Anupam- The Dreamer

If you are living in disaster-prone areas like Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir etc., you would have witnessed the fury of nature in person, whether in the form of thunderstorms, cloudbursts, landslides, floods or earthquakes. And if you are not living there, you must have atleast read or heard about such news, if you are not hidden somewhere in a cave where you don’t have any internet connection. The news of a part of whole village being submerged under many feets of mud, boulders, and moraines of glaciers, is not only heart-wrenching, but at the same time is a grim reminder of the disastrous impact of the human’s tinkering with nature and not aligning with nature’s forces.

The question is why do we tinker with nature in the first place? We do it because we want “development”! And development you see is a subjective word! What does development mean actually? We often assign a narrow interpretation to it by saying that “it is something which improves the quality of life of a person in terms of more income, better health and education etc”. Yes, we definitely want better sources of income, health, education, infrastructure for all our people, but the question that we must ask ourselves is “AT WHAT COST?”

Development does not come without a cost to earth’s ecosystem and its precious resources! And earth’s resources, you see, are limited!! We want development in hilly regions of our nation which are environmentally disaster-prone and geologically fragile. There are ample studies which have stated that the Himalayan mountain ranges are geologically active and any tinkering with them must be well-planned and taking into consideration the nature of disaster that could happen in that region. For example, if we want to build a four-lane road to boost tourism in the upper hilly regions of Uttarakhand, we must take firstly do an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) of that project on the local geography and people. If the project seems feasible, then only we should go ahead and that too after taking care of the amount of blasting of the rocks and the terrain that can be done and the scale of deforestation that the region can bear, so as to prevent any man-made disasters in the future. If we go just after “unmindful development” and meddle with the geography of the region, the impacts can be disastrous in the future in the form of landslides, which has the potential to wipe out any “development” that we wanted to do in the first place. When the whole part of the mountain comes crashing near the construction site, can we call it “development”? I leave it for you to answer this question!

This takes me to the deeper question- Do we need “development” at any cost OR Do we need “sustainable development”? Development in terms of infrastructure, or lifestyle, or luxury (like increasing GHG emissions) cannot be called a true development if it threatens the existence of humankind in the long-term! Making infrastructure like huge dams, roads, human habitations, by tinkering with nature’s geology, deforestation, depletion of limited fossil fuels etc. can reap us short-term benefit in terms of more income, more sources of employment, and it may even give dividends to the politicians in terms of more votes, but in the long-term any development which is not “sustainable” can never be helpful for humanity as a whole. The resources of mother earth are limited and so is the carrying-capacity of mother earth with respect to the amount of tinkering that we can do with the planet’s ecosystem. The humans have impacted the climate and the resources of the planet in such a huge manner that the present geological age is now being called as “Anthropocene”! But, we must understand that there are indeed “limits to growth”, a term that was beautifully explained in the seminal report published in 1972 by an organization called “The Club of Rome”. If we think that the Earth has unlimited resources to fulfil the ever-growing needs of humanity, then we are quite mistaken! The Earth cannot support ever-increasing human population and the per capita need of every human in terms of material development. Imagine if every person out of 7 billion plus population demands a car and air travel, for him/her to be called “developed”, then are we ready to handle that? Certainly, NO! We are stuck in a catch-22 situation, where on one hand we want everyone to be developed but on the other hand if we go after unmindful “material development”, then the impacts of climate change and global warming will be even more severe than we are witnessing across the world today. And we have some political leaders who will brush off the threats like climate change for their own personal, narrow and selfish agendas.

So, if we want to progress, there is no way other than to go for “Sustainable development”, which is a broad-term to explain that the development should be such that it is in coherence with the nature’s limited resources, it caters to the needs of all humans in an equitable manner, preserves the ecosystems of our planet by preventing resource depletion and extinction of fauna and flora, and which does not compromise on the ability of the future generation to meet their own needs while we meet the needs of the present generation. And if we ignore this, the impacts will be disastrous for the humans, in particular, and the planet Earth, in general.

While we have discussed that there are indeed “limits to growth” to material development, but there is one dimension of development where there is no “limits to growth”. And that is “spiritual development! Such development of humanity can be ever-growing and everlasting. The spiritual development is the progress of the individual from within, wherein he/she is not dependent on the outer resources of the planet. This kind of development is not only sustainable, but also aligns the “material development” with the overall development of a human being as well as the planet. It makes ourselves see us as a small part of the whole universe. It makes us realize that humans are not the only species in the planet, which is also a home for all other plants as well as animals. It makes us rethink the extent of material development that we want in life. It makes us dwell upon the ethical values that we must imbibe in our life to become a better person and a better global citizen. And the best part is that there are no limits on spiritual development. It can be done at the same level for all humans, unlike material prosperity which can never be equally distributed.

So, it’s still not too late for us to ponder over these aspects of development. We want material development, but it can never be sustainable without the spiritual development of humanity as a whole. There are indeed “material limits to growth”, but there are no “Spiritual limits to growth”, and we must decide for ourselves the path that we want to take, individually, as well as a small part of the humanity considered as one whole entity.

Till next time…..