Kerala is in the grip of a heatwave. Terms like yellow alert, orange alert, and red alert were once only reserved for the monsoon months, but now they are heard even at the onset of summer as the sun scorches the earth. The summer months have just started, but the mercury has already risen to 39 degrees Celsius. And it is still rising!
Why does it happen? It happens because thousands of trees are being felled across Kerala in the name of road development. The onslaught is visible from Kasaragod to Thiruvananthapuram.
In her book Seeds of Hope, Jane Goodall calls trees sunlight eaters. Those who are afflicted with the development mania do not know that the trees and plants they destroy are sunlight eaters, that the trees and plants they destroy protect them from the scorching heat of the sun by eating the heat.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, the Native American Professor of Environmental Biology and the founder and director of the Centre for Native Peoples and the Environment, says in her book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants that in some Native languages the term for plants translates to “those who take care of us”.
Our education system is seriously flawed as it fails to make us sensitive about the environment. Our education does not make us realise that it is because of the trees, plants, bees, birds, forests and the wildlife, that we humans are able to survive on earth.
As Rachel Carson says in her book Silent Spring, “the earth’s vegetation is part of the web of life in which there are intimate and essential relations between plants and the earth, between plants and other plants, between plants and animals. Our disturbing these relationships may have consequences remote in time and place”.
Carson referred to the consequences as remote in time and place in 1962; but today, they are not.
Humanity is now facing the disaster Carson warned the world 60 years ago. “We stand now where two roads diverge. The road we have been travelling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road —the one ‘less travelled by’— offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of our earth.”
To turn to the other fork of the road, we have to unlearn our destructive ways, we have to say adieu to the juggernaut called development which is unsustainable and have to be cured of the development mania.
We have to instil in our hearts and minds the following lines from Prerna Singh Bindra’s book The Vanishing: India’s Wildlife Crisis: “When we ravage nature, we are threatening our future. When we war with wildlife, it is a war against ourselves.”
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