Saakhi is a Sunday column from Mrinal Pande, in which she writes about what she sees and also participates in. That has been her burden to bear ever since she embarked on a life as a journalist, writer, editor, author, and chairperson of Prasar Bharti. Her journey of being a witness-participant continues.
It has always been a source of wonder to me how, compared to the great environmental meltdown that stares the world in face today, wars – first the one in Ukraine and then in Israel – get such a remarkably good press coverage all over.
Once upon a time, around 2005, Al Gore, a formal presidential candidate and ex-vice president of the US, appeared in An Inconvenient Truth, an Oscar-winning documentary directed by Davis Guggenheim. It was one of the first hard-hitting exposes of the effects of global warming on our steadily degrading world environment. Using very few aids – except some photo slides – the documentary explained how we had messed up our planet.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
He issued a warning: something had to be done soon to arrest the climate change driven by human greed, or else the Earth faced floods, hurricanes, melting of ice on the poles, rise in sea levels all over; in short, migrations and soon after that, extinction on an unbelievable scale.
Memories of those predictions still haunt us, but regrettably, despite the immense damage to the environment and suffering the two World Wars have generated, feelings of hate and distress against them have grown hazy in our generation.
The First World War was long over before our generation arrived and the Second World War was something our parents talked of. Those were pre-TV and social media days – but today, each time a “master stroke” is reported, we cheer in the streets and on social media and celebrate the death of soldiers with great fanfare.
Not just us, even the world still celebrates the Armistice Day that marked the end of the First World War, quite overlooking the fact that mankind grew no wiser after the first one and waged a second one that killed many more soldiers and civilians.
Those of you who watched the BBC in the last month may have noticed (or not) the irony of the little red poppy flower marking Armistice Day worn by all anchors in the studios in their lapels.
Lapels in the shape of a red poppy flower are worn to mark anniversaries of Armistice Day. Representative image. Photo: Screenshot from YouTube.
The poppies, you find, come out of the ‘Earl Haig Poppy Factory’ (named after Douglas Haig, the commander-in-chief who led soldiers to the Battle of the Somme). The funds collected by their sale go to the Haig Fund for wounded servicemen, even as thousands of both soldiers and civilians are being killed each day in Europe and Asia.
History has its own cruel little jokes.
Just as the grim battle on the Somme killed the idea of a jubilant victory after a war for many who lost friends and family in Britain, the war in Gaza has killed the lies about an environmental apocalypse being the senseless propaganda of some gloomy environmentalists backed by a political agenda.
No matter what the outcome of the present wars raging in Gaza and Ukraine, we cannot ignore the horrifically visible environmental degradation it has speeded up. This year is reportedly the hottest in 1,25,000 years and the ultimate human cost of global heating, especially for poorer nations, will be immense.
We in India will have to share it, no matter how many world leaders meet (including ours) and make an appeal for peace and justice with a toothless UN leading the pack.
“The unarmed war – between the so-called West and the so-called East (US vs China) – is going to make things worse for the fight against climate change”, writes environmentalist Sunita Narain as the world heads to the UN climate change conference in Dubai.
Scientists say 2023 is on track to be the warmest year on record, around 1.4 °C above pre-industrial average temperatures. Credit: Jorge Vasconez/Unsplash.
At home, democratic values symbolised by the freedom of speech are being tested severely. Legacy print and visual media, we learn, are now controlled by four major corporations all supportive of a questionable agenda being promoted in the name of modernising India.
Power plants are being built in the Himalayan region, and protected forest zones and ancient sites of pilgrimage built over delicate ground full of shale rubble have been opened up to tourists. Real estate agents and builders for landowners in both urban and rural areas control the region.
The result is toxic air, toxic rivers, and mass migrations all over India. Like wars, pollution blows across state boundaries. As the local leadership struggles to control pollution in the national capital, it needs well-financed and target-aligned strategies, and strong compliance across all the four NCR states.
Now the Supreme Court has ordered the government to take measures to end this agony, because toxic gases surround slum dwellers and dwellers of the Lutyens’ zone similarly.
Photo: Shekhar Tiwari.
Delhi is not some zoo being subjected to a golly-green-eyed monster’s annual visits. Anger against successive chief ministers is an easy dodge, a massive distraction from the real, more prosaic question of just where the toxins are being released, how and why?
The laws of nature carry no philosophy, make no judgments and don’t sit down to write tracts.
Having signed agreements to hand over national parks and swapping land assets to carbon emitting industrialists, after encouraging the production of more cars and chemicals, and hounding and harassing protesters, leaders cannot simply go and sit in a lotus pose along the banks of some holy river or kund, or within the womb room of an ancient temple.
How can Ma Ganga and Ma Yamuna or Lord so-and-so give answers for the way out of extinction to leaders whose policies have ruined the source of our holiest rivers and temple towns in unimaginable ways?
Nature, or Gods if you will, permit just so much cheating and exploitation of natural resources. No more. It is literally a pathetic fallacy to say that nature mourns extinction. Nature uses extinction to wipe off a species that has outlived its value.
So the annual wearing of red poppies or Soldiers’ Day flags upon our lapels, erecting war memorials to honour the dead, or showering pilgrims with rose petals and performing smoke-emitting yagnas for purifying the environment is not going to ward off the next mass extinction.
It may hasten it.
An inconvenient truth, but there it is!
Mrinal Pande is a writer and veteran journalist.
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