People have to introspect about their current way of life which is devastating the environment. This will be difficult because it is a product of the consumer culture which, in turn, is a product of market capitalism
It has been a strange winter in the Kumaon hills in Uttarakhand following a strange monsoon earlier. Heavier snowfall than any in recent history, and unusually bitter cold stretching into March, have chilled bones and disturbed the pattern of plant life after floods, one of the worst in history, had killed hundreds and swept away habitations, and prolonged downpours had caused landslides and eroded vast stretches of roads. People here are attributing havoc to climate change, which is altering weather patterns the world over.
While the massive damage caused by the phenomenon is being increasingly recognised even by sections of business and industry which had once scoffed at any mention of its dire effects, the full dimensions of the threat it poses have not yet sunk in widely enough. It is not just a matter of coping with floods, snow storms, and droughts, their after effects and the loss of lives but of reckoning with a changing environment. Global temperatures are going up, glaciers are melting and the sea level is gradually rising.
The consequences of all this will be disastrous in the extreme, As Paul R Ehlrich and Anne H Ehlrich point out in The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment, “Destabilization of the climate can undermine biodiversity, exterminating populations and species that cannot adapt or move fast enough to keep up with changing habitats, including species that may play important roles in support of agriculture. Ecosystems may be torn apart as species migrate at different rates and in response to differing changes.”
One of the consequences may well be the extinction of humankind. Those inclined to laugh at the idea will do well to listen to the Ehlrichs, according to whom, “A change in climate may well have played a key role in the splitting of our lineage from that of chimpanzees. It seems likely that our last common ancestor lived in woodlands in a gradually drying world, and that the chimp line followed retreating forests while our ancestors ventured out onto the spreading savannas.”
Those who may conclude from this that if a climate change could have led to the emergence of Homo sapiens, another can well see its transformation into an even more capable entity, will be assuming too much. Natural selection, the principal force which drives evolution, and which works on anvils of the environment and genetic endowments (genotypes) of organisms, can also diminish the latter’s ability to cope with change. As a result they, as it happened with numerous organisms that could not change fast enough to keep pace with environmental change, become extinct. There is nothing to indicate that human beings are exempt from such a fate.
It is important to bear this in mind because climate change, overwhelmingly a product of human activity, is a vital but not the only element in environment change. A very important one is human intervention, which is drastically modifying the physical environment. Humans have destroyed forests to make way for settlements and agriculture, dammed and changed the course of rivers, thus destroying the habitats of countless organisms. They have altered gene pools of animals and birds through hunting and selective breeding of domesticated animals, besides releasing innumerable human-made chemicals and lethal radioactivity from testing nuclear weapons.
One will no doubt hear that science and technology, which have enabled humans to dominate and mould the environment, will enable them to wither the adverse impact of the changes. That, again, would be assuming too much. Science and technology have produced the economic order and the structures of governance of modern industrial societies. In Technological Society which, first published in English translation in1964, remains a classic, Jacques Ellul, says that “technique”, which he uses almost synonymously with “technology”, “integrates the machine into society. It constructs the kind of world the machine needs and introduces order where the incoherent banging of machinery heaps up ruins; it does in the domain of the abstract what the machine did in the domain of labour.”
The progressive and proliferating introduction of machines has led to sweeping changes in society and environment. Machines consume power —muscle, fossil fuel, hydro-electric, nuclear and so on. They have to be arranged to ensure smooth and efficient functioning; space has to be created for their installation. large factories housing them are often spread over acres. Forest and agricultural land, and even built-up urban land have to be cleared for establishing factories and for accommodating people who work in them and who, in some cases, number in thousands. Roads, railway lines and bridges have to be built to convey raw material to — and transport manufactured items from — them.
The argument that advances in the area that have come to be known as ‘green technology’ will neutralise the environmental havoc that industrial civilisation has wrought, represents wishful thinking. ‘Green technology’ remains on the sidelines of the industrial order and its efficacy as well as adaptability by industry, remains to be seen. Besides, scientific and technological inventions have turned out to be counterproductive in many cases. The use of pesticides have made many varieties resistant to them while killing off some others. Similarly, over-use of antibiotics has made many varieties of bacteria resistant to them, so much so that many scientists believe that they would soon become almost useless.
Clearly, people have to introspect about their current way of life which is devastating the environment. This will be difficult because it is a product of the industrial economy and the consumer culture which, in turn, is a product of market capitalism. The latter’s survival and progress depends on stimulating consumption which, in turn, stimulates demand for consumer items which are met at heavy cost to the environment. The first step would be a people’s movement to slash the items which are not really necessary for a decently comfortable life.
The second will be a determined move to reduce the rate of population growth which is increasing the human demand on the environment for sustenance. The first will take a lot of doing, and the second a huge amount of courage given the strident opposition of obscurantist bodies to birth control. But the rate of environmental decline will accelerate rapidly unless both are attempted successfully. Without the effort, specific measures to protect the environment will not help.