Column | Biosphere’s Victory Over Misguided Human Ambitions Will Come At The Cost Of Billions Of Innocents: Bittu Sahgal

Among the many people who have influenced my life, I owe a lifetime debt of scientific gratitude to the late Sálim Ali. Having had the good fortune to listen to his adventures across India’s wilds over the span of a decade, the love I had for the outdoors was not merely strengthened, but also imbued with focus. Much of my mission to protect the wild emerged from my interactions with uncomplicated scientists/conservationists such as Sálim Cha, and people like Fateh Singh Rathore who grounded me with both passion and reality before leaving us. I recall, for instance, sitting with Sálim Cha at my Malabar Hill home in Bombay, way back in 1983, our eyes glued on a Torrent Duck (Merganetta armata), swimming against the impossible current of a swift-flowing South American river. We were watching an episode from the 13-part BBC documentary Life on Earth: A Natural History by David Attenborough, which breathtakingly revealed wonder after wonder of the living biosphere. Suddenly, ‘The Old Man’ (as the venerable ornithologist was lovingly called) exclaimed: “How on Earth does it manage to survive, leave alone hunt expertly for food underwater in that raging river?” I would imagine that millions across the globe must have had similar instinctive reactions as Sir David’s authoritative, yet mellifluous, voice explained what made the natural world tick.

Nature-smitten artists and writers have been documenting life on Earth since time immemorial, on cave walls, rock shelters and later on parchments and tomes. One such book published in 1859 was Charles Darwin’s on The Origin of Species, a controversial revelation that redefined our perception of Homo sapiens... and our place on the planet. Some three centuries earlier, in 1599, William Shakespeare had Cassius articulate the famous line, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

Today, such wisdom is flatly rejected by global authoritarian power brokers, policymakers and their handlers, who invoke force majeure (acts of god) to paper over the death-dealing consequences of their false ambitions. This involves the deliberate destruction of irreplaceable natural infrastructure (rivers, oceans, land and air), which is written off like any commonplace, post-acquisition, valueless asset of a liquidated corporation.

Some scientists suggest that Planet Earth has already crossed its climate tipping point as we wake up daily to catastrophe after climate catastrophe. Thus, the killer floods in Assam, cyclones and storm surges in Florida, raging fires in Europe, the US and Canada and lethal landslides across the brutalised Himalaya in India and Pakistan. Early warnings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Nobel Prize winners Al Gore and the late Rajendra K. Pachauri, and the subsequent ‘fire alarms’ by the likes of Lord Nicholas Stern (Stern Review) and Partha Dasgupta (Dasgupta Review) continue to fall on deaf ears.

Here in India, we too dismiss the teachings of our ancestors who believed that god was nature and nature was god. Which leaves me wondering whether a nomenclature change is called for from Homo sapiens (the wise man) to Homo stupidus suicides (self-explanatory!).

Biosphere: The Last Word

I have served on India’s Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change infrastructure expert committees, on and off, for almost two decades. The game is fixed. Dissent notes from members are sometimes not filed, falsified environment impact assessments are accepted at face value and those raising factual issues to contradict claims are quietly dealt with by ‘reconstituting’ the committees. Worse, bureaucrats prior to retirement are sometimes promised plum consultancies to handle the projects they approve while still in service. Not surprisingly, the late Shyam Chainani and I have suffered such ‘honours’ because of our opposition to infamous projects as the Enron thermal plant, the jetty at Guhagar in Maharashtra and the upper and lower Subansiri dam—the latter’s cost has risen from Rs 6,600 crore to over Rs 20,000 crore in Arunachal Pradesh.

Chainani and I had vociferously predicted that Sikkim’s stage three and stage four dams on the Teesta River were ill-advised and that extra-wide road projects in the high Himalaya would slide down the mountainside thanks to earthquakes or landslides. He is not with us to witness how right we were. We had also strongly opposed the proposal to hand over much of our energy security to the likes of Enron, a company that collapsed under its own ethical and financial contradictions. The climate crisis that has begun to overwhelm us today is a direct result of such faulty decision-making, involving a toxic carbon-tainted soup of ecological ignorance, testosterone-fuelled arrogance, unbridled avarice and rampant apathy.

I love my country and believe our ancients’ reverence and attitudes towards nature need to be exported to the all-powerful, but lost power brokers of the Industrial North. Instead, we find ourselves competing to outdo the consumption levels by importing false ambition and environmentally-illiterate attitudes from countries whose economic rise was funded on the ruthless colonisation of countries globally.

An old Indian adage states that might is right, which is the mantra of delusional global power brokers who believe their writ runs beyond political and corporate spheres to the biosphere itself, upon which they have declared open war.

But the biosphere has never lost a battle over billions of years. John Steinbeck’s lovely little book, The Short Reign of Pippin IV, published in 1957, is prophetic. Even if you do not read the book—I recommend you do—just Google it and your hair will stand on end when you discover how applicable the story is to the Daliesque ecological misadventures we are witnessing today.

In truth, I’m squarely on the side of the biosphere. But I take no succour from the fact that the biosphere will inevitably have the last word...because its victory over misguided human developmental ambitions will come at the cost of tidal waves of misery inflicted on billions of innocents.

(Views expressed are personal)

Bittu Sahgal Editor, Sanctuary Asia

(This story appeared in Outlook magazine’s August 31 issue, 'Whose Idea of India?', in which India’s noted public intellectuals, policymakers, cultural practitioners, political leaders, scholars and economists write in detail about the idea of India they believe can best secure the nation’s future as we celebrate 80 years of independence.)