June 5 will be celebrated, as in previous years, as World Environment Day. The theme for this year, “Many Species. One Planet. One Future”, is comprehensive and eloquent in its wide implications. Just as in the case of World Environment Day in previous years, we really need to reflect on more than solely the protection of the environment. We need to focus on the very basic direction and structure of economic growth and development, the way it is being pursued across the globe.
There is in evidence today a serious and growing imbalance between human activities on the one hand and the sustainability of ecosystems on the other. This imbalance has been largely neglected because this worsening condition is essentially recent in its manifestation. If we go back in time, human society was characterized by the hunter–gatherer phase of living. Subsequently, our ancestors discovered the skill of organized cultivation through agriculture, the maintenance of captive livestock and the practice of horticultural activities. During these two phases of development, the abundance of natural resources that existed absorbed the pressures imposed by human society. However, since industrialization, this long standing balance has been affected to a serious degree.
While inventions such as the steam engine, the development of the internal combustion engine and other technologies have allowed us to use fossil fuels and other sources of energy increasingly, we never really visualized the impacts of growing production and consumption on the environment and ecosystems of this planet.
The most striking example of this disconnect and deviation from a sustainable pattern of production and consumption is now apparent on account of the human influence on the earth’s climate. The Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has clearly brought out the fact that warming of the climate system is unequivocal and that most of the warming which occurred in the second half of the twentieth century was the result of increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases. In other words, human society has been influencing the earth’s climate to an increasing degree in recent decades.
Now that science has given us clear evidence of the impacts of human actions on the stability of this planet’s climate systems, it is essential for us to bring about change in the right direction. This change must respect and acknowledge the incalculable value of maintaining the earth’s many species. All the food that grows from the ground in this world is the remarkable result of genetic characteristics derived from a large number of species. So also is the case with most medicines, the origin of which is rooted in many species that have been found vital in dealing with some of the most serious diseases and human ailments.
While expanding our ecological footprint, we need to remember that there is only one planet that all of us live on, and if our footprint becomes larger than what this planet is able to sustain, we have nowhere to go. Similarly, in a world that is so interdependent across political boundaries and ecosystems, we have only one future which binds all of us together. Gone are the days when some countries could live in affluence while others toiled under conditions of deprivation. Our past may have differed substantially across different regions of the world, but the future is inextricably bound together.
All human beings on earth now have a common future and, therefore, neglecting the growing interdependence of human society in different parts of the world is something that we would be doing only at our own peril.
