Anupam- The Dreamer

Canary is a small bird, size about 4-6 inches and weighing just about 15-20 grams. It is like a “chidiya”, belonging to the same order/family as that of the house sparrow. It is yellow and looks beautiful, and it has a melodious voice. But, that is not what it is famous for. It has a unique speciality among birds, which often became the cause of its death too!!!

In the earlier times, when the sophisticated equipment was not available, canaries were used as “a living alarm for detection of Carbon monoxide (CO) gas” inside the coal mines. The coal mines have a heavy concentration of poisonous and harmful gases like CO, hydrogen sulphide, carbon dioxide, methane etc. So, the miners took the little canaries inside the cages (as shown in the picture above) with them when they went in the underground mines to dig coal. This bird was very sensitive to the concentration of the CO gas, and started showing signs of distress on detecting CO. This alerted the miners of the impending harm, because CO being an odourless gas could not otherwise be detected by them. They rushed out of the mines after this “alarm” by the canary. But, sometimes the poor canary had to sacrifice its life because being small its capacity is less than humans to inhale CO. Or in other words, you can say that the miner killed the canary just to save his own life. This unique ability of canary became the cause of its own death. From the perspective of poor canary, it’s like “लेना एक न देना दो, जान गयी सो अलग”. Later, when the CO detectors came up, the practise of using canary in the mines subsided and now virtually nowhere the canaries are used during mining.

Over time “canary in a coal mine” became an idiom to mean that “something that suggests an early alarm for the impending crisis”. If we look around, there are so many canaries around us in one or the other form. For example, the global warming and the consequent rise in temperature is also a canary in the coal mine. We know that the canary is sounding alarm, in the form of cloudbursts, intense rainfalls, droughts, etc, but if only we start caring about the canary we could save ourselves. Otherwise one day, after the canary will be dead, there would be no alarm, and then it would spell a disaster for us only.

Other canary that is ringing alarm is the small-scale wars around the world, like Russia-Ukraine, Israel-Palestine-Iran, India-Pak, Vietnam-Cambodia, and civil wars in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan etc. The arms race is going on at a frantic pace and every nation is racing to amass WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction). We are sitting on a nuclear stockpile and if the humanity as a whole fails to listen to the alarm sounded by the canary, then we too may have to meet the same fate as that of the canary.

Another is the race for materialism and material comforts that has put immense strain on the available natural resources. The canary here is the small climatic disasters like the recent floods in the Himalayas, landslides, glacial lake outburst flows etc. These are sounding alarm about yet bigger disasters that are awaiting us in the Himalayas, if we continue to encroach the ecosystem and pursue deforestation on a massive scale. Millions of wood logs being washed away in the rivers are again a canary for us, which prove the massive scale of deforestation that is rampant in the region. If we ignore this canary alarm, and continue the business-as-usual approach, then there is no one out there to blame for our own misdeeds later.

And biggest of all is the moral crisis that has plagued the humanity and has the potential to wipe humanity from the face of this earth. There are umpteen examples of the alarms being raised in many areas of politics, economics, society, environment etc. Please allow me to refrain from the pain of mentioning some of them here, as we all know what they are. If we continue to ignore the alarm and go deeper and deeper into the mine, then we know who is to be blamed.

It is in our own interests if we identify the canaries around us and take early action, so as to achieve twin goals of saving the canaries and also ourselves. The miners who acted early, ran with the canary bird out of the underground mine, so as to save the life of poor canary as well as themselves. We need not kill another canary, for our selfish goals. We need canary more than it needs us. Therefore, we have a responsibility towards the little bird too.

So, how many canaries did you save?