Padmaparna Ghosh
The other day, I stood in a supermarket aisle considering plastic packaging – the most beloved and ubiquitous of human elements. I wondered what would happen if we stopped using plastic and instead moved all packaging to organic materials (paper, bamboo, jute, etc). Would that be the best idea? What about the trees that would need to be cut – the carbon and biodiversity cost of that? Where would all the land come from?
Mundane daily operations such as a grocery run have prompted me to calculate all possible permutations of the environmental cost of moving through life on this planet. Is it better to drive to the mall instead of getting goods home-delivered? What about pitting fossil-fueled public transport against solar-powered private cars? Am I less guilty if I eat organic produce that traveled 1,000 km and not the gently-pesticide-laced bhindi that was grown in a floodplain at edge of my city? But what about the emissions when the pesticide was manufactured…?
I don't know. These are not questions that have attained the status of daily vocabulary or entered our household budgets because no one ever accounted for their cost – of carbon emissions or the pollution we wreak or the ecological/public health loss our actions perpetuate. For decades, we have taken out mammoth mortgages with no repayment plans. But climate change is here to make us atone.
Climate change is the most powerful ogre we are wrangling right now. But it isn't the only one. It is merely pointing us to the mess we have created. Bill McKibben wrote this week about how extreme weather is shrinking the habitable part of Earth. The truth is we started whittling away at the edges of our own homestead when we cut down the first forest to make way for farms, and never stopped. Dwindling biodiversity, invasive species, coral reef or wetland devastation, wildfires, desertification, deforestation, over-exploitation of aquifers, pollutant dumping – all of this has been going on for centuries. As a species, we have pruned and shaved the Earth's resources into a form useful and entertaining only to us. We have wiped out 60 percent of all mammals, birds, fish and reptiles since 1970. At a terrifying pace, we have moved our boundaries into those of thousands of other species, squeezing their habitats into tighter and tighter spaces. And now, climate change is wedging them harder. A recent study showed that birds in the Peruvian Andes, which were moving uphill to escape warming temperatures, will soon run out of room. We have literally run species off the planet, over decades.
It is only now that the universal and inexorable nature of climate change has forced us to look at these accumulating scars like it were the result of one colossal environmental crime. If climate change (CC) is the over-arching narrative for the future, then does it also take precedence over other issues?
Jonathan Franzen, writer and longtime birder, has a problem with climate change being used as a universal argument to hang all of humanity’s doings. He argues that “conservationists have gravitated to climate campaigning at the detriment of more immediate threats, such as the loss of wetlands or, in the case of seabirds in remote locales, rats that eat hapless chicks alive”.
And now, a solution to climate change -- wind power -- may itself be a threat to bird life. In the northern Western Ghats, which has one of the largest and longest-running wind farms in the region, researchers have found almost four times more predatory birds in areas without wind turbines than around the wind farms. In Gujarat, wind turbine-grid transmission lines have led to deaths in the critically endangered Great Indian Bustard population, of which only 150 remain worldwide.
Renewable energy is a big cog in this technological miracle that we hope will pull us out of the quicksand. But it does not come without its set of conditions. India has an ambitious target of generating 100GW solar power by 2022, a target that is hard to achieve without massive farms solar farms. Both solar and wind projects are concentrated in dry desert regions that are already stressed with water shortage for agriculture and human use, for example in Tamil Nadu. Land conflicts with renewable projects are also emerging.
When it comes to hydropower, the future of the sector is doubtful. Hydropower is not as benign as it sounds – it is a powerful force that subsumes large swathes of ecologically sensitive, productive lands that often provide livelihoods to vulnerable people. It also substantially contributes to carbon emissions. And with future climate scenarios that project a giant melt of Earth’s third pole, the Himalayan region, hydropower’s future too is in peril.
Wherever we turn, resources are already under stress, whether it is agriculture, water, land, forest reserves. And the resource box is getting tighter. The future of renewable energy, its scale (for adequate CC mitigation), national targets and policy pathways are tied to how we harmonize them with ecological, agricultural and societal needs. If we don’t, then we have learnt nothing from our past mistakes.
The point isn’t that there is an inherent conflict between climate change mitigation and other environmental goals – the point is of over-consumption, or over-consumerism, and of over-mankind. Log by log, we have built a pyre through self-destructive habits, and climate change has just lit the fire.
It is very easy and satisfying to elevate a standard of life. It is that much harder to dial down, to step back from consumption. For decades we have been told that we will be able to deal with climate change with technology – something magical will come around and mankind will pivot, that our lives will never need to suffer. It seems not, and by all measures, tones of optimism have dampened. So, over time, we have painted ourselves into a resource-scarce corner. We have refused to believe that life as we lead it will need to change, if we continue business-as-usual.
While governments falter on climate change goals, dilly-dally on how responsibilities should be shared, it is worth a moment to think about everything that led to this. If we have slowly eroded the boundaries of human existence on Earth, then we have only one recourse – we have to go back to where it started, and maybe that can be by planting a tree.
(Padmaparna Ghosh is a freelance writer. Views expressed are personal)
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