Ranjona Banerji | Are we too cheap to save the Himalayas?

If you wanted to take the name of this column literally, how far off the beaten track would you like to go? Instead of just thinking outrageous thoughts, would you choose the most difficult hiking path, full of danger and excitement, to ensure that you encounter as few humans as possible, making your perilous journey a self-exploration that no one but you can do?

And if you were to do this, where on this planet would you find both solitude and unexperienced adventure?

Under the sea, I would imagine. More unexplored than the space outside the Earth’s atmosphere, they say. Telescopes, from orbiting to radio, can look some over 13 billion years into the past at the Cosmic Microwave Background. But the murky depths of the sea? Mysteries and monsters lurk.

But actually, I do hope you won’t go there. Because the oceans are full of enough trash as it is. Us humans decided at some point that since we had polluted enough of the land, it was time to send our garbage out to sea. We forgot that the planet is globular, and what goes around comes around. Thus the waters are full of rubbish which varies from discarded plastic bottles to microplastics consumed by sea creatures. Some of which we eat. Which is possibly what we deserve, frankly.

And as we know — or we should — as people explore deep into unseen lands on this planet, we leave behind portions of ourselves which are really disgusting. The tallest land mountain is just full of human discards and debris as more and more sign up for the adventure and ticking off a bucket list. That rubbish will last long after many of us have kicked the bucket.

Every year, there is more evidence of human damage on paths less taken and most traversed. For humans to breeze through religious tourism, mountains and forests must be destroyed. What was once a journey of personal sacrifice as proof of devotion must now be a luxurious holiday. At great cost to the traveller and at worse cost to the land, the air, the environment and those who continue to live in the areas destroyed for someone else’s pleasure.

Now and again, the world’s “leaders” meet at some salubrious resort and discuss the future of the planet and make large promises. Most are not kept and those which are rarely cross the bare minimum. The devastation wrought by humankind is then balanced against the cost of convenience. “I am going to die soon, so who cares what happens to future generations” meets “They did much worse than we did in the past so why should we suffer as much as them in the present”. Neither argument is apparently contestable and, therefore, both arguments run contiguously. The effect is more disaster.

The road most taken is that of development. We need more and more of it. We must have progress and progress means infrastructure. Progress, however, does not mean maintenance of existing infrastructure. That is off the beaten track, presumably. And so, the onset of the monsoon has brought with it collapse of roads, bridges and airports. To name just a few casualties.

In order to build more infrastructure and to have more progress and development, there has to be even more destruction of natural resources. So we travel abroad and promise to maintain our forests to the community of nations and pat ourselves a few times on the back for our immense contribution to carbon sequestration. Then we come back to India and sign off on large tracts of forest land and decide to build roads for religious tourism on fragile mountain slopes.

Thus, as manmade infrastructure collapses around us, manmade development brings down mountains and cleared forests increase global and local temperature. This will only be felt at the next heat wave, so it doesn’t really matter, does it? By then hopefully everyone will forget as they always do.

Here in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, we have had the privilege of experiencing weather extremes in the short span of two months. We have gone from debilitating heat waves to destructive landslides and floods. That is, people have barely had time to recover from one catastrophe before landing in the next. The planet was warned of this. That we were close to the tipping point and that climate change could bring about harsh localised weather events. We heard, but we didn’t listen.  

Two arguments are made here when you bring up the environment. The one I hear the most is that people need houses and that local people need roads. Both these are true. But where I live, none of the “development” is for local people. If any government cared about local people, a massive disruptive road would not be built close to the town of Joshimath, which is on the verge of total collapse. Nor would hydropower plants be made where they endanger the lives of those who live close by.

The other is that the Western world has developed, so why can’t we?

Sadly, the planet does distinguish between this development and that. You just need to pay attention to the devastation of wild fires and hurricanes in North America to realise it.

Two of my favourite films are The Day After Tomorrow and Don’t Look Up. The first is about the freezing of the Northern Hemisphere and the second about a comet about to hit Earth. The first can be corny, the second is satirical. It is true that I am a sucker for disaster movies. But even so, both are made just under 20 years apart. And what they demonstrate is that we learn almost nothing. We know the jargon better and pay even more lip service to global warming than we did before.

But we do even less. The comet in Don’t Look Up is a metaphor for climate change. And while some celestial object is not likely to hit us, the damage we have done to our natural surroundings will.

Enjoy what you can while you can. Like the great science fiction writer Kurt Vonnegut said: “We could have saved the Earth, but we were too damned cheap.”