By Hugh & Colleen Gantzer
We have enjoyed the hype, hysteria and hoopla of the outstanding success of G20, particularly its success in bringing in the African Union. In addition were the laurels of the little rover trundling over the surface of the south pole of the Moon. But now it is time to put away the paper streamers, balloon and party hats and face harsh reality again. Harsh reality is the arrival of the ogre of Climate Change.
Climate Change was not born in the global South. It is the child of the greed of the obsessively consumer oriented industrialised nations. The people of the Global North have neither the human nor the natural resources to achieve prosperity. Because of this they plundered the global South and enslaved entire nations. The Belgium Congo was, for instance, the personal property of the King of Belgium. Years ago, one of us led the Calcutta University Debating Team against the Team from Oxford & Cambridge. The Brits claimed that India had developed because their benign government had built the railways. We countered by asking why the Railways always connected the areas which produced raw materials like cotton with the seaport. We asked if it was not a fact that Indian cotton was exported for the looms of England to produce vests and dhotis to be exported back to India with the value addition filling in the coffers of British industrialists. We also asked if the British planners of their rail system had used British labour to lay the rail tracks. Who then had built the Indian Railways?
This brings us to the present.
The industrialised society of the global north is built on a carefully cultivated appetite for the Fashionable. Manufactured objects are rejected not because they have outlived their utility but because they are no longer fashionable. Simply put, it amounts to a Worship of Waste. This was not the old Indian way. Our local grocers saved every bit of string, wound them into enormous balls which they then used to wrap their sale packages. We still, thank Heavens, have the kabariwalla who is the world’s most efficient recycler, but, quite clearly we are losing the battle against waste as the growing mountain of garbage outside Delhi proves. Waste is Wealth in the wrong place. We need to institute a national prize for the inventor of a system to convert this waste into the wealth that it really is. For instance, if plastic cannot be recycled naturally because nature has not had the time to evolve a plastic degrading microbe, the first person to invent a method of using plastic as a road building material should receive a Global South Award which should match a Nobel Prize.
Climate change has been caused by the factories of the global north, and their clones in the global south, belching out greener house gasses than the green trees of the earth can recycle into carbon and oxygen. Carbon is used by vegetation for their tissues and oxygen is needed by animals for their survival. Trees also moisturise the earth by shedding minute droplets from the pores of their leaves. These pores are called Stomata. They are cell structures in the epidermis (skin) of tree leaves and conifer needles that are involved in the exchange of carbon dioxide and water between plants and the atmosphere. Green leaves and conifer needles have a wonderful way of using a green chemical called chlorophyll to capture the energy of sunlight to do its wonderful recycling work. If a scientist invented a machine called a Terrestrial Recycling Environmental Equipment, he could be a billionaire overnight. But the Creator has outsmarted him by creating the TREE. Yet a mantri designated as a Protector, turned Predator by sanctioning the felling of thousands of trees thereby welcoming the climate ogre. If that is not imbecilic then we do not know what is.
This is a wonderful example of the old adage that you cannot protect a crop when the fence begins to eat it!
We shall continue highlighting the consequences of climate change on our small State in our future columns.
(Hugh & Colleen Gantzer hold the National Lifetime Achievement Award for Tourism among other National and International awards. Their credits include over 52 halfhour documentaries on national TV under their joint names, 26 published books in 6 genres, and over 1,500 first-person articles, about every Indian state, UT and 34 other countries. Hugh was a Commander in the Indian Navy and the Judge Advocate, Southern Naval Command. Colleen is the only travel writer who was a member of the Travel Agents Association of India.) (The opinions and thoughts expressed here reflect only the authors’ views!).
