M. A. SIRAJ says that man has endangered his very existence owing to over-exploration and misuse of natural resources. He urges immediate corrective steps for sustainable use of these precious resources. This can avoid global disaster and ‘end o
Planet Earth’s natural environment is under deep stress. Man’s predations are disemboweling the earth, poisoning the air, contaminating its water sources, stripping its hills of forests, hunting down the animals and exploiting the loopholes in the very same law the man has put in place to protect the environment.
New name of the game is Globalisation. It is shifting power away from governments and popular institutions and is driven by a single imperative: to maximize the profits for businesses. This has the effect of accumulating enormous economic clout and political power in the hands of a small elite whose share of the products of a declining pool of natural wealth continues to increase at a substantial rate. It lends them the smug satisfaction that the system is working perfectly well.
While environment may be an irreversible casualty, it has also rendered fuzzy the concept of progress which is being defined only in terms of economic growth totally divorced from the moral, psychological and social hazards it engenders. Tragically those very people who are the ultimate victims of this economic growth are the ones who fail to comprehend the difference between happiness and development. The crass material race that has ensued between nations, obscures the fact that this economic development uses people merely as means rather than beneficiaries. Few can see or wish to see the seamy underside of this ‘dynamic economic competitiveness’ which is dangerously superficial and camouflages the deeper reality of impoverishment and disruption of ecological balance.
Our profligate present effectively masks the grim future the world is being hurled into. Greed, not sustainability, guides our existence. Objectives of acquisition and possession, not the spiritual fulfillment, make us chart our route ahead. Our economic institutions no longer are rooted in the community’s needs and livelihood. Its disastrous trail is pockmarked with Singur, Nandigram, Bhopal, Tehri, Harshud and the killing fields of Vidarbha. That is all in our immediate neighbourhood. But on global level, the ravages of the globalization are much starker and are clearly sounding alarm bells. Look at the environmental crisis staring into the eyes of the human race through the prism of under-mentioned chilling statistics:
Overfished, the world’s most prolific fisheries are collapsing one by one.
Water table is constantly plummeting turning major areas into deserts. Each year deserts encroach on another six million hectares of once productive land.
Population is set to touch nine billion mark by 2050.
As hungry mouths are increasing, nature’s bounties are dwindling.
77 million people are being added to the planet Earth every year.
The first environmental limits that we have confronted, and possibly exceeded are not the limits of renewable resources and the environment’s ability to absorb our wastes —referred to be ecologists as ‘sink functions’.
Acid rain has damaged 31 million hectares of forests in Europe alone.
At the global level, the area covered by the tropical forests is reduced by 11 million hectares, there is net loss of 26 billion tons of soil from oxidation and erosions, and 1.5 million hectares of prime agricultural land are abandoned due to salinization from irrigation projects.
Per capita grain production has been constantly declining since 1984.
Five per cent of the ozone layer over North America and probably globally, was lost between 1980 and 1990.
There has been a two per cent increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide in the past 100 years.
Treading of the consumerist path in pursuit of the living standards is one of the key problem areas of the current idiom of economic growth and development. By its ability to implant identical images into the minds of millions of viewers, television homogenizes perspectives, knowledge, tastes and desires to make them resemble the tastes and interests of the people sitting at the source of emission of the imagery. The media tethered to its transnational MNC servers, follows the agenda of raising grand illusions of approaching, if not achieving, lifestyles in America. The adulation of wealth and success propels our way forward to ecological hell. It is now being realized that the economic success of the capitalist nations is clearly a threat to the world environment.
Our senses are continually assailed with ever new technological gizmos such as airplane seats with individual TV screens, an information highway that makes it possible to connect to the Internet while sunning ourselves on the beaches of Buenos Aires, turning the sun visor of one’s car to watch latest films on the TV or leaving the dog with automatic dog-feeders at home while family vacations at resorts. Tetrapacks and disposable cartons have replaced the traditional banana leaves and potteryware. Thus the lifestyle in the third world is increasingly set by standards of the Western society. These standards are taken to be indices of progress. Yet the things that most of us really want – a stable and secure livelihood, a decent place to live, uncontaminated food to eat, clean air to inhale, good education and healthcare for our kids, a clean and vital natural environment – seem to distancing away from the grasp of most of the world’s people with each passing day.
Small scale farmers, artisans and fishermen are finding that their resources are being expropriated by the big moneyed people. People are being dislocated in a major way. Nearly 25-30 million people are working outside their countries as legal migrants. Another 20-40 million people are undocumented workers outside, all these leading to fragmentation of the socially integrated, peaceful communities. Nearly five lakh child prostitutes in Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Thailand cater to these migrants who find no other outlet for their biological hunger. Contrast these pictures of deprivation in the third world against the images of opulence in the West which is clearly living beyond its means.
William Rees, an urban planner from the University of British Columbia says that four to six hectares of land is required to maintain the consumption of an individual in a high income country.
In 1990 the total available ecologically productive land in the world was estimated to be 1.7 hectares per capita. So the population of the Netherlands consumes an output equivalent of some 14 times as much productive land as is available within its borders. Obviously, most developed countries draw upon resources of the low income countries to live their lives lavishly. How superficial are the gains from the ‘economic growth’, the mantra of the globalization, could be gleaned from the fact that 70 per cent of the growth is in 30 per cent economic activity revolving round petroleum, petro-chemicals, and metal industries; chemical-intensive agriculture; public utilities; road building and transportation; and mining—specifically the activities that leave most debilitating impact on the environment. They destroy the greenery beyond the regenerative capacity, draw water from the earth at a rate the Nature cannot replenish, denude hills, deplete lakes, pollute seas around and make the land porous and finally emit hazardous gasses to warm the globe.
Saddest part of the environmental discourse is that the countries that degrade the world’s environment are the ones that control the process of the environmental legislation. They feel no qualms in importing from the third world raw material that they do not possess, logging the forests of Sumatara and depleting the bowels of Middle East and scouring the mines of Congo and Zambia. And they stealthily export their waste to find landfills there. Be it ship-wrecking units of Aland or toxic dung dumping by Norwegian ships, the West’s record is shameful. This is indicative of the West’s gluttony when it comes to conspicuous consumption and thereby generate more pollutants and still breathe in less polluted environment by exporting the dirt and filth to the third world.
We have moved beyond an era when rivers could carry the sludge and disgorge it into deeper oceans, or air cleared itself of all pollutants, and if lands showed some signs of exhaustion, the people could move to New World with virgin soil. Environmentalism is not merely the task of romantic defenders of natural heritage. The very survival of the humanity is at stake. The question of conserving environment cuts at the core of our existence and the consequences of our greed are not there to be left to hang.
The challenge is therefore to conserve the wealth-generating capabilities of the nature even while finding a way out for underfed, undernourished multitudes to live healthily.