The life on earth is endangered by the human greed and wrong policies throughout the globe. These so called unplanned developments have threatened the existence of life on the planet earth and it has been accelerated by the global climate change. The mountainous ecosystems like Kashmir Himalaya- a part of Himalayan Mountain chain are exceptionally fragile due to natural and anthropogenic drivers of change. The root cause of such problems has excellently explained by Dianne Dredge, according to him “During the shift from the European Dark Ages to the scientific revolution, there was a move away from blind faith in the Church, temple, mosques and feudal relationships towards trust in science, democracy, and the role of government as protector of public interests.”According to him, one of the most significant developments during this time was rational scientific thinking which, for the last three centuries, led to four very substantial effects:
Individualism: The rise of the individual worldview where the focus is on self-interest, competition and individual wealth-creation over collective public interests has flourished. Individualism assumes that people act out of self-interest and personal gain.
Reductionism: The practice of analyzing, describing and diagnosing complex, dynamic challenges in terms of a single explanation to provide a best-fit solution. Reductionism assumes complex problems can be dealt with by reducing the problem into small manageable discreet parts, such as marketing, management and economic growth.
Separation: Individuals were distanced from each other and nature. This separation effectively distanced individuals from taking personal responsibility for their actions, relying instead on science and law to divest, outsource and off set personal responsibility. For example, responsibility can be externalized and passed off through laws, regulations and voluntary sustainability criteria so that it is someone else’s problem. This is how sustainability becomes everyone’s challenge but not one’s responsibility.
Marketization: Individualism and separation allowed competition, consumerism and individual wealth accumulation to flourish. The collective public interest and caring for common resources gave way to the pursuit of private interests where, presumably, the invisible hand was thought to take care of negative impacts.
Influenced by these four dimensions over the last century, the scientific mindset has evolved to embrace blind faith in strategic management and economic ideologies as the primary forces shaping our economic–social–environmental relations. This belief system has shaped our relationship with nature, each other, ourselves, and what we perceive as success.
In this view, nature is broken down into individual resources (e.g. water, air, minerals, forests, beaches, communities, workers, etc.), and the key task has been to extract maximum value from these resources to fuel economic production and consumption. “In other words, these resources are there for the taking.
If we continue to exploit nature and taking nature only as a resource to our wishes and aspirations-then we are wrong, the consequences will be too dangerous. We should understand that the human being is a smaller system than the whole, which is nature; continuing with such practices to exploit nature without any check and policy frame work is going to be a costly affair.
Unfortunately no political parties, including the progressive left haven’t proper alternative to this do or die problem. All the political parties of nation should take a lead to have scientific solution to this problem keeping the life on top priority and rest things as secondary.
The people experienced the ill effects of this silent spectator attitude of political-corporate nexus and have protested for long in the past and present as well. From the early seventies, in wake of mass movements that started in late 60s the consciousness about the evil effects of unscientific development began to grow. One of the earliest was the Silent Valley Movement of the Palakkad district of Kerala.
Likewise KoelKaro movement in Jharkhand, Narmada BachaoAndolan, Niyamgiri in Odhisa, all these movements were not supported by any of the political spectrum. Therefore, it is high time to realize the seriousness of the situation and all political parties should work for better life and survival of our mother nature. The developed nations have started the rewinding projects and recently US has approved $1.2 trillion infrastructure package under bipartisan infrastructure bill. Biodiversity experts are of the opinion that by passing this bill, U.S. policymakers took an important step toward stemming the loss of the nation’s species and, perhaps, initiated a shift in the way the country considers the natural world.
The fiddling with nature has already deprived us with fresh air to breathe and if we continue with this practice God forbid we may very soon be without water as the large Himalayan glaciers are receding at an alarming rate. Himalaya- the water tower for a large part of Asia is most vulnerable under the present scenario.
The policy makers including the political parties must change their mindset for development and learn from nature by collaborating with local communities. A multidisciplinary and holistic approach consisting of empathy and care for nature and local communities should be taken into consideration while implementing different project works.
It is high time to have alternative approach for sustainable development which will be eco-friendly, equal benefit sharing and have socio-cultural benefits as well, and political corridors at least in this matter should look towards West for sustainability and existence of life on nature earth.
(Author is Assistant Professor, Department of Botany, North Campus, University of Kashmir)
