Oh, The Times Are A-changed

A friend, a mentor and a core colleague called me this evening. He had read a report in the morning’s papers of a researcher rediscovering and mapping some of the species in the land that Henry David Thoreau inhabited in those immortal times he wrote Of Walden Pond and those other works that have since then become guiding lights for a century of thinking on the environment.

The first thought came to me even as this colleague spoke to me about is that David Thoreau has become so irrelevant to our times. However radical that thought may be, you can’t refute the fact that the world has now redefined itself so far beyond recognition from the early 20th century that a Thoreau or an Aldo Leopold or many such leaders and pioneers of thought on environmentalism lived and wrote of a world to be.

They were not wrong in aspiring for a world that would remain sane and not destroy as much as they saw as damage in their times. Only, things are far worse today than their worst fears. What would perhaps make sense for us in our current times is that that world has changed so much, in a sense, for the good, that the sheer necessity for changing the way we abuse our planet has led to many different innovations for the good. So much so, that we don’t have to worry as much in our current times about the purer forms of environmentalism that protect sanctuaries and national parks, but work more toward homing in on solutions that will offer reduced dependence on external municipal or state resources for energy, water, waste water and waste. A whole new set of technologies, protocols and practices in these areas is what will drive the future before us, in the urban context. For this is where the challenge will lie in the decades ahead.

So why would this be? It takes no stretch of imagination for us to see that this sharp and decisive turn toward urbanization of the kind that we have seen in the last decade in the world, with the historic landmark of the urban population for the first time having exceeded the rural number this year, shows that the world, into the next hundred years, will be governed by decisions and destinies that two per cent of the world’s land mass will shape for us all.

A startling statistic that bears repetition is that this 2 per cent of the world’s landmass produces nearly two-thirds of the current GDP, has 55 pc of the world’s population living in it, and consuming 75 per cent of the world’s natural resources that come from the eco-systems that the other 98 per cent of the world’s land mass represents.

What does this mean and how will the world respond to this challenge? However impractical it may sound, the contour of the future tells us that the world will adapt the best of a sustainable, pre-industrial era, and that of the market-led world’s advantages. What it shows, therefore, as a trend into the future, is a clear turn to a point where these ecosystems beyond the urbanized regions will soon see a sharp reduction in the harm and damage that this 98 per cent of the lands are suffering today.

Business and Local Governments will quickly see that what are today nascent notions of, say, urban agriculture; treatment of all city waste to a point where we don’t just reuse them as a socially responsible thing to do, but as an economic imperative; producing power at levels were renewable energy either from the sun or the waste of cities becomes an economic reality; ‘growing your own water’ becomes a necessity where dependence on fresh water is reduced by nearly 70 per cent, and therefore growth of these urban nodes is made more possible….

When you have such inclusive, self-sustaining systems acquired by these urban pockets of the world, the city’s need to rely on the vast outlying ecosystems of forests and sanctuaries and the wealth of natural resources residing there will fall steadily.

Some examples of such sustainable growth are : top soil-free building blocks; increased use of lime and not limestone-based cement; non-forest timber or certified plantation timber; CFC- and HCFC-free air-conditioning systems that are non-ozone-depleting; energy-efficient building systems for hotels and hospitals, and so on.

What does all this mean in the context of naturalism or environmentalism that the Americas articulated a hundred years ago? What we will see is that the case for protection of these ecosystems needn’t quite be made with the same earnest that the early 20th century did, because of the sustainable processes that our urban nodes would have put into place pretty firmly over the next thirty years.

Remember, that there are indeed no precedents from the past for this future that is to be upon us soon, if it is not already upon us now. But today’s trends clearly presage such a future.

Naturalism will quickly be replaced by processes that will ensure that these systems continue to exist the way they have for long aeons of times, while they get monetized such that the urban world knows the significance and recognizes it in the marketplace with financial attributes provided for such carbon sequestration that these vegetated systems and forests offer to the smaller minority landmass of the urban world.

Beyond these, there is another reason why the environmentalism movement of the American kind relates poorly to the Indian situation. The vigilant activist models of environment development that first made its presence in the early 1970s with the Chipko movement in the sub-Himalayan hills of Garhwal in UP, served as an inspiring role model for action that was community-based, unlike the American line of thinking that has only focused on the vast expanse of forest and hilly regions and protection measures that was advocated for those sanctuaries and reservations. But that’s another story.