Earth Day 2018 — India and Sustainability
While I was in my early 40s I developed a deep found love for the field of astronomy. Looking back astronomy taught me two things.
1. How insignificant we are in the universal scale of things
2. How beautiful and wondrous is our Mother Earth
April 22 is celebrated as Earth Day and the focus is on this beautiful and wondrous Mother Earth.
Of all the things I learnt on astronomy one image always stood in my conscience. It is the image of Earthrise which was photographed by Apollo 8 crew when they were the first humans circumnavigating the Moon. It shows how beautiful this rare blue planet is. The atmosphere, the magnetic field, water and a unique combination of things makes it hospitable to life as we know. It is an oasis in a vast expanse of nothingness. We as intelligent life form have a great responsibility to protect this beauty of a planet as long as possible till one day when Sun will expand and engulf it some few hundred million years from now.
Globally there is a growing consciousness on climate change and the impact it is going to have on the life forms on Earth. Man is greatly responsible for all the excesses he commits in the name of development for this state of affairs. The goal of any life form is propagation of species. That intrinsic trait can be seen from various life forms on how they fight to survive and continue with the role of propagating its own species. Human beings have done this propagation work pretty well. The human population have gone from 1 billion to 7 billion in little over a century. The strain this places on Mother Earth is enormous.
Let us take the case of just India. The population has grown 6x in the past 100 years. We are still growing at 1.2 pct year over year. We wall lament the fact the population of Bangalore has increased to 1.5 crores. However, what is not readily understood is we add one Bangalore equivalent population to India every year. The number of births in a given day is around 100,000. The number of deaths is 58,000. So the net increase in a given day is 42,000. In four days our population growth is equal to the population of Chittoor town. Population of Chittoor district used to be 9 lakhs in the year 1920. Today the population is 47 lakhs. As a nation we add 3 times the population of Chittoor district in a short span of 365 days. In less then 5 years we add an Andhra Pradesh to our population. You don’t have to be a scientist, thinker or a tree hugging environmental activist to realize the doom we are heading towards. Propagation of species is our goal. By definition Propagation also includes preservation. We will not preserve our way of life or our own species if we continue to grow at this rate. There is no other grave problem that is facing India and even the whole of Earth than this explosion of population.
We have seen in our lifetimes how our way of life has dramatically changed. Just in 70s we had water bodies everywhere in Chittoor. Digging a well for drinking water beyond 30 feet was not needed. There was semblance of balance with nature. Since then we have doubled our population footprint. Also the literacy levels have gone up and with it aspirations of people has increased which in turn lead to higher demands on resources. There is a worthy campaign to stop defecating in the open which is very prevalent in rural India. However, can we afford the gallons needed to flush?
Few years back when I visited my village my old time friend who is a dalit had a worried face and on enquiry he mentioned that the bore well motor was not working for couple of days and there was hardly any water for the families. There was another incident sometime later wherein there were problems with the electric transformer in the village and they literally ran out of water. We always thought that electric power cuts would make a developed country stop on the tracks. We thought we were insulated from electricity blackouts and brownouts. That is not the case anymore. We don’t have enough surface water and cannot live without drawing water from the deep drawn bore wells which need powerful electric pumps. This deep under water is from centuries past. This is the Crown Jewels that the Mother Earth has provided for its inhabitants. It is not meant to be used for our daily bread.
We as a nation have been clamoring for degrees in all advanced fields. That is not what is needed today. Any education that does not teach sustainability and preservation (not propagation) is not worth the study. We have seen the fate of Cape Town of South Africa when it ran out of water. Such perils will visit us in few years from now. We need serious reduction in population. We need to get into negative growth rates. We as a nation just cannot afford a second child whether you are rich or poor, north or south, east or west. We have to come back to a point where we were just 50 years back. If we do not plan and act on such a thing, nature will find a brutal way to reduce population and it will not be pleasant!
It is time to wakeup and save ourselves!