In our ageing world, nature has been demonstrating its fury in recent times. The devastation the rains have recently brought to large parts of India and Pakistan, with entire villages washed away in the force of the downpour and the rise in the water levels of rivers, is not only a happening which is the consequence of climate change but also a challenge to the human race on its ability to cope with the future in the face of such fury.
The human predatory instinct has been responsible for all the misery we now encounter all across the globe. We have had the terrible experience of the Earth getting heated up from within, the result being sudden forest fires ravaging communities in the United States, Canada, Greece and other countries in the Western hemisphere. In Britain, instances of rivers drying up, of desperate measures undertaken by the authorities to arrest such decline, has been of grave concern in the past year or two.
Consider now the climatic changes which have affected life in Bangladesh. Monsoons do not come when they should. With no hint of rains, no sign of clouds in the sky, the months descend into being long summers of sizzling heat. And then there are the flash floods, which take a toll of human life and in accompaniment preside over the sinking of villages nestled beside our rivers. Agricultural land disappears, which is an additional cause for grave worry.
And then there are the dormant volcanoes in various parts of the globe. Dormant? They suddenly spring to life, the lava from them burying entire villages and homes along the path it takes to the lower reaches of the mountains. Those who can, move swiftly away to safety. Those asleep or unable to move fast are incinerated in the heat.
For people around the world, these are times that are wreaking havoc everywhere. Nature is under onslaught, with the ice melting in the Arctic, with forests vanishing through the commercial instincts of the human race. It is often politicians like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro who cheerfully preside over the destruction of trees in the interest of appeasing the friends who have placed them in high places.
We who have grown into old age in Bangladesh remember a time when the monsoon and the floodwaters left behind soil rich for fresh crops to grow, for village dwellers to partake of the wealth such soil brought in the wake of the rains. Those were times when an abundance of fish swam through the fields of rice and jute, enough to replenish the food stocks of people who lived in the huts they inhabited in their villages.
Those times have passed into eternity. The floodwaters are yet there and so are the fitful monsoon rains, but those fish have become extinct. The human desire for an augmentation of food crops, through promoting fertilizers, has been satisfied. But at what cost?
Rivers around the world have been prey to pollution. Should we be surprised? With the global population rising to more than eight billion people, how much more can this ancient earth take? Farming lands, especially when you look at Africa, a continent which has historically suffered from human depredations, are today lengthening stretches of deserts. Little girls and their mothers walk long miles to collect water from sources that may not yield enough for everyone. Boys and men go hunting for food for their families in a time when wildlife has been depleting over the decades.
Forests have been cleared of trees. Villages have seen their trees and other forms of natural vegetation disappear. In their place has been an infiltration of human habitation underscored by new homes with little of the natural in them. Birds, which once were a beautifully noisy presence in the bucolic sky and on the rural trees, do not any more give us reason for good cheer. They have gone away elsewhere, in search of new woodlands. Owls and foxes and squirrels and wild rabbits and sparrows are today tales out of a world we have lost to the devastation wrought by time.
Are we in a state of despair? We most certainly are, when we observe people leaving their ancestral homes and villages, because life does not anymore have the wherewithal to sustain them, and making the long trek to countries that will treat them as illegal aliens. On unsteady rickety boats men and women from an assortment of nations come together to make the perilous journey on the rough seas in search of a better life in Europe. Many of them die when the boats capsize. Those who survive are left wondering if the gods will answer their prayers for a life better than the one they cast aside on their native shores before boarding these flimsy boats. If their nations had been well governed, would they turn their backs on their countries?
Nature does not tolerate abuse. It suffers in silence as all those onslaughts on its integrity are made. But then comes a time when it hits back, when it punishes. That time is now.
Governments might be rushing to hold back the terror which typifies the harm to the Earth’s ecology, but to what degree they can roll back this damage remains a question. When hills turn bald, with their forests murdered by our so-called civilization; when rivers shrink owing to the theft of its banks committed by elements close to the powerful; when people cut down trees to build homes on the resultant empty spaces, offering a clean invitation to mudslides, nature comes roaring back in its many manifestations of indignation.
These are times to remember divinity, the better to ask the Lord of the Worlds to grant us salvation, to pardon us for the sins we have perpetrated through the centuries. These are times when educated, enlightened, and purposeful leadership, cognizant of the dangers threatening life on the planet, ought to emerge and teach nations the means that will restore respect for the planet we inhabit. There will come an age when our Earth turns lifeless, when it declines into being a wasteland, into a planet not unlike the worlds where no trace of life exists.
We will not, we cannot hold back the apocalypse. But we can, in our collective interest, beyond our multiplicity of territorial borders, place our hands firmly on the dike and hold back the waters from overwhelming us as long as we can.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a writer. Email: ahsan.syedbadrul@gmail.com.