Onkar Singh
Everything we use to communicate, move , stay warm, stay cool, sit, sleep, cook and refrigerate comes from the 15 billion tons of raw material that humans extract from the earth each year. And although ideas have changed about the desirability of this massive appropriation of nature, mining, damming, timber cutting, and fishing proceed much as they have for the last couple of centuries. Nearly 40 years after the environmental movement made significant global waves, we have gained only marginal ground in efforts to decrease overall dependency on non-renewable resources, and to reduce degradation of, for example, primary fisheries, forests and water resources.
The volumes of material extracted and harvested have increased. Recent trajectories for selected major commodities show the continued expansion of resource extraction. Global water consumption has risen six fold since 1960- more than double the rate of population growth. Global ground water deficit is conservately estimated at 160 billion cubic meters per year- the amount of water used to produce one tenth of the world’s grain supply. The rise in total energy and oil consumption in the newly industrializing countries and elsewhere in the third world is twice their 1990 levels at present owning to industrialization, transportation needs, urbanization and population growth. Global wood consumption has increased 95 percent since 1961 to around 4.3 billion m3 per year, over half of which is burned for fuel. Paper accounts for almost one-fifth of the world’s wood harvest. Nearly all of the resources are being consumed at larger volume than in the past.
The modern era of widespread concurrent change in the Earth’s land cover-species transfer, the conversion of forests, grasslands, and wetlands to croplands along expanding frontiers of change – may be thought as having been inaugurated by the Columbian Encounter in 1492 .Substantial change in the Earth`s biogeochemical flows is a product of the Industrial Revolution beginning in western Europe in the late eighteenth century.
Set in motion by these processes, the major human- induced changes to date have begun to rival or surpass in their magnitude the rate of the operation of natural forces in the biosphere. World forest area has been reduced by some 20 percent and an area of land the size of South America converted from its original vegetation cover to cropping. Human kind may usurp as much as 40 percent of net primary productivity. Global fossil-fuel and industrial mobilization of sulfur-a major source of acid precipitation and other forms of pollution, now approximately equal the natural flow of the element, while human activity, primarily use of fertilizer, exceeds the natural flow of nitrogen. The important atmospheric trace gases carbon dioxide and methane, both contributors to the green house effect, have been increased by about 25 percent and 100 percent respectively over these preindustrial levels by human action. Emissions of some trace pollutants released by human activities- a number of metals, for example- now greatly exceed natural flows, while releases of synthetic organic chemicals introduce novel substances that do not exist in nature. Face of the Earth has been transformed.
Apparently, the ever rising world population has been exerting greater demands on Earth’s resources. So is the rise in demand for better standard of living made possible by modern technology. The argument that economic growth is the necessary condition for development and the subsequent alleviation of poverty that continues to haunt many nations of the global South are no less significant. Behind all this is the idea of the Earth as an input, a set of discrete resources that can be separated, extracted and developed at a rate determined by the needs of the economy.
Whether codified into laws governing resource access, internalized as a personal worldview as a part of the education process, or used as rhetoric to gain popular support for political projects, such discourses are complicit in – and fundamental to – the conversion of ancestral home lands into oil fields, tropical forests into bio-mines for pharmaceutical prospecting, and sentient animals into laboratory resources. Neo-liberal hegemony of the developed nations in the globalized world has made the things worse, so much so that foreign investment in the mining sector of the developing counties and the export of these resources are not only resulting in irreparable damage to the ecology of those areas but destroying the communities and cultures imbedded on those soils for ages.
Yet demand on resources the world over continues with ever more vigour and intensity. India is no exception. India with 1.2 billion population is the second largest nation in the world. Its rising middle class, the vibrant democracy, vast market, almost two-fifths people living below the poverty line, an aggressive and domineering private sector and a pro- neo-liberal economic development model friendly ruling elite, make the demand on resources ever more compelling and an environ for their exploitation ever more conducive. The post neo-liberal India has witnessed a sharp rise in economic growth as also in aspirations of people, leading to fast paced development across the country of continental size. This has meant rising exploitation of natural resources creating, in turn, a new set of environmental and socio- cultural and political problems. Be it the people against uranium mines in Meghalaya, bauxite mines and Posco’s steel project in Orissa, iron ore mines in Goa and Maharashtra, lime stone mines in Gujarat, industrial expansion in Jharkhand or for that matter industrial pollution in Jammu and Kashmir, the protest map of India against predatory development is spreading fast.
But the nefarious nexus between votaries of growth and the funding agencies has time and again been successful in silencing these voices of protest and furthering their agenda of destructive development. Behind the current model of development is the thinking of converting places into spaces and changing the physical landscape forever for the everlasting supremacy of capitalism. Commoditization of Earth as a source of discrete resources and hence its exploitation is directed toward that end in view. The idea of Earth as life giving and life sustaining holistic entity has for the same reason not found any favour with the main stream development thinkers; hence intensification of plunder of the Earth.
Can the conflicting interests of environment and development be reconciled? Is an alternative model of development that is environment and people friendly, possible? Any answers??
(The writer teaches geography at the GDC Kathua)
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