We have another World Environment Day before us, and another ceremonial set of noises that we will make as a nation, and as citizens of the world.
When you look back even to times as late as the late 1980s, you realize how little we did or understood of how life on earth is basically a relationship between what someone called ‘the two most complicated systems on Earth’ : Nature in all its vastness and us as humans in our desire to tame that vast beast to meet our ends.
When we came as a species to Earth—a mere 150,000 years ago, we weren't very many or very big, we weren't gifted with special senses. We evolved to be a new species on a planet that has so far lost nearly all the millions of species that it gave birth to, as part of the continuing change and evolution over 4 billion years.
The one thing, the key to our survival and our taking over the planet was the human brain. But because the human mind ‘invented’ the concept of a future, we were the only animal on the planet that actually was able to recognize that we could affect the future by what we do today. As one earth researcher remarks, “We look ahead, recognize where the opportunities are where the dangers lay, and choose accordingly to survive. That was a great survival strategy of our species.”
When people struck a good balance with Nature, it worked, they lived well. When they didn't, the people were gone. Every civilization perished without a trace after long centuries--because they reached an acme of such abuse and arrogated to themselves the power to tame natural resources. The Indus Valley civilization lasted over 3,000 years, spread over two-thirds of what is today’s India, displayed the finest knowledge of urban planning, showed immense respect for their forests and rivers, … until the last 200 centuries when something went wrong. From the little we know of that civilization, it disappeared without a trace in less than a hundred years. The Mesopotamian civilization died for similar reasons—even if it had recognized the importance of the environment to a point where the Hammurabi Code sentenced anyone to death who was guilty of felling a tree.
Saving The Environment?
At the end of the day, when we all talk about ‘saving the environment’, in a way it's misstated because the environment will survive far beyond us. We're the ones who may not survive. Or we may survive in a world we don't particularly want to live in, if it is going to be as bad as some of the dire predictions of our scientists is to be believed.
It takes no more proving that our biosphere is sick. We have a planet that's behaving like an infected organism. We just have to look around in the environment in which you live, for you to agree.
We continue to go ahead with these massive plans for making new roads and flyovers and bridges for all those cars that we desire, we covet. We think wider and more roads will sove the challenge; that we can continue to buy more and bigger cars; that the government will offer us all those wonderful roads for us to gratify this desire for speed and comfort. San Francisco has its traffic crawling today at 12 km an hour, after 30 years and many millions of dollars on building bigger and better roads.
The rivers, the forests, the lakes. Our continued profligate ways that is causing devastation that has already threatened the very foundation of the life system that has given us birth. “We are ultimately committing mass suicide as a civilization,” says one researcher. So as we destroy nature, we will be destroyed in the process.
Is There Any Escaping That Conclusion?
As the celebrated actor, Anthony Hopkins says in a recent movie where he plays an anthropologist who has spent time with a clan of gorillas who accepted him, ‘We humans are just takers.” We’ve never known how to give. If the human mind made that difference to this species among the many million others that Earth has spawned over a billion years, and if the human’s instinct for survival threw us out of balance thousands of years ago, what changed in recent history?
Disconnect With Nature
In the last century, we've dramatically increased our impact on planet Earth. One element has emerged that has made us even more destructive, accelerating our disconnection and causing extensive damage to our climate and all other natural systems. We’ve assiduously built an illusion in the world that as humans we are separate from nature. When it takes so little to see we are part of nature. We are indeed nature. This fundamental misunderstanding has helped us cause havoc on a scale that it looks like we have no way to return, to redeem ourselves and our place on Earth.
This our present ‘Christian civilization’, if you may want to call it, which started around the time of Christ, assumed these forms about 1500 AD when industrial society, the way we know it, was born. It is built on the assumption that we are the superior life form on Earth, that we are separate from all other life forms. It began conspicuously from the maritime invasions of 1400 AD of European sailors who believed that humans were given dominion over all other life forms. Then began this tide of rot that we have done little to stem.
We have learnt to create our homes, our offices, our hotels and hospitals, our cars and buses… all these ‘boxes’ that protect us from the very elements of nature that we cannot do without. We live today totally in disharmony with the planet. When was the last time you spent a couple of hours under the sun soaking in its rays, while you worked, naturally, with earth, her plants?
When you spend day after day in the centrally air-conditioned environs of your office, your home or your car, it is easy to think you're different from other creatures. And to delude yourself into believing that as a race we're smart, that we know how to create our own habitat, and, worse, that we don't need nature. The next time you walk around the aisles of a shopping mall, it’d be useful to remember that every single thing that you buy is out of Earth, and worked by humans who spend hours under the sun, relating to nature, and paying their obeisance to the produce that the sun, the winds, the waters and air offer these growers.
In the frenzy of our cities, the economy has become the only important thing. And in focusing on the money and trade, we've forgotten some ancient and humbling truths. Our traditional wisdom, are the essence of the learning of those past civilizations who had themselves died because of their lack of reverence to nature.
That's the lesson that we've forgotten and that we're paying a price for today.
Chandrashekar Hariharan
The writer is head of the Bangalore-based green solutions company, Biodiversity Conservation India.
When you look back even to times as late as the late 1980s, you realize how little we did or understood of how life on earth is basically a relationship between what someone called ‘the two most complicated systems on Earth’ : Nature in all its vastness and us as humans in our desire to tame that vast beast to meet our ends.
When we came as a species to Earth—a mere 150,000 years ago, we weren't very many or very big, we weren't gifted with special senses. We evolved to be a new species on a planet that has so far lost nearly all the millions of species that it gave birth to, as part of the continuing change and evolution over 4 billion years.
The one thing, the key to our survival and our taking over the planet was the human brain. But because the human mind ‘invented’ the concept of a future, we were the only animal on the planet that actually was able to recognize that we could affect the future by what we do today. As one earth researcher remarks, “We look ahead, recognize where the opportunities are where the dangers lay, and choose accordingly to survive. That was a great survival strategy of our species.”
When people struck a good balance with Nature, it worked, they lived well. When they didn't, the people were gone. Every civilization perished without a trace after long centuries--because they reached an acme of such abuse and arrogated to themselves the power to tame natural resources. The Indus Valley civilization lasted over 3,000 years, spread over two-thirds of what is today’s India, displayed the finest knowledge of urban planning, showed immense respect for their forests and rivers, … until the last 200 centuries when something went wrong. From the little we know of that civilization, it disappeared without a trace in less than a hundred years. The Mesopotamian civilization died for similar reasons—even if it had recognized the importance of the environment to a point where the Hammurabi Code sentenced anyone to death who was guilty of felling a tree.
Saving The Environment?
At the end of the day, when we all talk about ‘saving the environment’, in a way it's misstated because the environment will survive far beyond us. We're the ones who may not survive. Or we may survive in a world we don't particularly want to live in, if it is going to be as bad as some of the dire predictions of our scientists is to be believed.
It takes no more proving that our biosphere is sick. We have a planet that's behaving like an infected organism. We just have to look around in the environment in which you live, for you to agree.
We continue to go ahead with these massive plans for making new roads and flyovers and bridges for all those cars that we desire, we covet. We think wider and more roads will sove the challenge; that we can continue to buy more and bigger cars; that the government will offer us all those wonderful roads for us to gratify this desire for speed and comfort. San Francisco has its traffic crawling today at 12 km an hour, after 30 years and many millions of dollars on building bigger and better roads.
The rivers, the forests, the lakes. Our continued profligate ways that is causing devastation that has already threatened the very foundation of the life system that has given us birth. “We are ultimately committing mass suicide as a civilization,” says one researcher. So as we destroy nature, we will be destroyed in the process.
Is There Any Escaping That Conclusion?
As the celebrated actor, Anthony Hopkins says in a recent movie where he plays an anthropologist who has spent time with a clan of gorillas who accepted him, ‘We humans are just takers.” We’ve never known how to give. If the human mind made that difference to this species among the many million others that Earth has spawned over a billion years, and if the human’s instinct for survival threw us out of balance thousands of years ago, what changed in recent history?
Disconnect With Nature
In the last century, we've dramatically increased our impact on planet Earth. One element has emerged that has made us even more destructive, accelerating our disconnection and causing extensive damage to our climate and all other natural systems. We’ve assiduously built an illusion in the world that as humans we are separate from nature. When it takes so little to see we are part of nature. We are indeed nature. This fundamental misunderstanding has helped us cause havoc on a scale that it looks like we have no way to return, to redeem ourselves and our place on Earth.
This our present ‘Christian civilization’, if you may want to call it, which started around the time of Christ, assumed these forms about 1500 AD when industrial society, the way we know it, was born. It is built on the assumption that we are the superior life form on Earth, that we are separate from all other life forms. It began conspicuously from the maritime invasions of 1400 AD of European sailors who believed that humans were given dominion over all other life forms. Then began this tide of rot that we have done little to stem.
We have learnt to create our homes, our offices, our hotels and hospitals, our cars and buses… all these ‘boxes’ that protect us from the very elements of nature that we cannot do without. We live today totally in disharmony with the planet. When was the last time you spent a couple of hours under the sun soaking in its rays, while you worked, naturally, with earth, her plants?
When you spend day after day in the centrally air-conditioned environs of your office, your home or your car, it is easy to think you're different from other creatures. And to delude yourself into believing that as a race we're smart, that we know how to create our own habitat, and, worse, that we don't need nature. The next time you walk around the aisles of a shopping mall, it’d be useful to remember that every single thing that you buy is out of Earth, and worked by humans who spend hours under the sun, relating to nature, and paying their obeisance to the produce that the sun, the winds, the waters and air offer these growers.
In the frenzy of our cities, the economy has become the only important thing. And in focusing on the money and trade, we've forgotten some ancient and humbling truths. Our traditional wisdom, are the essence of the learning of those past civilizations who had themselves died because of their lack of reverence to nature.
That's the lesson that we've forgotten and that we're paying a price for today.
Chandrashekar Hariharan
The writer is head of the Bangalore-based green solutions company, Biodiversity Conservation India.
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