Rajeev’s Almanack

The End of the World is Near-Not! 2

A couple of thoughtful comments by Biswajit and Miuw on my last post have provoked me to write a follow up. Several points were raised and I will try to give my response to each.

Is Global Warming for Real? I have not made up my own mind mind about this, because I find the Earth’s atmosphere such a daunting physical system that I don’t know any one can make accurate predictions. However, people who know much more about it are doing so confidently so I have to concede that Global Warming must be for real. It is even harder to predict how human beings will react to such a global change. My argument is that solutions will be found, but not necessarily without tension and struggles.

The very fact that there are many more people in the world today, and many of them are in areas that provide decent cheap education, means that there is a greater chance of finding solutions. To take the example of Norman Borlaug again, at the time he was growing up, the world was still dominated by the British Empire. You would have expected then that any scientific breakthrough that affects billions of people would come out of Cambridge or Oxford. His education at the University of Minnesota and his family background in agriculture provided him with the basic knowledge he needed. Many people growing up in the US as well as India, China, Brazil right now have the same opportunities. A few of them will rise to the occasion. The funding needed is not large compared to the gigantic amounts spent on weapons research or scientific white elephants . Widespread awareness of the problem is needed, a welcome outcome of the current debates.

Is Reasoned Optimism Justified?

We are supposed to be boundlessly optimistic when we are young and turn cynical with experience. However, I think many of us were too pessimistic in the seventies and slow to absorb the good news as it came in. The last thirty years or so have been some of the best years in human history.

The `good life’ used to be available only to an elite in the `good old days’. Now more and more of us are able to live comfortably and think of larger issues. This has come at some cost to the environment, but not irreversibly so. Apart from food security, the world has improved in other ways as well in the last decades. The religious and political totalitarianisms that ruled over billions of people have decayed.

Of course, this depends on what time interval we use as a baseline. If we were to look at the world 1900-1950, it would be dominated by colonialism and two world wars. It was in the build up to World War II that Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western Civilization. “It would be a good idea”, he replied.Still, the seeds of the next age were planted at that time, in part by Gandhi himself.

Will Old Cultures be Destroyed by Globalization?

I am from an old culture and I have seen some of it destroyed in the name of progress. The village I grew up in has been bought up wholesale by a secretive clay mining company, and is about to be wiped off the map. The huge gashes on the Earth made by clay mines in nearby villages are visible on Wikimapia’s aerial map. I weep knowing that this is about to happen to our place too. Yet the people who lived there longer than me don’t have the same sense of loss: they all got a good price for the land and were able to move to other locations. An old way of life has been destroyed but their new life is better, according to most of them. Although I think what is happening is a tragedy, their opinion about it is what matters, as I moved away thirty years ago.

The feeling is not unanimous. A couple of my stubborn uncles have refused to sell out: their homes will be perched at the edge of a precipice in a few years as the bulldozers get to work.

Part of the reason it turned out for the better is that Kerala is a place with a left wing government where global corporations have to tread carefully. Coca Cola and Pepsi have learned their lessons there. Without a vigilant and representative government to look after their interests, the people there would have been ravaged in the name of progress. Other parts of the world are not as fortunate.

So, the answer is not simple.It is often outsiders (or people who have moved away) who weep at the injury to the land and loss of habitat due to ecological destruction. The people who live in the affected regions are not sentimental about it. Should we, who might only visit Alaska on a cruise, have greater say in what happens there than the people who live there the whole year? If we care about saving the Bonobo, should we not also find a way for their human neighbors to make a living?

The messy and occasionally corrupt politics of India and the US ( the two countries that I know about) has somehow found a reasonable balance over such conflicting demands over the last few decades. This is not so in many other parts of the world, as the comment by Miuw points out. There is no substitute for representative local government. But perhaps international awareness can mitigate the worst abuses by corporations. They all want to project a green image these days. Next time I see a British Petroleum commercial on how environmentally correct they are, I will be skeptical.

What is the Good Life?

I subscribe to the old Indian (not just Buddhist) view that a good life is one devoid of extremes, allowing contemplation. Extremes of poverty or concentrations of wealth lead to catastrophes. Even elites who enjoy comforts in a world surrounded by desperation do not truly have the good life. This was true of the Spartans and the Namboothiri Brahmins of old India. The elite lived with the constant fear that the have-nots will dispossess them. But things have been getting better, more people have this good life than ever before. I suppose these days the good life would include not only food security, but also political freedom. Some would include air conditioning and WiFi.

Can everyone have it?

The surprising answer is yes. All through history people have been fighting with each other thinking that their good fortune has to come at the expense of others. But it turns out that someone else does not need to starve and toil for us to be well fed. It goes beyond food security. Scarcity of resources is often exaggerated.

If someone had predicted in 1985 that in twenty years 18% of India would have telephones I would have laughed. Back then it took a two year wait to get a telephone connection, a very scarce commodity in the days when you needed a wire to connect you to the world. Even in the US, the telephone company was a monopoly that jealously fought off any competition. Breaking up that monopoly improved not only the lives of Americans. The internet and cell phones came about as a result: the technical innovations had already been discovered. The technological revolution it unleashed spread through the world. While 80% of India is still not on the grid, growth is phenomenal: six million new connections (more than the entire population of Ireland) every month. The social implications of being connected are important. It is harder to exploit someone who can reach out to the world and complain about it.