Live and let live: some thoughts on a sustainable future

Humans are not what they imagine themselves to be

June 23, 2019 12:00 am | Updated 12:00 am IST

Anyone who has ever bought a plant from a nursery, watered it every day and watched in dismay as it failed to thrive, knows that gardening isn’t easy. Even if you manage to grow a plant successfully, growing food is another ballgame altogether. Vegetables such as bitter gourd and tomato grow almost like weeds, but others are trickier. They have varied water needs, soil requirements and temperature and sunlight preferences. In the event you get all of this right, you still need to protect them from pests. Finally, after weeks or months of care and patience, your plants may yield just a few kilograms of vegetables.

Recently, I watched in astonishment as a vine took root in my balcony, sprouted leaves and filled up the entire length of my planter in a matter of days. Flowers blossomed, and before long I spotted a tiny pumpkin, as big as an avocado. The children were beside themselves with excitement.

We watched it grow each day, and I helped it along by cutting back the vine and snipping off the browning leaves. When we finally cut it off, it weighed a good 4 kg.

In our home of seven, the fruit of our labour didn’t last long, but the children were convinced it tasted better than any they had ever tasted. Not a crumb was wasted.

If only we looked at all food in the same manner, for every fruit or vegetable that makes its way to us has been grown painstakingly by some farmer somewhere. One bad monsoon can ruin a crop, but we always have food on our tables and find it difficult to imagine that a day may come when we may not. The truth is, that day may arrive sooner than we think.

There was a book I read to my daughter, titled Millions of Cats . It’s an old classic, printed as far back as 1928. Although the book’s subject matter deals with aesthetics, a few lines stood out in my mind. A very old man was returning home with millions of cats. They came to a pond. Each cat took a sip, and the pond was gone. When they were hungry, each ate a mouthful of grass on a hill, and not a blade was left.

Humans have been around for an estimated two lakh years by some accounts. Think about it. It took thousands of centuries to reach the level of a billion people, and today we are at 7.5 billion. Have we ever wondered just how many people earth can take? How many can it feed before there’s just a mouthful left for each of us?

We presume we have an endless supply of food, but the truth is that the quality of our soil is deteriorating thanks to the large-scale use of pesticides and toxins that enter the soil and water through garbage disposal. Dead zones — areas in the ocean that can no longer sustain growth — are gradually increasing. Species are growing extinct at an alarming rate. More and more of marine life are being found with plastic in their bodies. Fish is getting progressively unsafe to eat and pregnant women are cautioned against eating many forms of seafood because of concerns about the mercury level in them. If our water is growing unfit to support marine life, how will it support us?

We buy things we don’t need, often tire of them, and throw them away, without a thought to all the resources it took to make them. The numerous artefacts we gift each other make no sense, serve no purpose and destroy the environment. Everything, from fast fashion to fast food, is a burden the earth shouldn’t have to bear.

We can do a lot to help — not just the earth but ourselves — by gardening, composting, planting trees, avoiding single-use plastic such as straws and plastic water bottles. Eating locally grown, organic foods and reducing meat consumption will go a long way in addressing environmental concerns.

A few nights ago, when debating the advantages and disadvantages of a vegetarian diet, a friend declared that, much like the beautiful lion, we are at the top of the food chain and can eat whatever we want. The survival-of-the-fittest argument is old and tired. We don’t eat meat for survival, we eat it for pleasure. But that aside, there is a fundamental difference between lions and humans. The lion is a predator. It takes what it needs without destroying the environment. On the other hand, a tapeworm lives in our intestine, sucks nutrition and slowly destroys us — and itself.

It’s time we realised that we should change; we’re not the magnificent predators we imagine ourselves to be. We’re actually the parasites.

vidulachopra@yahoo.co.uk

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