spectre that we barely made out, because neanderthals took us under their shelter, that sapiens was all at sea over changing climate?
As a species that today dominates our planet, we are aware of the spectre of rising sea levels, of melted polar ice caps, of burning permafrost, raging forest fires, deluges of rainfall, mudslides, sinkholes and rapid desertification are not mere simulations but observed and documented microclimate and local geological truths. We are also aware of the limits of modelling, of how it is more than impossible for us to accurately decipher these individual signals of distress into a larger whole, to the big picture which predicates our survival on this planet. A 10 foot rise in sea levels would mean nearly 40% settlement loss. What it also means is that our species will be increasingly angry, at odds with our brethren and elitist as we scamper for survival. So unlike neanderthals, humans are not going to scout for better places to survive and settle, interplanetary or exoplanetary, rather they will create safe heavens on this earth, which they will fence and exclude vast populations of those we will label ‘disadvantaged’! In Kindred, you find no evidence that neanderthals left any of their kind behind, like we do routinely, and our species has enough history of creating ghettos for the plague or Black Death as it was called back then, of creating what are even now known as ‘leper colonies’, and of course the great residential hive of the industrial age that demeans every marker of what it should mean to be human- our urban slums! Hence the species could well survive using divide and rule, segregation between entitled and the enthused, by doling out the promise of the ‘meek inheritor’ while ensuring that the sly and sleek are the inherited!
Hopefully Western Civilisation which has led much of our species march in the last 100 years, will continue showing a more Kindred Spirit as it has shown so far in this Pandemic, from offering a free testing, tracing, treating, vaccinating model to economic support for lockdowns, propping up all levels of local and global economic activity, that encompasses both mom & pop stores to multinational corporations. In a fundamental departure from ‘free market’ economy, big government spending and mind boggling levels of government debt have been taken on, even as there is growing consensus in voting populations and scientists about climate change. If any doubt is there of leadership, we know how the West worked to make their sun bathing safer, by phasing out ozone depleting CFCs. We also know how Germany phased out nuclear power, how many Scandinavian countries are committed to phasing out fossil fuels in the next decade. Considering the differentials in per capita energy footprint, we know that American insistence that China and India do more on climate action before the West does its share was just delaying the inevitable. The way America herself has moved from that position of George Bush Jr to the present one of Biden, is largely due to massive floods and forest fires that America has encountered in the first two decades of this century.
Call it a divine blessing, call it a call to humans to heed to nature, the precipitation now attendant on our planet across climatic regions is perhaps the dressing down a petulant child needed, to perk up and reform!
indiarubberman.com 