Dr Anu Sharma
None other species than man has been the best and worst creation simultaneously.
He proves this when he knows he is cutting the same branch of the same tree where he is sitting but still he keeps on sharpening the edge of the sword.
What we are actually heading towards in the name of growth and development is a matter of concern. There is a need to revisit this idea of growth and development, green economy, very frequently used and encountered term-sustainable development. Everyone has defined and designed the concept of being sustainable as per their ease and comfort. In fact, it is a fit at times and a misfit many a times. Sustainability and sustainable development has become the most exploited terms these days. Centuries before we started this race of growth which later on, few decades before was replaced by much better and fitting term popularly called development. Just to fit ourselves in the scheme of things we further modified it to sustainable development.
Several reports are coming up every year by various agencies like FAO, IP2 .CC, Conference of Parties (CoPs), WMO, IMD, CITES, IUCN, WWF and many more across the globe which very clearly state that there is a situation of climate crisis or better called climate emergency as also recently declared by the Canadian Parliament. The country on June 17, 2019 declared a national emergency because of extreme warming. Canada faced warming three times as fast as the rest of the globe- declared by the environment minister of Canada-Cathereine McKenna. Thus, we are in the state of climate crisis. Its not only climate change that is happening but it the crisis that has been generated by the extreme weather patterns.
We have been reading, hearing, watching over televisions regarding global warming as called earlier and later replaced with the term climate change as the world witnessed not only events of global warming but there were events of global cooling too. Now the trend is shifting towards the climate crisis and climate emergency.
I may not be against growth and development but for sure skeptical about this skewed pattern of development that is being followed in the name of sustainable development which is not even near to sustainable. As an illustration, environmentally speaking, let’s talk about the patch of road from Udhampur to Chenani which is under road development for the last 5-6 years. While travelling through this road we all witness landslides, rock fall and accidents very often. I wonder if there was any EIA of the whole patch before the project was initiated. The mountain ridges along the line are devastated and degraded. The fragile and delicate patch is highly vulnerable to ecological destruction. Such type of projects which take unusual time frame lead to change in the ecology of the areas at its first place for sure and air, water and soil pollution on the other. The story does not end here. The continuous movement of vehicles on the highway is a source of noise pollution too. The people remain stranded for hours together which lead to health impacts. As a source of water pollution, river Tawi along the way gets polluted due to construction and demolition waste arising from the road construction as well as the undue silting being caused to the water body due to landslides, rock and mud fall. The project of road construction keeps on passing from from one company to another but not much seems to happen. Due to prolonged period taken for the completion, fragile ecology of this part of the Himalayas is under continuous threat and destruction. This is just one illustration. Many of the readers would have come across a number of cases within and outside Jammu and Kashmir where the environment is facing threat due to such ill planned projects.
Dear readers might be thinking why I am laying stress on such issues? The only thing that I am concerned is after all what we heading to? Where are we are trying to achieve when we are digging our own graveyards. The environmental degradation is very much visible. It is no more a theoretical. It is very much visible in the form wildlife destruction, ill planned projects of roads, railways, dams and barrages, occurrence of pandemics like the ongoing Covid-19. The year 2020 remained the worst hit year in this century. The year 2019 remained the year of extreme events like storms, cyclones, floods, landslides, forest fires, unusual patterns of rainfall and snowfall etc. India witnessed cyclone Fani hitting Odisha in May 2019 having center in Bay of Bengal hitting at Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh coasts which grew to a monstrous size making landfall on the coast of Odisha as an extremely severe cyclone. Yet another cyclone Vayu occurred in Arabian sea somewhere later in June spanning over nine days from June 9 to June 17. Other cyclones which hit the country were Hikka, Kyaar and Maha in the Arabian sea and cyclone Bulbul in Bay of Bengal. The Arabian sea, usually not known to be prone to cyclones, had four major cyclones in one year. The world is witnessing the cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons on the one hand and parallelly faced many forest fires. For example the world’s largest rainforest (Amazon) suffered more than 200,000 fires since January till mid-September 2019 (As per State of India’s Environment, 2020). The Arctic region also suffered extremely due to fires. Nearly 2.4 m ha of Siberian forest burnt down. In Alaska, fires took away 1 million ha tundra and snow forests. Such events of forest fires have alarming consequences for the whole world. Wildfires in the Arctic can have a Domino effect. Smoke particles land on snow and ice, causing the ice to absorb sunlight instead of reflectance thus leading to reduced albedo and enhanced warming.
Not only this but many things happening on the earth are not in sync with the nature. Yet another monster is plastic. Plastics are a byproduct of fossil fuel extraction. Around 99% of what goes into the making of plastic is derived from oil, coal and gas making industry, the second largest and fastest growing source of industrial greenhouse gas emissions. We as consumers are given the satisfaction of using compostable or biodegradable plastics. But there are still implications. For example: when released into the environment, compostable/biodegradable plastics do not fare any better than conventional plastics. Polylactic acid emits a great amount of methane which is a greenhouse gas and 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Packaging is the largest application. 65% of bioplastics are used globally. One kind of single use plastic replaces another. The story goes on like this.
With number of problems we also have solutions to get in sync with nature. Among many, one simple principle is to designing ourselves and our needs with nature and taking care of the assimilative and regenerative capacity of the earth and stop here before we enter the point of no return.
(The author is Department of
Environmental Sciences Government Degree College, Bhaderwah,
University of Jammu.)
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