Column

I don’t know how many of us have time to read anymore… as in books, serious and contemplative, so I am going to paraphrase something I read.

In the book Ishmael, Daniel Quinn projects the point of view that we are killing the planet because of a misplaced mythology.

With typical human pride and an arrogance that we humans have learnt as part of our behaviour towards all other living things since we learnt to walk erect, we believe that the world belongs to us. The truth however is that we are animal, like every other animal, though evolved further than them, and thus a part of the world.

But our belief in who we are, owners of the world, which has been created we think, for our singular use, makes us try to make Nature work for us and us alone. We thus tame and change the course of rivers, ‘conquer’ and in the process decimate and litter the highest mountains, and deforest the thickest jungles.

He goes further to say that our attitude to nature is similar to Hitler’s attitude on race: “Hitler waged a genocide against non-Aryans, we are getting rid of every creature and everything that doesn’t seem right to us. Hence jungles are cut down and animals butchered to the point of extinction to make way for farmlands and factories to feed the rising human population.”

I write this and quote from this, because I have felt this way so many times.

I felt it yesterday as I was driving to work. Not far away from the office, where a towering mini city is coming up, the road just outside it was cleared and broadened so that traffic could flow smoothly, especially when the complex opens for commerce.

I had slowed down to let a truck reverse, and saw on the roadside the roots and stub of what had once been a giant tree. It lay, amputated and abandoned on its side, of no use to anyone, except the contractor who would use it as proof to get the commission he gets for having employed his labour to cut the tree down for the road works dept. Further down the road, more stubs lay, like helpless giants who had been slain while asleep.

I think of it when I see more and more high rises coming up. They more often than not destroy all the green around to make the most of every available space: for cars to park, for more money to be calculated in square feet…

I think of the living things that have sacrificed their lives for a monolith that will give its occupants nightmares as they try to pay for the comfort of a home.

Trees, we forget, are living things. They breathe, they grow, they have cycles of death and rejuvenation, of reproduction just like humans. Just because we cannot hear them or know their feelings, we decide they are inanimate and don’t count for anything. We cannot see the air waves that get us connected by the now ubiquitous cell phone either… but they do exist don’t they?

It is scary the way we destroy everything we touch… especially things we cannot create. We might be super humans who have created the computer and the technology of tomorrow that takes us into new frontiers, but can we yet find in us the wherewithal to even count the infinite variety of flowers that exist in nature? The multitude of colours, of shapes and textures, of detailing that makes one different from the other, the scents, and the purposes they serve… Even cataloguing them could keep one person employed through an entire lifetime.

Yet we go about destroying in the name of progress, recreating, rewriting the natural law even as we realise that it boomerangs in our faces. The destruction of the carefully orchestrated balance nature has placed before us, will end in our own destruction: part of nature that we are.

Already we are seeing the signs on the wall. But illiterate as we are, we prefer to read the language of commerce rather than the script Nature is writing.

The only consolation I can see in all this is, well, selfish. I won’t be around when Nature has her revenge.

Email: ssaran@dnaindia.net