The failure to prevent environmental destruction is as dismaying as the failure to identify an exploding population as its most important cause. Soon, the earth’s resources may no longer be able to meet the demands of humans
Plants and animals exist symbiotically as parts of the wider environment which includes human beings. Unfortunately, most environmentalists forget this and pay scant attention to animals and their travails on World Environment Day, which falls on June 5 every year. One reason in recent years has been global warming which is finally causing nightmares. While action remains inadequate, the increasingly loud global commotion over the subject is relegating other critical environmental issues. This prevents the adoption of a comprehensive plan that preserves and regenerates the diversity that supports living beings on earth. Unfortunately, most people do not realise that animals constitute a critical component of the diversity. On the contrary, they think that the protection of animals is not important at all.
Summing up the essence of the human attitude toward animals, Paul Sheppard writes in his seminal book, Thinking Animals: Animals and the Development of Human Intelligence, “At the Centre of our humanity is pride in our independence from animals and animality. We have bodies as they do, but we also have minds. We tell ourselves that minds can free us not only from the animal in us but also from the animals around us. In our mortal life this mind is the focus and the means of all we must prize, our hope for making something of ourselves, of rising above mere existence.”
Rejecting this view categorically, Sheppard writes, “My thesis is that the mind and its organ, the brain, are in reality that part of us most dependent on the survival of animals. We are connected to animals not merely in the convenience of figures of speech — a zoological equivalent of ‘flowery speech’ — but by sinews that link speech to rationality, insight, intuition, and consciousness. It is not the same as thinking about animals. The connection is in the act and nature of thought, the working of mind.”
Arguing that “there is a profound, inescapable need for animals that is in all people everywhere, an urgent requirement for which no substitute exists.” He argues that the need is in “the peculiar way that animals are used in the growth and development of the human person, in those most priceless qualities which we lump together as ‘mind.’ It is the role of animal images and forms in the shaping of personality, identity, and social consciousness. Animals are among the first inhabitants of the mind’s eye. They are basic to the development of speech and thought. Because of their part in the growth of consciousness, they are inseparable from a series of events in each human life, indispensable to our becoming humans in the fullest sense.”
The need for taking up the issue of animals and other non-human living beings is pressing because a large number of species — over 3,000 according to one estimate — are becoming extinct every year. In fact, the world is now in the midst of its sixth mass extinction of plants and animals in the last half-a-billion years, and the worst since the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago. At this rate, as many as 30 per cent to 50 per cent of all species would be moving toward extinction by the middle of this century.
Regrettably, human activity, leading to habitat loss and global warming, besides the introduction of exotic species, is causing the extinctions. Even oceans have not escaped. Fish farms are destroying mangroves. Bottom trawlers, scraping ocean beds with nets, have already affected 20,000 square miles and turned large tracts of continental shelves to rubble. The consequences will be disastrous. Continental shelves teem with life because sunlight can penetrate their shallow waters and not the depths of oceans.
Seabed mining threatens to destroy unique ecosystems besides taking pollution to the deep sea. There are also incidental damages. While the continuing ban on whaling is most laudable, a growing number of container ships are killing whales through accidents. According to the International Programme on the State of the Ocean, acidification, caused by excessive carbon absorption and warming, are making oceans increasingly inhospitable to life, as is de-oxygenation, caused by nutrient run-off resulting from agriculture and climate change. According to reports, all this has caused a 40 per cent decline in coral reefs besides leading to the migration of some fish to cooler waters.
On land, loss of habitat because of human encroachments following exploding populations, the resultant conflict between humans and animals which stray into inhabited areas, and large scale killing of animals as a result thereof, are posing serious threats to the survival of several species. Loss of animal habitats through deforestation to accommodate human colonies and enterprises like farming, dams, irrigation systems, railway tracks and roads, as well as factories and markets, have severely adverse environmental effects for humans as well.
To cite an example, besides reducing rainfall, deforestation causes soil erosion by removing the roots of trees, which critically contribute to soil cohesion. Soil erosion, in turn, increases silt content in river waters, which reduces the water-holding capacity of dams by raising their levels through silt deposition. If this reduces the capacity of the dams to contain floods, rise of river beds, again through silt deposition, limits their carrying capacity and conduces to water spilling over embankments and causing floods.
All this has been widely discussed but, apart from a few conspicuously outstanding examples, action has been pathetically minimal. This is particularly shocking because the developments cited above, especially deforestation, contributes significantly to global warming. Trees play an important role in absorbing carbon from the atmosphere and their large-scale felling enhances a country’s carbon emission. Besides, a decrease in rainfall, a result of de-forestation, can lead to droughts and cause massive forest fires that devastated large tracts in Uttarakhand and some other parts of India a couple of months ago.
The failure to prevent environmental destruction is as dismaying as the failure to identify the pressure of an exploding population as perhaps its most important cause. A situation may come when the earth’s resources are no longer able to meet the demands of humans, who may then face extinction. If this sounds too alarmist, one should consider this. Referring to a future when 400,000 million humans crawl all over this planet, Desmond Morris writes in The Naked Ape, that we would have collapsed as a dominant species long before that happened. He adds: “Many exciting species have become extinct in the past and we are no exception. Sooner or later we shall go, and make way for something else.”