‘Saare jahan se acchha,’ gushed Sq Ldr Rakesh Sharma with enthusiasm when Mrs Gandhi, the Prime Minister at the time, asked him what his country looked like from that distance of outer space. What perhaps didn’t cross Rakesh’s mind was that the blue planet also looked extremely vulnerable. When the first set of pictures of the earth rolled out in the late 1960s, for the first time we looked with new eyes at the third big rock of the solar system, its place in the universe, and our place on earth as one of many million species and many billion beings.
The last fifty years has begun a rediscovery, of a global understanding that takes into account who we are and the state of our relationship to this planet, our only home. Even as we have relentlessly gone on to destroy those resources of Earth that have been created over many million years, there is also a slow dawning that Life on Earth is possible only because a number of parameters lie in certain very narrow ranges. Many of these are clearly environmental. Like the Earth has the right temperature and pressure to have lived with water.
Our ancients wrote and sang about the marvel of Creation in the universe. They paid their deep reverence to Creation as everything that we can see and a whole lot that we can't. Probably more that we can't see.
It’s amazing how our planet is just far enough from the sun, has just enough of that atmosphere of a certain composition that more heat stays here than radiates out to the vast cosmic space. Not too hot, not too cold, just right… and we just happen to be here. We forget that we are an incredibly young species on Earth. We are just over 100,000 years old, while the roach is 700,000 years, the rhino is nearly a 500,000 years old, many of our tree species are over 700,000 to a million years old.
Our instincts, like of all animals and plant species, have been conditioned by an essential character: opportunism. But what has made us different from the rest of the species is our greed. While other living species do what's necessary for them to do in order to survive, the human ability to think and strategize has thrown us out of balance with the rest of nature.
Until the last 200 years, for the vast majority of human history of over 100,000 years, humans lived on current sunlight. Sun fell on the fields, the fields grew plants. The plants made cellulose, plant matter. Animals ate the cellulose, we ate the plants. We ate the animals, we wore clothing made out of them. We were living off of current sunlight. It was our food supply, our clothing, we heated with wood it was our heat supply, our light supply. It was all current sunlight.
The sunlight that fell on Earth in a year was the maximum amount we could use. It was the maximum amount of energy that we could use. And from the earliest evidence of human civilization up until a few centuries ago, pretty much, that's how we lived. And our population never surpassed a billion people.
And then we began discovering that there were pockets of ancient sunlight. WE found coal, and then we mined oil. And over 300 years, a slow but insidious creep of consumption occurred, between such use of coal and oil, and the agricultural revolution. Our population rose, until we hit our first one billion people by the 1800s. It didn't take 100,000 years to go from one billion to two. Our second billion only took us 130 years. We hit two billion people in 1930. Our third billion took only 30 years, 1960.
It is startling to realize that about the time Nehru died, there were half as many people as today in the world. When Nehru went up the Red Fort’s ramparts in 1947, India was home to 280 million, under 25% of today’s population. The reason that we've been able to have this exponential growth of population is because we have managed to create food and clothing and transportation. We have been enamoured by our own genius at being able to gain mastery over the world’s resources, all the time forgetting that we're doing it all with this ancient sunlight that was stored in the Earth 300-400 million years ago. And if we had to go back to living off current sunlight, lacking technology the planet couldn't sustain more than a half a billion to a billion people. So we live in the most unusual period in the history of the planet in terms of a species getting access to energy-rich carbon.
What we have done is become good alchemists: the ability to take fossil carbon and turn it into human biomass. And we have used the supermarket the transportation system, to make that happen. So the cornerstones of this system that we have are all resting upon nonrenewable, energy-rich carbon we call fossil fuels.
The real problem is there are too many of us using too many resources too fast. Now, coal and oil has enabled us to do that. We use oil to increase the rate at which we extract all other resources—everything from topsoil to fresh water, from aluminium to zinc.
Chandrashekhar Hariharan
The last fifty years has begun a rediscovery, of a global understanding that takes into account who we are and the state of our relationship to this planet, our only home. Even as we have relentlessly gone on to destroy those resources of Earth that have been created over many million years, there is also a slow dawning that Life on Earth is possible only because a number of parameters lie in certain very narrow ranges. Many of these are clearly environmental. Like the Earth has the right temperature and pressure to have lived with water.
Our ancients wrote and sang about the marvel of Creation in the universe. They paid their deep reverence to Creation as everything that we can see and a whole lot that we can't. Probably more that we can't see.
It’s amazing how our planet is just far enough from the sun, has just enough of that atmosphere of a certain composition that more heat stays here than radiates out to the vast cosmic space. Not too hot, not too cold, just right… and we just happen to be here. We forget that we are an incredibly young species on Earth. We are just over 100,000 years old, while the roach is 700,000 years, the rhino is nearly a 500,000 years old, many of our tree species are over 700,000 to a million years old.
Our instincts, like of all animals and plant species, have been conditioned by an essential character: opportunism. But what has made us different from the rest of the species is our greed. While other living species do what's necessary for them to do in order to survive, the human ability to think and strategize has thrown us out of balance with the rest of nature.
Until the last 200 years, for the vast majority of human history of over 100,000 years, humans lived on current sunlight. Sun fell on the fields, the fields grew plants. The plants made cellulose, plant matter. Animals ate the cellulose, we ate the plants. We ate the animals, we wore clothing made out of them. We were living off of current sunlight. It was our food supply, our clothing, we heated with wood it was our heat supply, our light supply. It was all current sunlight.
The sunlight that fell on Earth in a year was the maximum amount we could use. It was the maximum amount of energy that we could use. And from the earliest evidence of human civilization up until a few centuries ago, pretty much, that's how we lived. And our population never surpassed a billion people.
And then we began discovering that there were pockets of ancient sunlight. WE found coal, and then we mined oil. And over 300 years, a slow but insidious creep of consumption occurred, between such use of coal and oil, and the agricultural revolution. Our population rose, until we hit our first one billion people by the 1800s. It didn't take 100,000 years to go from one billion to two. Our second billion only took us 130 years. We hit two billion people in 1930. Our third billion took only 30 years, 1960.
It is startling to realize that about the time Nehru died, there were half as many people as today in the world. When Nehru went up the Red Fort’s ramparts in 1947, India was home to 280 million, under 25% of today’s population. The reason that we've been able to have this exponential growth of population is because we have managed to create food and clothing and transportation. We have been enamoured by our own genius at being able to gain mastery over the world’s resources, all the time forgetting that we're doing it all with this ancient sunlight that was stored in the Earth 300-400 million years ago. And if we had to go back to living off current sunlight, lacking technology the planet couldn't sustain more than a half a billion to a billion people. So we live in the most unusual period in the history of the planet in terms of a species getting access to energy-rich carbon.
What we have done is become good alchemists: the ability to take fossil carbon and turn it into human biomass. And we have used the supermarket the transportation system, to make that happen. So the cornerstones of this system that we have are all resting upon nonrenewable, energy-rich carbon we call fossil fuels.
The real problem is there are too many of us using too many resources too fast. Now, coal and oil has enabled us to do that. We use oil to increase the rate at which we extract all other resources—everything from topsoil to fresh water, from aluminium to zinc.
Chandrashekhar Hariharan
