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Rome: One hundred legislators from across the world converged here to participate in the G8+5 Legislators' Forum on Climate Change ahead of next month's G-8 Summit in the Italian city of L'Aquila. Add two-dozen journalists and pundits and our guilt quotient shoots up with our expanding carbon footprint. But as the conference wore on, my thoughts began to wander...
As a little girl, I would often tour the garden with my grandmother. She would gently pluck leaves off the Tulsi plant for her daily puja. She would first circumambulate the plant three times, chanting a shloka, asking it seemed, permission to take a few leaves. Then she would offer water to the plant, seeking its blessings. Sometimes when she felt tired, she would ask me to get the leaves for her, while she bathed little images of gods and goddesses in her sacred alcove. One evening I decided to be better organized. So off I went after dinner, plucked the Tulsi, carefully wrapped the leaves and left them in the refrigerator, pulling them out triumphantly in the morning, very pleased with myself.
The normally sweet-tempered grandmother was livid. "Don't you know that you should never pluck leaves and flowers at night?" When I asked her why, she answered that nocturnal insects and bugs might bite you. More important, she said, the plants are asleep at night, so it was insensitive to disturb them. The real reason was probably more scientific. There is no photosynthetic activity at night, so plants tend to release more carbon dioxide than oxygen. The converse would be true during the day. If you wander around a garden full of trees and plants at night, you might end up inhaling more carbon dioxide. You might also tread upon and kill garden insects or startle them, inviting an attack.
Whatever the reason, Indic tradition was environmentally sensitive; anything that was an integral part of nature was considered sacred. Children were given lots of ecofriendly advice — don't throw garbage in the river; don't tug at leaves and branches, treat them gently; don't desecrate river banks; don't sleep under trees at night; wash regularly. The reasons given were — and still are — probably "because I say so" or "otherwise God will punish you!" But, these practices surely evolved out of a need to live amicably with one's natural surroundings, in a spirit of give and take.
Ecological sanctity is something that is common to traditional systems across the world. It is not unusual for almost every culture to praise the sun, offer thanks to water bodies and plants, conserve water, leave some land fallow to enable rejuvenation, forbid fishing or tree-cutting for certain periods of the year – when it's the breeding season for fish or growing time for plants.
So how and when did the regression begin, leading us to the brink of a planetary-scale catastrophe? How did the climate change scenario get played out, with us as villains, spewing pollution into the air and disgorging the bowels of the earth, destroying forests and species and accelerating global warming? What if glacial melting causes sea levels to rise too fast for us to adapt to face the challenges and mitigate the threat?
As hunter-gatherers, we might have gone hungry if we killed too many animals, upset the food chain, natural balance and flora and fauna. We would have killed the goose that laid the golden egg. When we learnt to cultivate the land, we settled down to an agricultural way of life. Yet we were careful not to overdo it, for we would have sucked all the nutrients out. But with industrialization, things changed.
Most would say that's about the time — when industrialization enabled us to produce more than we needed — our relationship with other constituents of Planet Earth began to flounder. So the regression began when currency and trade expanded and flourished in place of the barter system. When faster, higher, stronger no longer referred only to the aspirations of Olympics contestants but translated as the way to achieve steadily increasing rates of economic growth measured in terms of Gross National Product (GNP). When the worth of a country came to be measured by how much it produced and consumed rather than how much it conserved. When people bought products and services even when they didn't really need them.
Instead of living off the land, we began to exploit it. The baseline was no longer peaceful coexistence with nature. The Judeo-Christian tradition was misinterpreted as unbridled licence to humans to exploit natural resources – in the belief that man was created to have dominion over all other species: "And God said, let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let him have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth..."
The Talmud and rabbis who interpret scripture stress that "dominion" did not mean making everything else subservient to man, but acting responsibly for yourself and others. It certainly does not sanction the unlimited right to use and abuse animals, minerals and fossil fuels. We just need to know when to stop extracting stuff. As in any other relationship, balance and harmony are all about reciprocity and mutual respect.
Subjective though they are, annual opinion polls gauging a people's happiness show that there is really no direct correlation between a country's GNP and its happiness quotient. Perhaps this is because GNP thrives on expansion of consumption and the production of goods and services but happiness is determined by contentment. This is not to say the world needs immediately to revert to the barter system, shut down all factories, dump motorized transport and start walking.
Obviously, we cannot go back to the pre-industrial era, throwing away the benefits of medical cures, easy transport, instant communication, access to knowledge and skills. But we do need to redefine development and its objectives so that they are more sustainable – not by eschewing technology but by embracing it to enable a life of harmony and sustainability, care and compassion, mutual benefit and contentment.
As a little girl, I would often tour the garden with my grandmother. She would gently pluck leaves off the Tulsi plant for her daily puja. She would first circumambulate the plant three times, chanting a shloka, asking it seemed, permission to take a few leaves. Then she would offer water to the plant, seeking its blessings. Sometimes when she felt tired, she would ask me to get the leaves for her, while she bathed little images of gods and goddesses in her sacred alcove. One evening I decided to be better organized. So off I went after dinner, plucked the Tulsi, carefully wrapped the leaves and left them in the refrigerator, pulling them out triumphantly in the morning, very pleased with myself.
The normally sweet-tempered grandmother was livid. "Don't you know that you should never pluck leaves and flowers at night?" When I asked her why, she answered that nocturnal insects and bugs might bite you. More important, she said, the plants are asleep at night, so it was insensitive to disturb them. The real reason was probably more scientific. There is no photosynthetic activity at night, so plants tend to release more carbon dioxide than oxygen. The converse would be true during the day. If you wander around a garden full of trees and plants at night, you might end up inhaling more carbon dioxide. You might also tread upon and kill garden insects or startle them, inviting an attack.
Whatever the reason, Indic tradition was environmentally sensitive; anything that was an integral part of nature was considered sacred. Children were given lots of ecofriendly advice — don't throw garbage in the river; don't tug at leaves and branches, treat them gently; don't desecrate river banks; don't sleep under trees at night; wash regularly. The reasons given were — and still are — probably "because I say so" or "otherwise God will punish you!" But, these practices surely evolved out of a need to live amicably with one's natural surroundings, in a spirit of give and take.
Ecological sanctity is something that is common to traditional systems across the world. It is not unusual for almost every culture to praise the sun, offer thanks to water bodies and plants, conserve water, leave some land fallow to enable rejuvenation, forbid fishing or tree-cutting for certain periods of the year – when it's the breeding season for fish or growing time for plants.
So how and when did the regression begin, leading us to the brink of a planetary-scale catastrophe? How did the climate change scenario get played out, with us as villains, spewing pollution into the air and disgorging the bowels of the earth, destroying forests and species and accelerating global warming? What if glacial melting causes sea levels to rise too fast for us to adapt to face the challenges and mitigate the threat?
As hunter-gatherers, we might have gone hungry if we killed too many animals, upset the food chain, natural balance and flora and fauna. We would have killed the goose that laid the golden egg. When we learnt to cultivate the land, we settled down to an agricultural way of life. Yet we were careful not to overdo it, for we would have sucked all the nutrients out. But with industrialization, things changed.
Most would say that's about the time — when industrialization enabled us to produce more than we needed — our relationship with other constituents of Planet Earth began to flounder. So the regression began when currency and trade expanded and flourished in place of the barter system. When faster, higher, stronger no longer referred only to the aspirations of Olympics contestants but translated as the way to achieve steadily increasing rates of economic growth measured in terms of Gross National Product (GNP). When the worth of a country came to be measured by how much it produced and consumed rather than how much it conserved. When people bought products and services even when they didn't really need them.
Instead of living off the land, we began to exploit it. The baseline was no longer peaceful coexistence with nature. The Judeo-Christian tradition was misinterpreted as unbridled licence to humans to exploit natural resources – in the belief that man was created to have dominion over all other species: "And God said, let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let him have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth..."
The Talmud and rabbis who interpret scripture stress that "dominion" did not mean making everything else subservient to man, but acting responsibly for yourself and others. It certainly does not sanction the unlimited right to use and abuse animals, minerals and fossil fuels. We just need to know when to stop extracting stuff. As in any other relationship, balance and harmony are all about reciprocity and mutual respect.
Subjective though they are, annual opinion polls gauging a people's happiness show that there is really no direct correlation between a country's GNP and its happiness quotient. Perhaps this is because GNP thrives on expansion of consumption and the production of goods and services but happiness is determined by contentment. This is not to say the world needs immediately to revert to the barter system, shut down all factories, dump motorized transport and start walking.
Obviously, we cannot go back to the pre-industrial era, throwing away the benefits of medical cures, easy transport, instant communication, access to knowledge and skills. But we do need to redefine development and its objectives so that they are more sustainable – not by eschewing technology but by embracing it to enable a life of harmony and sustainability, care and compassion, mutual benefit and contentment.
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