By Dawood Auleear
The concern on environmental issues appeared about half a century ago in Mauritius. The degradation of our living space was attributed to the rapid rise of the population of the planet whose needs had to be met with increased production which in turn caused a rapid depletion of resources and increased the amount of carbon dioxide released in the atmosphere. Some scientists resisted the idea of overpopulation, advancing that there was a fight between techno fixers and doomsayers. Techno fixers were going to win the battle as they believed there was no limit to human ingenuity.
The threat of the end of humanity is still persisting with all forms of pollution: logging, grazing which causes erosion, deforestation for agriculture, mining for minerals and especially for gold, and wild fires are all reducing our forest and wet lands and destroying the lungs of the Earth. In the process, we are losing rare flora, source of our medicine and habitat of indigenous populations. We treat indigenous tribes as lesser human beings. This will boomerang in our face as we are simultaneously losing the wisdom that allowed our species to live in harmony with nature and saving us billions spent on modern medicine.
Factories are depleting our mineral resources and their smoke is choking us. The building of roads for automobiles is reducing land available for agriculture, and energy guzzling air travel and emitters of deadly gases and destroyers of our ozone layers are adding to our sorry plight. It is a pity that we don’t see it.
We have solutions to all the ills listed above and they can be summed up with the saying of Mahatma Gandhi that there is enough for everybody’s need but not enough for everybody’s greed. But why is the application of the wisdom of the Mahatma so timid? The Greens in Europe and the West, source of positive innovations, have not made any significant headway. The third world may be waiting for a signal from the West to take any step. In this situation, the saying of Bertrand Russell comes to mind: men are born ignorant, not stupid, they are made stupid by education.
On the other hand, it is hard to understand human behaviour. Laws have to be passed and enforced to control it and save humanity from itself. You have to fine or imprison people for them not to drive while drunk, you have to erect barriers to prevent man from crossing the rail before an approaching train and inscribe on red bold characters notice that a liquid is poisonous. However, the number of avoidable deaths is on the rise. Are humans suicidal? Well, the way they are behaving in the face of the threat to their own destruction caused by their own hands tends to justify this belief. And if they do not change course, one may say that the environmentalist are striking cold iron and trying to change a behaviour that you can’t change. We are still postponing decisions that should have been made years ago and our inaction seems to be lethal. Will there be any further human history? It is very much in doubt. Arnold Toynbee may be right after all when he said that civilisation die by suicide, but not by murder.
