Another summer arrives and the season is nowadays quite merciless. We have created simmering, scorching summers by relentlessly devastating the environment.
In my childhood, my village was filled with spacious compounds full of large clusters of bamboos and black palm trees, plenty of mango and cashew-nut trees, and other trees whose foliage absorbed the scorching heat of the summer sun and protected us, and provided water and food security for humans and other animals. Wild creepers were seen climbing up to the top of these trees.
These compounds were small forests that sheltered foxes, mongooses, civets, wild lizards and different kinds of birds. They yielded many delicious fruits to the birds and us. We used to spend the afternoon in these compounds, feeding on the mangoes and the berries the creepers and thickets provided.
I still remember vividly a particular mango tree which would give sweet fruits for us every day during the summer vacation. It stood at the centre of a vast compound. At every noon, my friends and I used to go to the tree through the dense thickets and the tree would welcome us with the ripe mangoes strewn all around it. After eating the fallen mangoes, we would climb on to the branches and shake them and fresh fruits would fall down.
In my family’s own compound, there were many jackfruit trees and indigenous mango trees. I was an expert in climbing them. One noon we were very hungry after playing in the large pond in the vast compound adjacent to ours. On top of one of the gigantic trees, we saw a ripe jackfruit. I climbed the tree and after comfortably sitting on a branch near the fruit, pushed my right palm into it and plucked out the sweet juicy petals and dropped them down to my friends who stood below looking up and spreading their palms and opening their mouths. Some petals would fall in their mouths, some on their palms and many on the ground which was blanketed by the fallen leaves of the trees. While they were eating, I too satiated myself like Tarzan.
I think a Tarzan lives in the mind of every human being, but the “development mania” that alienates humans from Nature smothers the Tarzans in us and we inculcate the dangerous idea that ‘development’ lies in overpowering Nature and hence we become nonchalant towards the elimination of the flora and fauna around us and destroy the habitats of birds and animals pushing them to extinction.
As Prerna Singh Bindra says in The Vanishing: India’s Wildlife Crisis , “We continue to clear no less than 135 hecatres of forests a day, diverting it for various projects such as highways, mines, and cement factories. And we pitch their protection, and that of a healthy environment, against development....The statistics are frightening. Global population of fish, birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles have declined by an astounding 58% in the four decades spanning 1970 to 2012. One in five species faces extinction. A tenth of the world’s wilderness has been destroyed since the 1990s, and we are in real danger of losing it all by 2050. ...If it all sounds remote and ‘out there’, I would suggest you look into your backyard. Try and remember when you last saw a bee, or a hive, in your surrounds.”
Yes, we live in an anthropocentric world that has no place for bees and butterflies and dragonflies and birds and animals and trees and plants. The so-called development has brought us into a world bereft of biodiversity that makes the earth beautiful and sustainable. By relentlessly destroying the forests and rivers and lakes and wetlands and indigenous flora in the name of development, the humans are pushing birds and animals into extinction without realising a world sans the flora and fauna will automatically be the mass grave of Homosapiens. By pushing all other living beings into extinction, the humans are pushing themselves to theirs. They don't know what they are doing.
Thirty five years ago, I spent my childhood in a sustainable agrarian village that cultivated everything we feed on, and the trees we protected gave us their seasonal fruits and assured us water security in return. Today we cultivate nothing; there are no mango trees or jackfruit trees or cashew-nut trees that give the children fresh and delicious fruits not contaminated with pesticides and chemical fertilizers. As there are no indigenous trees and fruits, there are no birds and squirrels either. Can the children, who grow up without seeing and playing with trees and plants and flowers and butterflies and birds and squirrels be humane human beings?
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