Day #17 (10 April 2020)
Half the Earth for Nature and the Wild!
“The most dangerous worldview is the worldview of those who have not viewed the world.”
― Edward O. Wilson in Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life
To many of us, the world is where we live, and we make the best of what we get, and we strive to get more of it, if possible all of it, every nook and corner of it. This broadly defines every one of us, whether it’s the material aspirant, or the spiritual aspirant, almost everyone of us.
Till we were locked down, we never thought we will ever be locked down, for such long days, and even more perhaps; one of the tiniest creatures in the world, a virus, that we are not yet sure whether it’s a living form or not, caught us in it’s mire, and forced every nation to stop everything that it does for it’s own growth. Even as I write this, the virus has infected 17, 55,313 people and killed 1,07,030 people in 210 countries and territories across the world. Every single growth index, every sector that kept the economy running is now down. Some sectors, like the Tourism sector, even with a relief package, could take three years to be back and running. A virus just taught us that it can stop our growth! Many scientists who study viruses, especially those who study the ecology of diseases caused from the wild, say, this has happened before, it can happen again, and that this can happen in worse forms.
“Pathogens do not respect species boundaries,” says disease ecologist Thomas Gillespie, an associate professor in Emory University’s department of environmental sciences, who studies how shrinking natural habitats and changing behaviour add to the risk of diseases spilling over from animals to humans. He adds that human beings are to be blamed for this, as they create the conditions for the spread of diseases by reducing the natural barriers between host animals and themselves. “Major landscape changes are causing animals to lose habitats, which means species become crowded together and also come into greater contact with humans. Species that survive change are now moving and mixing with different animals and with humans”, he says. (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/18/tip-of-the-iceberg-is-our-destruction-of-nature-responsible-for-covid-19-aoe )
The SARS-CoV2 virus that caused the Covid19 pandemic is believed to have originated from bats, moved into the pangolins, and then possibly infected humans in a wet meat market in China. The Ebola, another dreaded disease that killed nearly 12,000 people, has it’s origin on a supposedly freak spill over incident. It’s traced back to a little boy, the first case, who was playing near a tree, where the bats lived. Even the “monkey fever” which springs up, now and then, in some parts of the Western Ghats has its roots in deforestation activities.
But, we continue to plunder the wild.
The Amazon rain forests is one of the largest rain forests on the Earth, and occupies 4% of the Earth’s surface. It contains 33% of the world’s plant and animal diversity. With such diversity and other contributions that it makes to the local ecosystems, including towards land, water, climate, livelihood, it also absorbs approximately 5% of global emissions of CO2 (2 billion tons of CO2 every year). It’s existence is absolutely essential for our survival on this Earth. But it continues to be one of the most plundered and abused piece of pristine land on Earth, by the who-is-who among the global corporates. A recent report from the Amazon Watch (https://amazonwatch.org/news/2020/0312-investing-in-amazon-crude ) exposes how 5 major global banks are financing major crude oil extraction projects in the Amazon, with serious impact on the rainforests, the indigenous people and the climate. I am sure many of us have funded this unknowingly, and even if we know it, we may prefer to be helpless.
Back home, it’s a scandalous story. These are examples, and they are acts of politicians, officials and some dangerous individuals, and I would appeal to those who are politically polarised to keep the political aspect out for some time. We are not talking about that. We are talking about survival, with Covid in the air. During the pandemic, even as the whole nation was locked down, some heinous activities went on, as has never stopped for decades. Kerala, the state that handled the Covid crisis in a commendable manner, dubiously cleared an order that allows landowners to chop down trees in plantations, that were earlier protected. “At stake is about five million trees, many of them over 300 years old” says Adv Meera Rajesh, who works on conserving tree diversity. Inspite of the high level of environmental consciousness, it’s deep democratic roots and it’s intricate dependence on the diverse ecosystems, the State has been in the forefront, destroying some of its most pristine ecosystems, for the sake of development demands. Luxurious projects, that the State’s ecosystems cannot sustain are dreamt up by most Governments, eventually making the state a disaster hotspot as well.
The National Government is as worse. Even during these dark days, we saw some of the worst actions from the Ministry for Environment, Forests and Climate Change. Goa’s highly controversial new airport project at Mopa has been given environmental clearance. This is supposed to have serious impacts on the ecologically sensitive zones of the Western Ghats. In the city of Bangalore, already starved of water and open spaces, and growing into a pollution hot spot, the same ministry approved the clearing of the Eco-Sensitive Zone of Bannerghatta National Park by 100 sq km to accommodate mining and real estate interests. Meanwhile the State Government in Karnataka has cleared the Hubballi-Ankola railway line that will cut through the Western Ghats. The worst then happened on April 7th, when the Standing Committee of the National Board of Wildlife cleared a number of very destructive projects that would amount to a loss of 185 acres of forests from the national parks and sanctuaries. This includes a highway project through Goa that will cut across a wildlife corridor; a railway line cutting through tiger corridors of three tiger reserves in Telangana, Maharashtra, and Chhattisgarh; and a hydroelectric project that will submerge about 900 hectares of pristine forests and endemic myristica swamps of Karnataka.
Our last patches of wild, reservoirs of biodiversity, known and unknown is being plundered. Covid or not, pandemic deaths or not, some agencies of the human species, just don’t seem to care. The insults on nature and the wild life continues in the form of reclamation of forests, habitat loss, deforestation, unprecedented loss of biodiversity, invasive species, pollution, poaching, over fishing, and finally climate change.
Where and How do we put a full stop to this?
I am sure biologists, with a heart, have spent sleepless nights, grappling with this question, because they know something about life, that we Engineers do not know, and have never been taught. By Engineers, I mean the rest of us, the attitude, that keeps aspiring for the never-ending upward growth curve.
Edward O. Wilson, a master biologist and author of a number of books is some one I would turn to to show us the way forward. His warnings are a biologists bible to the apocalypse. He writes, “Despite all of our pretences and fantasies, we always have been and will remain a biological species tied to this particular biological world. Millions of years of evolution are indelibly encoded in our genes. History without the wild lands is no history at all.”
I wish to introduce to my readers his classic, “Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life". He writes, “I propose that only by committing half of the planet's surface to nature can we hope to save the immensity of life-forms that compose it."
Our intrusive, manipulative, engineering, builder brain is undoubtedly in conflict with this reality. But we have hit the end of choices!
Half the Earth for nature and the wild, is for our sake as well! Let’s give it up!
Afternote:
If you still find it difficult to agree to this, and want a factual justification, let me try giving you one. The human population is 7.6 billion, and the population of all animals, though difficult to estimate, the best studies put it at 20 quintillion. That makes the human to animal ratio at 0.000000038 to 1. Inspite of this overwhelming disadvantage, we get half! Convinced?
