Man in a Hurry Venkat Ramanan

Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers took over 50,000 years to multiply from a few thousand individuals living in sub-Saharan Africa to a few million scattered around the globe. The entire human population, at the time agriculture originated on Earth around 30-35,000 years ago, was approximately ten million. By the year 1750, at the dawn of the Industrial Age, it had risen to over 500 million and today – only 250 years later – it exceeds six billion.

Modern man came on the scene in Europe in fairly significant numbers around 35,000 years ago. And – only a few millennia later – the rise of homo sapiens had reduced Neanderthals groups perhaps to only isolated pockets. And by 25,000 years ago, according to the population geneticist Spencer Wells, these hominids had disappeared completely.

Around 20 per cent of bird species have become extinct in the past 200 years alone and another 11% is on the verge of extinction. We are also losing between 2,000 and 20,000 rainforest species a year.

What is common to these few observations of human history is that they are all examples of man’s boundless ability to change the world around him – be it eradicating the hominids who occupied the Earth before him or in relentlessly putting pressure on the natural environment around him. And what is even more apparent from a mere cursory reading of our history is the remarkable acceleration in the way in which we are changing the world around us. For instance, it took us more than 37,000 years to increase our population 50 times by 1750 A.D. But then, it took us only another 250 years (or 0.7% of the earlier time interval) to increase our number twelve-fold from 500 million to more than 6 billion today.

This propensity of ours to change the world around us has been either the result of an intentional or deliberate action on our part or an indirect consequence of the lifestyle choices we make during our sojourn on Earth. It can probably be argued that not all the loss of biodiversity and other destruction over the years can be attributed to our direct meddling in the ecosystem that surrounds and nurtures us. But, the current alarming increase in the rate of loss of biodiversity attests to the fact that our lifestyles have – particularly after the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the 19^th century – wreaked incalculable damage on the world we live in. Deforestation, for example, releases the carbon already stored in trees and decreases the amount being taken out of the atmosphere. Nitrous oxide released by automobiles traps the sun’s heat and re-emit it towards the Earth. These activities may be leading to rising temperatures worldwide. For instance, in 1998 ocean temperatures off Tasmania rose to levels too high for krill that favor colder currents. There was therefore no food for the mackerel in those waters and led to an 80% reduction in fish catch. Thus, while transforming ourselves from “naked ape to superspecies”, we are also, as David Suzuki notes, “transforming the biosphere – depleting the oceans, poisoning the air, levelling mountains and altering the composition of the atmosphere – and we are doing it all in a mere instant of biological time.” What is remarkable once again is the speed with which this transformation is taking place. As the noted environmentalist E O Wilson points out, “It takes a long time – millions of years – to create species as fully developed as the ones around us…. [And] we are destroying species a hundred times faster…”

Likewise, scientists do not suggest that the Neanderthals were purged by Upper Palaeolithic Moderns in some kind of hominid genocide. Rather, it may have been natural selection that acted as the Neanderthal Nemesis. As Spencer Wells has postulated, the Neanderthal’s conquerors had a complex social structure and with their “improved toolkits and bands of intelligent, social hunters, modern humans were much more efficient at hunting than the Neanderthals.” While the demise of these hominids may have been an unintended consequence of the arrival of homo sapiens in Europe, the massive growth of humans themselves will later have direct adverse effects on the human populace. Such hitherto unprecedented growth in population during the Neolithic period created the rise of infectious diseases and helped the rapid spread of these epidemics. Some historians have suggested that many of the plagues described in the Bible may have had their origins when agriculture arose in Eurasia. (in Wells, p: 159).

Moreover, life based on agriculture led to the “stratification of society”, as Wells observes. Once this occurred, “the seizure of power and the growth of empires was not far behind, which led to war on a scale that had never been seen in the Palaeolithic.” And wars, in addition to their usual ills, had other knock-on consequences – such as exacerbating the spread of diseases and destruction of precious cropland.

Wars today may be (fortunately) less frequent as now generally larger principalities are involved. But (unfortunately) when wars do take place, they are much more destructive. To cite an example from recent history, 8 million people died during World War I over four years. But just two decades later, 55 million were killed over a course of six years during World War II. The two bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki alone killed nearly 300,000 people. These alarming increases in war dead across human history can be attributed not only to the associated rapid increase in human population over the years but also the exponential advances in technology that has aided our capacity to destroy lives. In Martin Luther King’s words, “the means by which we live has outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.”

Further, while wars may be relatively less frequent in modern times, a new kind of war is now being waged by a new age of rulers whose effect on the world around us, including ourselves, could be equally insidious and damaging and result in irreversible consequences. Some of these new rulers exhibit the same aggression, greed and capacity for destruction, which was typical of history’s previous posse of aggressors. We call this new band “corporations”.

In the past, we had a lot of benevolent dictators interspersed by a few despicable despots here and there. Today we have instead a lot of benevolent companies, who, when not completely benevolent, may not at least intentionally harm the milieu in which they operate. But there are also a number of entities that are driven solely by greed, short-term goals and are not chagrined by their destruction of the world around them. These organisations have been able to turn lawless because modern society measures prosperity in terms of material wealth, instead of real happiness, at the individual level and uses imperfect benchmarks such as the GDP (which does not differentiate between spending that will increase real happiness and wasteful consumption) to measure success at the level of the wider economic and socio-political levels. Corporations thrive by supplying these goods and services with scant regard to the associated “soft” costs - costs to society, the environment and the risks to our long-term existence on this planet. We have commoditised virtually every facet of life on Earth and let the market dictate the way we live. As Bill Bryson puts it wryly, “we used to build civilisations. Now we build shopping malls.” Moreover, even to question the efficacy of the market economy and the rise of corporations with is deemed sacrilegious. As John Ralston Saul observes, “… we feel that everything that is socially successful is dependent on the success of the marketplace. We feel that to in any way analyse the marketplace, change the shape or direction of it, is in some way to endanger democracy, by endangering prosperity.”

Why are we in such a hurry? Why are we so bent on acquiring all these goods and services, which we may not always need, and in the process also destroying the world around us? It is as if that almost from the moment our forefathers came on the planet, we have been driven by a senseless apocalyptic urge to irreversibly change the planet and ultimately destroy it. If you were a believer in Hindu theology and cosmogony, you would think that the end of Kali Yuga is upon us.

Hindu scriptures divide time into four yugas or periods, which together extend to 12,000 “divine years”. During these four yugas – namely, Krita, Treta, Dvapara and Kali – goodness and prosperity on Earth dwindle gradually. The Krita, for example, is that age in which righteousness is eternal. During the Treta Yuga, righteousness decreases by a fourth and during the Dvapara Yuga ignorance increases and during Kali Yuga ignorance prevails. The Krita is thus the golden age and Kali (“an age of strife and dissension”) the iron one.

At the end of Kali Yuga, which makes up ten per cent of those 12,000 divine years, Vishnu (the Hindu god of preservation) will reappear on Earth “bearing the name Kalki, to put an end to… [ignorance and]… wickedness, and establish a kingdom of righteousness…” Fortunately, Hindus believe also that the end of Kali Yuga is not the ultimate end of the world as we perceive it. It is certainly not the Hindu variant of the Biblical Armageddon, the final battle that will end the world. It will instead be more redemptive. As R K Narayan points out, “since goodness triumphs in the end, there is no tragedy in the Greek sense; the curtain never comes down finally on corpses strewn about the stage….. Everything is bound to come out right in the end; if not immediately, at least in a thousand or ten thousand years; if not in this world, at least in other worlds.”

But many of us may not have the patience to wait for a thousand years or so for the world to right itself. (Yes, we are in a hurry in this too.) Moreover, if we were serious about bringing about the changes that will provide real lasting happiness, reduce damage to the ecosystem and our fellow beings (both human and animal), we should be endeavouring to begin today, this moment. In the words of Bill McKinnen, author of the book “The End of Nature”), ‘the story of the twentieth century was finding our just how big and powerful we were… The story of the twenty-first century is going to be finding out if we can figure our ways to get smaller or not. To see if we can summon the will, and then the way, to make ourselves somewhat smaller, and try to fit back into this planet.”

One possible first step in this new journey would be to re-evaluate the way we treat the environment. We humans are not the only inhabitants on this planet: it supports several million other species of flora and fauna too. Our long-term survival on Earth and the sustainability of the biosphere which caters for our needs (and wants) is possible only through an awareness of the need to maintain development and growth without irreversibly harming nature. After all, as E F Schumacher pointed out, “no degree of prosperity could justify [our poisoning the Earth]…. The idea that a civilisation could sustain itself on the basis of such a transgression is an ethical, spiritual and metaphysical monstrosity.”