The Problem

THE twenty-first century has brought concerns about the future of the earth and human-nature relations to centre stage. This has happened in ways that make the environment as a theme ubiquitous in our lives. Leaders of both the industrialized and emerging economies talked across the table on global warming in Copenhagen in 2009 and will do so again in Paris later this year. This is a far cry from the first UN Conference on the Human Environment at Stockholm in September 1972 that was attended by only two heads of government from Sweden (the host) and India. It is also unlikely that any world leader would repeat the words of the late Ronald Reagan that, ‘If you have seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all.’ Today, leaders in polities as diverse as Russia and the US, China and South Africa, vie to win for themselves the tag of being earth friendly, green and caring. Needless to add, public rhetoric is not always easy to match with action. All nation states and peoples share the same planet but rarely the views on its future. Stockholm saw a divide between those who claimed population as the problem and others who saw inter-state inequity as a root cause of environmental decay. Today, the same divide assumes a new form. The fulcrum of the world economy is moving from the Atlantic to the Asia-Pacific with countries like India and China emerging as global economic players for the first time in over three centuries. In the last decade, the BRICS countries (still only a fifth of the global Gross World Product) have been the engines of economic expansion. Countries once under imperial domination may differ in many fundamental aspects, but together they share their refusal to pay the environmental costs of other countries’ industrialization. This is the case with Brazil and South Africa, India and China. The post-Cold War expansion of economies opens up new opportunities for a better life for many, but also takes forms that deeply strain the web of life and nature’s cycles of renewal and its mechanisms of repair. Richard Tucker’s lucid history of the US impact on the tropics was titled Insatiable Appetite. Rubber and fruits, timber and beef demand in the country that accounted for over 40 per cent of gross wealth product in the mid-20th century (and just under half today) remade the land, water, flora and fauna of the tropics, often in deeply damaging ways. Over eighty years earlier, a prescient Mahatma Gandhi wrote to the left wing Indian advocate of industrialization, Saklatwala, on the larger implications of India following the development path of England. It would, he confidently asserted, strip the earth ‘like a pack of locusts.’ No doubt his words in 1928 ring true, but it is also difficult for any formerly colonized country to ignore the hard reality that political freedom to be meaningful needs the artifices of economic growth to protect and sustain it. The fact is that the idea of a path away from an industrial order, though it has many adherents, has rarely won space in the plans of those who rule and seek to guide the destiny of states. Stalin’s dictum that if his country did not catch up it would be reduced to a cipher, has takers in many who find little else attractive in the Soviet dictator. ‘Catch up’ often entails conquering internal frontiers. This has been the leitmotif in Brazil (which saw the Amazon as a frontier), in China (as in the desert and plateau regions) and in Indonesia (where mass resettlement was aimed to unify and weld together its peoples). Surprisingly similar collisions take place at another location of the development spectrum. Internal frontiers and marginal regions are also present in countries like Australia, Canada and Sweden, where extraction of gas, timber and minerals makes few exceptions for landscape damages and local community priorities. If the 20th century was about the rivalry of an ascendant American power, with militarism in the first half and state socialism in the latter, there is little doubt that a rising Asia will see more, not less, intensive resource use and higher levels of material development. Will the newly rising powers avoid the kind of resource destructiveness of earlier powers and how far can they moderate their impact without giving in to an upstairs/downstairs world? The larger dilemma is how to evolve in ways that lessen or moderate the ecological footprint of peoples and societies. Are there other, better ways to generate wealth in a manner that does not rupture the webs that sustain life? It is a positive sign that debate has moved beyond alarmism and denial to look at why, how and when changes took shape in the past. This is essential for a better future. The past cannot give any easy ‘turn-key’ lessons but can generate insight indispensable for all. We need the long-term view into the past in order for us to find a long-term sustainability into the future. Increasingly, this has meant a dialogue across the traditional divide of the humanities and the natural sciences. The complexities of the natural world and human social life demands studies in which we need to understand and connect across the scientific terrain. The interconnection of species and interrelation of the atmosphere and life forms of earth requires an informed analysis of how the knowledge of science mediates human action. The determinism imbued in arguments of how human futures are trapped by nature’s forces needs to be confronted by an understanding of how societies in the past dealt with large-scale disasters, pollution, and waste. Scientists need to integrate complex social analysis into their work. The humanities in turn can gain much by drawing on scientific insights even as they make us sensitive to multiple, often contested, ways of knowing nature. It is not a question of keeping to either of the favoured long-term perspectives into the past – of preferring the emergence of humankind, the agricultural revolution, the introduction of fossil fuels, or the European exploitation of global resources on other continents. We need a multiple vision of time as we understand the challenges of the present. In short, we need to speak across and beyond disciplines. This is easier said than done. The planet is one unified ecological entity, a home of life powered by the sun. Yet, it is divided into different nation states. Political borders of nation states (or former empires) by which research is often organized, funded or conducted can scarcely do justice to ever-changing markers across land- and waterscapes. Monsoons, earthquakes, or migrating birds make no exception for such borders. Nor do people. Looking at longer-term trajectories – labour, knowledge, capital, and goods have flowed across landscapes irrespective of politically bounded spaces; they have moved with or against tides and natural ruptures. This has been especially true in recent centuries, periods when the global wealth (the gross world product) doubled (1500-1800) or when it rose fourteen fold (1800-1900). But even these changes cannot be seen in isolation in time and space. New historical and archaeological works indicate considerable landscape shaping by use of fire by early hominids, and the colonization of islands, as in the Indian Ocean, even many centuries ago, led to large-scale extinctions of local fauna unable to adapt to new pressures. Not all changes were entirely negative and much of southern Africa and South Asia had extensive grasslands remade by a mix of anthropogenic and natural influences, so much so that it is difficult to draw a line between the two. Even many plant cultivars (yam or cassava or sugarcane) or trees now gone wild (such as neem in mainland India) or animals (such as the grey squirrel in England or the dingo in Australia) spread due to human interventions in history. Fluidity is a fact of human history. Economic exchange and human mobility has cut across bounds of empire and nation state. Unsurprisingly, new historical works go a step further and often cut across boundaries of space, time and species in a search for better explanations. Maize, in its march across Africa post-1492, became a major factor in changing more than just nutrition and food habits. The Bay of Bengal unified, not separated, the east coast of India from South East Asia, with migrant labourers remaking lands and waters to create a sense of home. Import of horses across the western Indian Ocean and the central Asian land routes was a major factor in South, Central and West Asian history for centuries, as they were paid for in coin. Domestic animals taken from India for the British forces in the 1890s may have helped the rinderpest virus hop across the waters, leading to a huge dying-off of the wild ungulate herds. On a more prosaic level, the plague virus taken across the Eurasian land mass in the mid-14th century brought demographic collapse in its wake, sparking fears similar to AIDS in the 20th century and ebola in the 21st. Mosquitoes and the diseases they spread played a greater role in 18th and 19th century wars in the Americas than those in battle may have suspected. And the potato and its spread helped revolutionize agriculture across much of Europe and Asia in more ways than any one might have imagined in its native home in the Andes. Plants and pathogens, succulent tubers and sturdy mounts, shade giving trees and edible feral animals, are all part of our connected and ever changing history. The flow of commodities and cultural contact has had deep impact on the ecosystems of the earth in ways often little realized. The markets for opium in China, integral to Pax Britannica in the triangular trade, powered the transformation of fields in Malwa and market places of Bombay. Rubber making a trans-oceanic trip from its native home in Brazil was part of Britain’s struggle for empire. In another era, much of the Mughal power was built on its ability to be the hinge between Monsoon India, with the rice paddies and d

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