Climate Change: find the will first, and a way will appear
Homo Sapiens (the wise humans), we claim ourselves to be, for we possess complex brains that have enabled us to build complex societies, managed via the likes of governments, businesses, social networks, science and technology, economic integration. ‘Sapiens’ for we are credited with inventions like money, language, rituals, traditions that lay the foundation of a society inhabited by intelligent species. ‘Sapiens’ for human ability to overcome environmental forces, to defy death, and to look after our self-interests.
However, times are changing as more names are cropping up: Homo necans (killing man), Homo mendax (lying man), Homo sanguinis (bloody man), Homo ferox (ferocious man). The debate is raging on, and time has come for us to make a collective decision: to rethink what “being human” means.
Earth has a rich history, and so does the human race, although it is difficult to compare the two on one time scale. Humans have discovered most of Earth’s history in the last few centuries. You would probably have heard of the Geological time scale, and the 24 hour clock analogy. It is simple. Equate 4.5 billion years of Earth’s lifespan to 24 hours of a clock, and every second roughly signifies 52,000 years. So, when did humans arrive? Just around 30 seconds to midnight. And when did the Great Industrial revolution start? Just 4/1000 of a second before the clock struck midnight.
During this “4/1000 of a second”, humans left their homes, in proximity of nature, in harmony with nature, to build a new world — only meant for them. They evolved over time to quickly become the most abundant large mammal — and more importantly the most dominant too. Over time, their ambitions have gone unchallenged and unchecked. Sky is no longer the limit for them.
In their journey, nature challenged humans or the other way round, depending upon how you see it. Every time humans overcame nature, they celebrated their win and set on for their next conquest. Defeating death, giving life, developing wings and fins, defying natural cycles, changing course of natural evolution, humans have pressed full throttle on their journey to become God-like or God themselves.
Humans have expanded their colonies, their homes on Earth, rampantly destroying the Gaia, and encroached on the homes of billions of non-human-lives, who are left with nowhere else to go; billions who cannot search for Planet B.
Tell me, what do you call a human who murders another human? Murderer, killer. And one who does it again and again? Serial killer, right? In the last half century, humans have taken close to a million plant and animal species (25% of the total) to the brink of extinction through human activity. So, what would you call humans, then? These sobering numbers should crush a human heart — if there is one left inside us. Even indigenous tribes, still living in jungles, will not identify with modern humans: their malicious ideologies, their uncontrolled greed, and their destructive mindset.
As early as 1847, George Perkins Marsh, an American diplomat with a passion for nature, and author of avant-garde book (Man and Nature, 1864 ) saw human negative actions on nature, and said “Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discord”.
He delivered arguably the first lecture on the human ill-impact on natural resources and the changing climate. He said, “But though man cannot at his pleasure command the rain and the sunshine, the wind and frost and snow, yet it is certain that climate itself has in many instances been gradually changed and ameliorated or deteriorated by human action.”
The warnings from terrified scientists and environmental activists that are increasingly closing in on us, do enter our senses but get lost in some dark space in our brain, not pushing us to act. The new knowledge that only incrementally substantiates the sad state of affairs we already know brings a spike of rage but then dissipates into nothingness is only painful. The emotions that accompany evaporate, until they return at the return of the next calamity.
