Civilisation as we know it will no longer exist within 30 years. This bleak conclusion is not one I have arrived at lightly. However, wherever I look the evidence suggests that we are heading towards a major ecological breakdown which the majority of us are unlikely to survive. A number of critical environmental problems are coming to a head and the fall out from these will dwarf any attempts we can make to tackle them. If the pitiful attempts that have been made so far to tackle the environmental crisis are any guide, then major ecological breakdown is inevitable within a few years.

Once civilisation starts to unravel, it will happen quickly. Crop yields will fall considerably as the effects of climate change and peak oil really start to bite. It is likely that one of the first casualties will be the current banking and financial system, which is unlikely to be able to withstand the strain. Thus wealth will offer no protection.

Compounding this will be the fact that fossil fuels and other oil-based products will become increasingly hard to obtain, so the transportation infrastructure will grind to halt. From a practical point of view, food will be in very limited supply, no one will be able to pay for it, and there will be no transportation available to deliver it. As the crisis deepens, the electricity supply will be disrupted as will water supplies. Disease will almost certainly thrive in such an environment. Conflict over what limited resources remain will be almost inevitable. In short we will be transported back to the dark ages in a very short space of time and many people, used to living a comfortable western lifestyle, will be unlikely to survive this transition.

So what has brought us to the brink? There are many factors which have contributed to our current situation. In particular overpopulation and over consumption of resources such as fossil fuels lie at the heart of our dilemma. This is underpinned by our economic system, which rewards exploitation of resources and focuses on economic growth. This system has contributed to the demise of ecosystems worldwide.

What is often not realised is that the environmental and societal problems we face are all connected and all can be attributed totally to the impact of too many people consuming too many resources. This is why symptomatic treatments, like trying to tackle climate change, while simultaneously encouraging economic growth are doomed to failure. Unless humans change their entire philosophy and way of life such band-aid solutions will do little to avert the coming crisis. Unfortunately, powerful national and corporate interests will never allow the kind of fundamental changes that are necessary to address these issues constructively.

The Earth is resilient, and there is little doubt that it will recover its former glory in a relatively short time period. Over millions of years, surviving opportunist species such as rats and crows will evolve into a myriad of new specialised life forms. Forests will return to cover much of the Earth. However what is a short time period for the Earth is totally outside of the human time frame. None of us will be around in ten million years time to see the planet reborn. We will have to contend with struggling to survive on a resource-depleted planet, under inhospitable climatic conditions. It is inevitable that many of the other life forms with which we share the Earth will also be impacted, with the rate of extinctions reaching a peak as civilisation collapses. Many of the plant and animal species we currently share this planet with are already poised on the brink, as a result of human activities, and are unlikely to survive long into the current century.

In spite of our predicament, I do not believe that our current western civilisation has been entirely bad news. Over the last two hundred years, our civilisation has gone through an unprecedented period of growth and expansion. We have made vast progress in our knowledge of all fields of science, arts and music have flourished. Technology has also developed which makes our lives easier than ever before. These are the gifts of the oil age. The development of many of things we take for granted today would not have been possible without the one-time gift of energy from fossil fuels. The capitalist economic growth model has lead to rapid advancement in many areas. Even periods of wartime have lead to beneficial advances in knowledge and technology.

However, we must now move beyond free market capitalism and the philosophy of unlimited growth. A new guiding philosophy is now needed for humanity and for the Earth if human civilisation is to survive in any form. I believe it was always inevitable that humanity would one day reach this point, the often talked about bottleneck of civilisation, where we ourselves have become the main threat to our continued survival as a species.

The problem is that now the ideology of the capitalist age is now so entrenched in society that few are capable of visualising a future which does not involve economic growth. The ideas and philosophies which have served us in the past can have no place in a future society. In particular, the concept of nation states, which protect their own interests at the expense of all others, and corporations, which exist only to make money, are not compatible with a sustainable vision of the future.

So how can we prevent the upcoming crisis from occurring? I believe that the harsh truth is that we cannot and that it is inevitable. Our planet simply cannot support so many people, consuming so much. We can make efforts to try to soften the landing. In particular, I believe that the environmental movement can play an extremely important part in helping to protect many of the remaining wild parts of the Earth, and in slowing the build up in greenhouse gasses over the next few years. However these can only be stop-gap measures. The main focus should be on sowing the seeds of a future sustainable society. For the rest of this essay I would like to look at how this could be done.

Consider what will happen after the initial crisis. A much reduced human population will be concentrated in areas which are still capable of producing food. For the most part, these will be parts of the world where climate change has not impacted local weather conditions too severely. In some cases, climate change may also make some new areas suitable for agriculture. Over time, these societies will grow and will probably make exactly the same mistakes as our society has done.

I foresee a situation where humanity will consist of a number of scattered populations, ruled over by feudal warlords. The end result will be a cycle of war and famine, with associated population growth and crash, and with additional resources being depleted in each cycle. This pattern will likely lead ultimately to the extinction of humanity, over the course of several thousand years. If history proves one thing it is that the lessons of the past are rarely learned. There is ample evidence that many of the major civilisations of the past were wiped out by environmental factors, but have we taken the lessons from this to heart?

So what is the solution? Clearly we cannot all go back to being hunter-gatherers. We can certainly learn from how so called "primitive" societies live as a part of their local environment. However even many of these societies are not perfect examples of living in harmony with the environment, as evidenced by the disappearance of mega-fauna on all continents, shortly after the arrival of humans. I believe that our best hope lies in developing entirely new sustainable settlements which can act as focal points for the development of a new society.

The classic science fiction series "Foundation" by Isaac Asimov describes a situation which has many parallels to our current predicament. The galactic empire appears to be at the height of its power, with its rule extending across the entire galaxy. One man however, the mathematician Hari Seldon, sees the inevitable collapse of the empire, where all others do not. His solution is to establish a colony in a remote part of the galaxy where the seeds of a new society can be planted. He is unable to prevent the break up of the empire and the subsequent turmoil, but the colony he establishes goes on to flourish and after many years becomes the basis of a whole new galactic civilisation. It is instructive to know that one of Asimov's inspirations for this series was the decline and break up of the Roman Empire, which has often been compared to our current situation.

In a similar way, I think that it is necessary to establish a series of sustainable settlements to act as seed points for a future civilisation. Although many current towns and cities are becoming more environmentally conscious and recognising the value of local sourcing, I believe that the changes in philosophy necessary are of such magnitude that even the most enlightened population will be unable to bridge the gap. The settlements I envisage must be totally self-sustaining, producing all their own food and meeting their energy requirements locally.

Unlike many environmentalists, I believe that technology should also play a part in a future society. The best of today's technology can be incorporated into the design of such settlements to allow the residents to live with a level of comfort vastly greater than other remnant human populations. Locally generated electricity can be used to provide lighting and limited transportation for example. The key to any technology however, is that it must be replicable within the community. Any technology which relies on outside sourcing will not be sustainable in the long term. This means that such communities must develop micro-manufacturing processes to produce materials such as electrical wiring, steel, glass, ceramics, and possibly even bio-plastics.

These settlements must also have a certain critical mass. One of the more encouraging recent developments is the movement towards eco-villages worldwide, but the fact is that most of these communities are simply too small to be sustainable in the long run. They lack the size and diversity to enable specialisation, with the result that on their own, they are likely simply to remain as subsistence farming communities.

The sustainable community of the future will need to have a population in the thousands to be viable. It must have a strict population control policy and environmental focus to remain sustainable and always look to the long-term future. Decisions should be made by the population as a whole; perhaps all members would be expected to spend a year as part of a governing council. This would ensure that all members of the community are fully represented and their voices are given equal weight. One model that could be effective is if a number of eco-villages were to locate adjacent to each other, the larger community would then have the required critical mass.

Unfortunately, it is inevitable that the coming crisis will result in millions of refugees, with a mass movement towards areas which are still capable of producing food. This is likely to be the main threat to the survival of many of these planned sustainable communities. If they are overwhelmed by a vast flood of refugees, the system will simply break down. To avoid this problem I would suggest that such communities be established in areas remote from existing population concentrations. A number of suitable areas exist throughout the world where population pressures are still not critical. Areas such as the South Island of New Zealand, Northern British Columbia, Patagonia, and parts of Scandinavia, have temperate climates and are sufficiently remote from major population concentrations to assure these budding communities a measure of protection over the first few years of the crisis.

Over time the function of these settlements will change. For the first ten or twenty years after the crisis starts, they will have to focus purely on survival. Outside contacts will be limited and the community will need to concentrate on feeding itself, and developing and refining appropriate technologies for sustainability. After this period it is likely that stability of a sort will have been established in the outside world. The community can then start reaching out to adjacent populations, helping them to create similar societies and settlements. Over time, entire regions will be able to develop sustainably, providing focal points for the development of a new genuinely sustainable society.

These then are my visions on how we might make it through the environmental and population bottleneck we now find ourselves in. Given that I believe a major environmental crisis is unavoidable, how might we ensure that genuinely sustainable communities could become a reality? Firstly I believe we should use the most powerful tool of the current age to design exactly how future communities should look, what technologies and system of government would be most appropriate, and how to ensure that such communities remain sustainable over time. Computer games already exist which allow users to design cities and societies. It would be a relatively simple undertaking to design an on-line computer game which would allow interested parties worldwide to refine the details of exactly what such a future society should look like. Remember that if communities develop in a haphazard manner, it is likely that they will fall into many of the traps that our current society has.

I believe it will be necessary to find a wealthy benefactor. It is ironic that in order to create a vibrant, sustainable community of the future, where money will have a place only as means of exchange, will take a considerable amount of money. It will be necessary to purchase large tracts of land and cover the costs of developing the initial infrastructure. This is a project which could easily capture the imagination of some of the more forward thinking philanthropic trusts and private benefactors. I think it would be very fitting to see capital derived from economic growth going towards the development of sustainable communities for the future.

The final component will be to find volunteers who are willing to commit themselves to such a project. Initially they would be involved in the design and construction of these settlements, but ultimately they will be the ones who would live there. If enough people can be found who would be willing to be involved in such a project, I believe that we can sow the seeds of a future sustainable society.

In conclusion, I have a bleak view of the future of our current society. There are many well meaning initiatives out there, but in order for our society to have any hope of survival we would need to completely abandon economic growth as a philosophy, and ensure that all women currently on the planet have no more than one child each. While these are desirable goals, we have to ask the question; is it at all likely that either of these scenarios will occur? I believe that instead of clinging to lofty and unachievable goals, we must actually prepare to face the unthinkable and set about designing the society of the future, using the most powerful tools available to us in the present. It is only by planning and developing settlements for the future now that we can help to ensure that future society will develop in a benign and sustainable manner.

2) Advertising aimed at making people buy more should be tapered off. Only adverts giving information should be allowed.

3) Roadside advertising hoardings should be reduced by 50%, and they should not be illuminated, as they use up precious energy for a relatively non-productive purpose.

4) Stop adding power generation capacities, whether thermal or otherwise. Freeze them at existing capacities and merely replace thermal capacities with wind-energy and solar generation capacities.

5) Stop registering new private vehicles. NGOs or government should incentivate people to give up private transport (for instance by giving them free passes on public transport with 10-year validity.)

6) Each year, taper off the numbers of private transport wheels by 10% or more, and enhance the capacity of public transport by 20%. This will result in a net improvement in the quality of transportation and reduced congestion each year. Also encourage biking and hiking by improving the quality of roadsides, and including rest facilities (lounges) every kilometre or two.

7) Enforce a one-child policy with both carrot and stick. This means that within the span of 60-70 years, population would go down by about 50%.

8) Build infrastructure for localised means of recreation such as playgrounds and stadiums, both indoor and outdoor. Encourage greater participation in physical and mental sporting activities by organizing competitions etc.

9) Civic and governmental efforts to improve quality of life are crucial to wean off people from the rat-race.

This is not saying that we shall have no more problems, and shall live happily ever after. Every situation and every lifestyle inevitably has its own set of problems... and we shall have to be alert and aware to deal with them as they arise.

Dear fellow-citizens,

There is an important social principle currently being violated by many manufacturing activities: While engaged in a profit-making activity, one must not leave a mess behind for the rest of society to clean up.

This principle can easily be understood as common decency. If I come to your house as a salesman in order to market something, I must clean up any mess that I make while selling my product.

But this principle is continually breached by manufacturers and marketers on a large scale in our country, and nobody even thinks of objecting!

Have you ever pondered how mineral water and soft-drink manufacturers who sell their product to you in a PET bottle take no further responsibility what happens to their non-biodegradable bottle? Most often, it ends up as litter in the environment, because the consumer simply does not know what to do with the bottle, other than tossing it away.

This is not how it should be. At the time of conceptualizing and designing the product, the manufacturer has the responsibility of thinking what will happen to the discarded packaging, or, in the case of non-consumables, to the product itself after its use. He must take the responsibility to create a safe avenue for its disposal or recycling.

This requires a mechanism to collect the empty container or used product. So he must set up that mechanism. For instance, the grocery shopkeeper may incentivate the consumer to return PET bopttles to him by initially charging a coupl;e of rupees as deposit for the bottle, which he returns when the consumer returns the bottle to him. These bottles can then be sent back to the company's recycling facility. (This is how soft-drink bottles made of glass were returned to manufacturers until very recently, remember? We, the consumers, were OK with this system. So why the sudden urge to package everything in discardable materials?)

We should mobilize citizens to demand legislation that every manufacturer must repurchase/collect and recycle as many tonnes of raw material as he uses on a week-by-week basis. For example, if a mineral-water manufacturer uses ten tonnes of plastics per week to manufacture bottles, he MUST buy back ten tonnes of plastic scrap and safely recycle it.

Now think for a moment about used automobiles. Used cars and scooters in India are sold as second-hand vehicles, and then third-hand, fourth-hand. A second-hand vehicle may go from a metropolis to a small town or village. It keeps going further and further into the interiors as it ages, as its condition deteriorates and its market price dwindles. And then?

And then it is sometimes sold to a garage at a throwaway price, and this garage may salvage spare parts from it. ut what remains of this vehicle, including worn-out tyres, may lie around rusting and gathering dust for years and years on some deserted road. The tyres, when they are often burnt in winter for warmth, releasing black, acrid smoke and carcinogenic chemicals into the atmosphere.

Or it lies as a rusting eyesore in some building compound for many years as the last owner loses all motivation to either repair it or sell it.

Thus, every automobile manufacturer sells a product that turns into many hundred tonnes of junk -- assorted metal, plastic, glass and rubber junk -- after 6-8 years. They end up littering the beautiful countryside with this junk. Is this socially acceptable behaviour?

If one looks for solutions, they are not difficult to find. Legislation and regulations are the answer.

Automobile manufacturers must be required by law to buy back that many tonnes of metals, plastics, glass etc every week, and find ways to recycle them. The cost may be met by raising the market price of their product... but the responsibility to make the recycling activity happen MUST be fixed on the manufacturer of every product.

The same applies to tyres, batteries, plastic goods, newspapers, textiles, chemicals, auto-lubricant oils, etc. The list is long.

It is possible that this will make some manufacturing and marketing processes unviable. If so, this would mean that these economic activities were unviable in the first place, and were sustainable only by passing on hidden costs to the environment, to society and to consumers! Such activities must necessarily come to an end.

Many industrial activities are environmentally and socially subsidized to keep them economically profitable. Let us lobby governments to knock off that subsidy and see how many activities remain sustainable!

I propose peaceful demonstrations to compel industries to self-regulate, and legislators to pass laws:

Small groups of citizens shall collect the branded packaging material of various manufacturers from the environment, and delivering them in large bundles every week to their corporate offices. It belongs to them, right? So let them have it back!

A peaceful demonstration like this, sustained over some weeks, would make a powerful statement. I think this will make a powerful media impact as well... and thereby, an impact on the consciousness of people.

This would be the first step to making changes happen. Citizens, industry and government must first be made to acknowledge that there is a problem; then viable solutions will begin to emerge.

What say, fellow-citizens? I would appreciate your detailed responses to this idea.

Those who wish to join me in peaceful social action (as described) are urged to email me at friendlyghost.kk@gmail.com

Warmly,
Krish

This is the sketch of a 15-minute Hindi street play that we are hoping to stage on 1st January before a Rotary audience, and later present before several other audiences. This is written for targetting slum audiences, municipal school children etc. in mind. However, we hope to strike a chord in sophisticated, urbane audiences also.

The author of this play is a half-Tamil half-Maharashtrian chap named Santosh Jangam who ran away from home, became a street child, and later found shelter, training and guidance at a YMCA. He currently lives in a slum at Vile Parle and makes a livelihood peddling books on suburban trains. I met him serendipitously while doing a little friendly research on the economics, profit margins etc. of book peddlers.

THE SCRIPT:

The Creator descends to earth and wants to know whether his creatures are happy. First, he beckons to a tree and a plant standing shyly at a far corner, and urges them to speak. They are diffident. "We dare not speak, because it is well known to all creatures that you favour humans over all other creatures," they allege. The Creator reassures them that it it is not so, and asks them to speak without fear.

What follows is a well-reasoned litany of woes from different creatures who each speak of being abused by humans in their greed for a better lifestyle.

Trees and plants complain that while other creatures consume them only for food, humans cut down trees for a multitde of other reasons, including the idle pleasures of reading newspapers with very little productive content. "Our land is continually being taken away from us (deforestation) and is left unsuitable for even tiny shrubs (desertification)", complain the trees. "That is why we are now left standing in secluded corners -- we who once populated all of the earth."

Others speak of similar truths:

fishes, whose water is polluted with chemical wastes and chemical fertilizers. Also, they are trapped in large numbers with hi-tech vessels, and driven to extinction through over-fishing.

insects, who complain of indescriminate use of chemical pesticides

birds, who complain of habitat loss due to deforestation and death due to pesticides

domestic animals who complain of being housed and fed in inhuman conditions

predators, who complain of poisoning of their prey, dwindling forests etc.

All these creatures keep ending their 2-minute speech with one request: "We no longer want to share this planet with humans, please take us away". (This is a reference to the wave of mass extinctions currently in progress... over 50,000 species per year.)

Finally, God asks humans to speak. Two guys who were formerly classmates represent the viewpoint of humankind before the Creator.

One, who is poor and lives in the slums, points his finger at the rich guy. "He drives a big car and parks it on the roadside along with others, preventing me from riding my bicycle and safely walking by the roadside," he says. "Because of him and many many others like him, who consume hugely and dump large quantities of garbage, I am unable to walk about safely in this city. Indeed, his garbage -- like PET bottles, chocolate wrappers and plastic bags -- litter even the countryside and the seaside. This world is no longer a nice place to live in," he lamets.

The rich guy in turn accuses the poor guy and his kind of having degraded his city with sprawling slums. "He and his kind indiscriminately burn garbage, plastic, rubber tyres, and poison the very air that I breathe. They are the ones ruining the environment," he says.

In this way, a lot of issues related to environmental degradation and global warming are aired in an interesting way.

Finally, the Creator concludes by urging the rich and the poor to make peace, to resume proper communications between themselves and together change their ways. He tells them to restore earth to make it liveable for all creatures, including themselves. He gives a brief explanation about the web of life, and its importance in maintaining breatheable air, drinkable water, cultivable land etc.

The End.

________________________

In the backdrop, we plan to have banners held by some actors -- scenes that portray healthy forests, deforestation, degraded environment etc. They will change the scenes a few times during the play.

We hope to end with a song or a slogan for all 'creatures' in the play to sing together. Haven't thought of one yet... any good ideas out there for a catchy jingle in Hindi?

Through this play, and others like this one, we hope to take the global warming message to many simple folks in and around the city, and trigger some amount of positive thought and action.

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Honorable members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Excellencies, Ladies and gentlemen.

I have a purpose here today. It is a purpose I have tried to serve for many years. I have prayed that God would show me a way to accomplish it.

Sometimes, without warning, the future knocks on our door with a precious and painful vision of what might be. One hundred and nineteen years ago, a wealthy inventor read his own obituary, mistakenly published years before his death. Wrongly believing the inventor had just died, a newspaper printed a harsh judgment of his life's work, unfairly labeling him "The Merchant of Death" because of his invention dynamite. Shaken by this condemnation, the inventor made a fateful choice to serve the cause of peace.

Seven years later, Alfred Nobel created this prize and the others that bear his name.

Seven years ago tomorrow, I read my own political obituary in a judgment that seemed to me harsh and mistaken if not premature. But that unwelcome verdict also brought a precious if painful gift: an opportunity to search for fresh new ways to serve my purpose.

Unexpectedly, that quest has brought me here. Even though I fear my words cannot match this moment, I pray what I am feeling in my heart will be communicated clearly enough that those who hear me will say, "We must act."

The distinguished scientists with whom it is the greatest honor of my life to share this award have laid before us a choice between two different futures a choice that to my ears echoes the words of an ancient prophet: "Life or death, blessings or curses. Therefore, choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live."

We, the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential even as we gather here. But there is hopeful news as well: we have the ability to solve this crisis and avoid the worst though not all of its consequences, if we act boldly, decisively and quickly.

However, despite a growing number of honorable exceptions, too many of the world's leaders are still best described in the words Winston Churchill applied to those who ignored Adolf Hitler's threat: "They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent."

So today, we dumped another 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, as if it were an open sewer. And tomorrow, we will dump a slightly larger amount, with the cumulative concentrations now trapping more and more heat from the sun.

As a result, the earth has a fever. And the fever is rising. The experts have told us it is not a passing affliction that will heal by itself. We asked for a second opinion. And a third. And a fourth. And the consistent conclusion, restated with increasing alarm, is that something basic is wrong.

We are what is wrong, and we must make it right.

Last September 21, as the Northern Hemisphere tilted away from the sun, scientists reported with unprecedented distress that the North Polar ice cap is "falling off a cliff." One study estimated that it could be completely gone during summer in less than 22 years. Another new study, to be presented by U.S. Navy researchers later this week, warns it could happen in as little as 7 years.

Seven years from now.

In the last few months, it has been harder and harder to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of kilter. Major cities in North and South America, Asia and Australia are nearly out of water due to massive droughts and melting glaciers. Desperate farmers are losing their livelihoods. Peoples in the frozen Arctic and on low-lying Pacific islands are planning evacuations of places they have long called home. Unprecedented wildfires have forced a half million people from their homes in one country and caused a national emergency that almost brought down the government in another. Climate refugees have migrated into areas already inhabited by people with different cultures, religions, and traditions, increasing the potential for conflict. Stronger storms in the Pacific and Atlantic have threatened whole cities. Millions have been displaced by massive flooding in South Asia, Mexico, and 18 countries in Africa. As temperature extremes have increased, tens of thousands have lost their lives. We are recklessly burning and clearing our forests and driving more and more species into extinction. The very web of life on which we depend is being ripped and frayed.

We never intended to cause all this destruction, just as Alfred Nobel never intended that dynamite be used for waging war. He had hoped his invention would promote human progress. We shared that same worthy goal when we began burning massive quantities of coal, then oil and methane.

Even in Nobel's time, there were a few warnings of the likely consequences. One of the very first winners of the Prize in chemistry worried that, "We are evaporating our coal mines into the air." After performing 10,000 equations by hand, Svante Arrhenius calculated that the earth's average temperature would increase by many degrees if we doubled the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Seventy years later, my teacher, Roger Revelle, and his colleague, Dave Keeling, began to precisely document the increasing CO2 levels day by day.

But unlike most other forms of pollution, CO2 is invisible, tasteless, and odorless -- which has helped keep the truth about what it is doing to our climate out of sight and out of mind. Moreover, the catastrophe now threatening us is unprecedented and we often confuse the unprecedented with the improbable.

We also find it hard to imagine making the massive changes that are now necessary to solve the crisis. And when large truths are genuinely inconvenient, whole societies can, at least for a time, ignore them. Yet as George Orwell reminds us: "Sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."

In the years since this prize was first awarded, the entire relationship between humankind and the earth has been radically transformed. And still, we have remained largely oblivious to the impact of our cumulative actions.

Indeed, without realizing it, we have begun to wage war on the earth itself. Now, we and the earth's climate are locked in a relationship familiar to war planners: "Mutually assured destruction."

More than two decades ago, scientists calculated that nuclear war could throw so much debris and smoke into the air that it would block life-giving sunlight from our atmosphere, causing a "nuclear winter." Their eloquent warnings here in Oslo helped galvanize the world's resolve to halt the nuclear arms race.

Now science is warning us that if we do not quickly reduce the global warming pollution that is trapping so much of the heat our planet normally radiates back out of the atmosphere, we are in danger of creating a permanent "carbon summer."

As the American poet Robert Frost wrote, "Some say the world will end in fire; some say in ice." Either, he notes, "would suffice."

But neither need be our fate. It is time to make peace with the planet.

We must quickly mobilize our civilization with the urgency and resolve that has previously been seen only when nations mobilized for war. These prior struggles for survival were won when leaders found words at the 11th hour that released a mighty surge of courage, hope and readiness to sacrifice for a protracted and mortal challenge.

These were not comforting and misleading assurances that the threat was not real or imminent; that it would affect others but not ourselves; that ordinary life might be lived even in the presence of extraordinary threat; that Providence could be trusted to do for us what we would not do for ourselves.

No, these were calls to come to the defense of the common future. They were calls upon the courage, generosity and strength of entire peoples, citizens of every class and condition who were ready to stand against the threat once asked to do so. Our enemies in those times calculated that free people would not rise to the challenge; they were, of course, catastrophically wrong.

Now comes the threat of climate crisis a threat that is real, rising, imminent, and universal. Once again, it is the 11th hour. The penalties for ignoring this challenge are immense and growing, and at some near point would be unsustainable and unrecoverable. For now we still have the power to choose our fate, and the remaining question is only this: Have we the will to act vigorously and in time, or will we remain imprisoned by a dangerous illusion?

Mahatma Gandhi awakened the largest democracy on earth and forged a shared resolve with what he called "Satyagraha" or "truth force."

In every land, the truth once known has the power to set us free.

Truth also has the power to unite us and bridge the distance between "me" and "we," creating the basis for common effort and shared responsibility.

There is an African proverb that says, "If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." We need to go far, quickly.

We must abandon the conceit that individual, isolated, private actions are the answer. They can and do help. But they will not take us far enough without collective action. At the same time, we must ensure that in mobilizing globally, we do not invite the establishment of ideological conformity and a new lock-step "ism."

That means adopting principles, values, laws, and treaties that release creativity and initiative at every level of society in multifold responses originating concurrently and spontaneously.

This new consciousness requires expanding the possibilities inherent in all humanity. The innovators who will devise a new way to harness the sun's energy for pennies or invent an engine that's carbon negative may live in Lagos or Mumbai or Montevideo. We must ensure that entrepreneurs and inventors everywhere on the globe have the chance to change the world.

When we unite for a moral purpose that is manifestly good and true, the spiritual energy unleashed can transform us. The generation that defeated fascism throughout the world in the 1940s found, in rising to meet their awesome challenge, that they had gained the moral authority and long-term vision to launch the Marshall Plan, the United Nations, and a new level of global cooperation and foresight that unified Europe and facilitated the emergence of democracy and prosperity in Germany, Japan, Italy and much of the world. One of their visionary leaders said, "It is time we steered by the stars and not by the lights of every passing ship."

In the last year of that war, you gave the Peace Prize to a man from my hometown of 2000 people, Carthage, Tennessee. Cordell Hull was described by Franklin Roosevelt as the "Father of the United Nations." He was an inspiration and hero to my own father, who followed Hull in the Congress and the U.S. Senate and in his commitment to world peace and global cooperation.

My parents spoke often of Hull, always in tones of reverence and admiration. Eight weeks ago, when you announced this prize, the deepest emotion I felt was when I saw the headline in my hometown paper that simply noted I had won the same prize that Cordell Hull had won. In that moment, I knew what my father and mother would have felt were they alive.

Just as Hull's generation found moral authority in rising to solve the world crisis caused by fascism, so too can we find our greatest opportunity in rising to solve the climate crisis. In the Kanji characters used in both Chinese and Japanese, "crisis" is written with two symbols, the first meaning "danger," the second "opportunity." By facing and removing the danger of the climate crisis, we have the opportunity to gain the moral authority and vision to vastly increase our own capacity to solve other crises that have been too long ignored.

We must understand the connections between the climate crisis and the afflictions of poverty, hunger, HIV-Aids and other pandemics. As these problems are linked, so too must be their solutions. We must begin by making the common rescue of the global environment the central organizing principle of the world community.

Fifteen years ago, I made that case at the "Earth Summit" in Rio de Janeiro. Ten years ago, I presented it in Kyoto. This week, I will urge the delegates in Bali to adopt a bold mandate for a treaty that establishes a universal global cap on emissions and uses the market in emissions trading to efficiently allocate resources to the most effective opportunities for speedy reductions.

This treaty should be ratified and brought into effect everywhere in the world by the beginning of 2010 two years sooner than presently contemplated. The pace of our response must be accelerated to match the accelerating pace of the crisis itself.

Heads of state should meet early next year to review what was accomplished in Bali and take personal responsibility for addressing this crisis. It is not unreasonable to ask, given the gravity of our circumstances, that these heads of state meet every three months until the treaty is completed.

We also need a moratorium on the construction of any new generating facility that burns coal without the capacity to safely trap and store carbon dioxide.

And most important of all, we need to put a price on carbon -- with a CO2 tax that is then rebated back to the people, progressively, according to the laws of each nation, in ways that shift the burden of taxation from employment to pollution. This is by far the most effective and simplest way to accelerate solutions to this crisis.

The world needs an alliance especially of those nations that weigh heaviest in the scales where earth is in the balance. I salute Europe and Japan for the steps they've taken in recent years to meet the challenge, and the new government in Australia, which has made solving the climate crisis its first priority.

But the outcome will be decisively influenced by two nations that are now failing to do enough: the United States and China. While India is also growing fast in importance, it should be absolutely clear that it is the two largest CO2 emitters — most of all, my own country that will need to make the boldest moves, or stand accountable before history for their failure to act.

Both countries should stop using the other's behavior as an excuse for stalemate and instead develop an agenda for mutual survival in a shared global environment.

These are the last few years of decision, but they can be the first years of a bright and hopeful future if we do what we must. No one should believe a solution will be found without effort, without cost, without change. Let us acknowledge that if we wish to redeem squandered time and speak again with moral authority, then these are the hard truths:

The way ahead is difficult. The outer boundary of what we currently believe is feasible is still far short of what we actually must do. Moreover, between here and there, across the unknown, falls the shadow.

That is just another way of saying that we have to expand the boundaries of what is possible. In the words of the Spanish poet, Antonio Machado, "Pathwalker, there is no path. You must make the path as you walk."

We are standing at the most fateful fork in that path. So I want to end as I began, with a vision of two futures each a palpable possibility and with a prayer that we will see with vivid clarity the necessity of choosing between those two futures, and the urgency of making the right choice now.

The great Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen, wrote, "One of these days, the younger generation will come knocking at my door."

The future is knocking at our door right now. Make no mistake, the next generation will ask us one of two questions. Either they will ask: "What were you thinking; why didn't you act?"

Or they will ask instead: "How did you find the moral courage to rise and successfully resolve a crisis that so many said was impossible to solve?"

We have everything we need to get started, save perhaps political will, but political will is a renewable resource.

So let us renew it, and say together: "We have a purpose. We are many. For this purpose we will rise, and we will act."

The Limits of Human Needs

by Charles Siegel, Earth Island Institute

Until the industrial revolution, 200 years ago, the typical standard of living had changed little throughout history. Today, the United States and the other developed nations have affluent economies, with only a small fraction of their output devoted to subsistence. Environmentalists say that we are reaching the limits of growth due to ecological constraints. But the fact is that we are also reaching the limits of human needs.

Growth is no longer improving the average American's well-being. Since 1960, per capita US Gross Domestic Product and per capita personal consumption more than doubled after correcting for inflation, yet most Americans feel economically worse off today.

The Daly-Cobb Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (which corrects the Gross National Product by subtracting environmental costs and the extra spending on healthcare, education, commuting and urbanization that is needed to support growth) concluded that economic well-being in the US increased substantially during the 1950s and 1960s, but leveled off at the end of the 1970s and has been in decline since 1980.

Counterproductive Growth
Ivan Illich was among the first to talk about the "counterproductivity" of growth - a state in which additional growth brings diminishing benefits while causing increasing social and environmental costs.

Growth creates social and environmental costs, whether the products produced are useful or not. A powerplant causes the same environmental problems whether the energy powers something useful (street lighting) or something useless (electric toothbrushes).

As people become more prosperous, they move from consuming necessities to consuming conveniences to consuming luxuries. The US reached this final point when Americans began throwing away empty soda bottles and driving to work one-per-car.

During the last 40 years, US spending on healthcare soared - from 5.1 percent of the GDP in 1960 to about 14 percent of the GNP today - but life expectancy virtually stopped increasing. The reason that life expectancy almost stopped, despite unprecedented economic growth, is a perfect example of counterproductivity. With a rising standard of living, affluence became a major health threat, as Americans ate more meat and snack foods, became less active physically, breathed polluted air and drank chemically-tainted water.

During the early 20th century, the move to lower-density housing initially helped control the spread of infectious disease. By the 1960s, Americans moved to even-lower-density suburbs built around the automobile. These suburbs did not prove significantly better at reducing infection, but they did increase the number of automobile accidents, which became a major new cause of injury and death.

Today's most common ailments - heart disease, cancer, emphysema, obesity and hypertension - are the products of economic "progress."

Heart disease, the greatest cause of death in the US, increased by 2000 percent between 1930 and 1960, paralleling the growth of cigarette smoking, lack of exercise (at a time when walking almost disappeared as a form of transportation) and the increased consumption of processed foods and fatty meats.

The second greatest cause of death is cancer. Most scientists now agree that the National Cancer Program's main achievement has been to show that cancer is less a medical problem than an environmental problem, caused by carcinogens in tobacco, air, water and food.

In the 1970s, life expectancy began to increase but not because of a higher standard of living or more medical care. The main cause was a general trend toward physical fitness. Better diets cut blood cholesterol levels by 5 to 10 percent and smoking by middle-aged men dropped 25 percent. During the 1970s, the US also adopted stricter environmental standards.

Consumerism versus Education
By making people passive, the consumer economy undermines the character traits essential to learning. Teachers in suburban schools say that the children treat them as performers and expect them to make the classes interesting enough to hold their attention - the opposite of prior models where teachers demanded satisfactory performance from the students. These children expect to be educated by the schools, just as they are entertained by television and sated by prepared foods.

The consumer economy also works against families, by requiring two full-time wage-earners to maintain a decent standard of living. At the beginning of the 20th century, only the poorest of the poor could not afford to take the time to raise their own children.

In 1950, the typical family was supported by one parent working 40 hours per week. As women entered the work force, we could have had families where both parents worked 20 hours per week and had free time for their children and for productive activities in their homes and communities. Instead, we have families where both parents work full-time and have no time for their children.

The fact that parents are forced to rely on day care facilities is one of the worst possible indictments of economic growth.

Neighborhoods at the Limit
Growth has made our neighborhoods less livable. In the 19th century, cities were built as "walking cities." Because most people got around by foot, cities had to be very dense. People lived in three- to six-story apartment buildings and narrow row houses, often with shopping on the ground level facing narrow streets.

Beginning in the 1870s, horsecars on steel tracks, cable cars, and electric trollies let the middle class move to "streetcar suburbs" - the classic American neighborhoods of free-standing houses with sizable backyards, small front yards and front porches looking out on tree-lined streets. Houses were commonly built on one-tenth acre lots.

The most important form of transportation was still walking. Streetcars were used for commuting to work and for occasional trips to other parts of town, but everyone lived within walking distance of Main Street or of a neighborhood shopping street with stores, doctors' offices, and other services. People nodded to passersby while sitting on their porches and chatted with their neighbors at local shops.

After World War I, middle-class neighborhoods were made up of bungalows on one-sixth acre lots. Neighborhood stores were no longer close enough to walk to easily, so people drove a few blocks to buy their groceries.

After WWII, the federal government actively promoted suburbanization to stimulate economic growth and create jobs, and middle-class suburban neighborhoods were characterized by suburban homes on quarter-acre lots. The city was rebuilt around the freeway. To buy groceries, you had to drive on high-speed arterial streets.

Increased automobile use has only made neighborhoods noisier, more congested, and less safe. The sense of community disappeared as local shopping streets were replaced by anonymous regional shopping centers.

Jobs and the No Growth Economy
The automobile and suburbia have been mainstays of the economy for decades. Post-war planners knew the car-and-cottage complex was wasteful, but they considered this a good thing. In his book Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States Jean Gottmann, one of our most authoritative urban planners, said that we were right to rebuild our cities around the automobile, because "A certain kind of planned waste is healthful for an economy of abundance." He speculated that, in the future, when automobile use reached the saturation point, personal helicopters might become the new mainstay of economic growth.

For many decades, Americans believed that we needed growth purely to create more jobs. Economists call the relationship between growth and unemployment "Okun's law," which states that an extra percentage point of growth causes about a half percentage point drop in unemployment. Under Okun's law, it takes an annual growth rate of about 2.5 percent just to stop unemployment from rising. (Even if per capita income reached $1 million per year, Okun's Law would still prescribe economic growth to avoid unemployment.)

Early in the 20th century, economists argued that growth would end when people had all the goods and services they wanted. When basic needs were met, they reasoned, growth would end because people would choose to shorten their work hours rather than to consume more. In his famous essay, "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren," John Maynard Keynes observed that there had been no great change in the average person's standard of living until sustained economic growth began in modern Europe and America. As technology improved, Keynes predicted, "a point may soon be reached ... when these [economic] needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes." With scarcity no longer a problem, "man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem - how to occupy the leisure which science and compound interest have won for him."

The Shrinking Work-Week
Early in the 19th century, most people worked 12 hours a day (or more), six days a week. After a long campaign by unions, the traditional six-day week was shortened to five days by the 1930s.

In the 1930s, it was a truism among economists that greater affluence would bring shorter work hours. But during the Depression, economists began looking for ways to promote growth and reduce unemployment. There was a struggle within the Roosevelt Administration over whether to fight unemployment by reducing work hours or promoting growth.

Initially, Roosevelt supported the Black-Connery bill, which reduced the work-week to 30 hours to combat unemployment through work-sharing. Labor supported the bill, but business resisted fiercely. Business leaders argued that the US should fight unemployment by promoting what they called "the new gospel of consumption."

As a compromise, the Roosevelt administration backed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which reduced the work-week to 40 hours. Roosevelt also promised funding for public works projects to stimulate the economy and provide everyone with a 40-hour job.

In post-war America, that compromise became the conventional wisdom. Everyone believed that we should actively promote growth to provide more jobs. The average post-WWII work week leveled off at 40 hours. The long historical trend toward shorter work hours stopped dead from 1945 until the 1960s, during a period of rapid economic growth, rising wages and widespread affluence.

In her book, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, Juliet Schor points out that the number of hours the average American works has increased by more than 10 percent since 1969.

Individual Choice of Living Standard
It is reasonable to work enough to produce things that you actually want and then to stop. It is irrational to produce things you do not want just to create more work for yourself. But how can we end growth without creating unemployment? The answer is obvious. We can either consume more products or work fewer hours.

According to market theory, we should let each worker choose how many hours to work. If workers choose shorter hours, it is because they get more satisfaction from free time than they would get from more income. But in today's economy, most good jobs are full-time, and most part-time jobs offer low wages and no benefits.

In the Netherlands, where the government and labor unions actively encourage part-time work with comparable wages and benefits, the proportion of part-time workers has increased from 21 percent in 1983 to 36.5 percent in 1996. As a result, the Netherlands has one of the lowest unemployment rates in Europe.

If the US adopted similar policies, we could eventually have enough good part-time, flexible-hour jobs to let people decide how many hours they wished to work based on how much income they need. Once people could choose their own standard of living, they would begin to think more carefully about spending their money. Before buying a second car, people would consider that they could work a day less every week or two if they did not have to support that car.

If people took productivity gains in the form of fewer work hours rather than in the form of greater goods and services, there could be a no-growth economy without rising unemployment. People could work just enough hours to buy what they wanted.

Political Choice of Living Standard
To end growth, we must make the political decisions to reform healthcare, limit suburban sprawl, halt discrimination against part-time workers and end all forms of mandatory consumption.

The market fails to end growth because people continue to consume more if it has any personal benefit, regardless of social and environmental costs. People use jetskis, snowmobiles, off-road vehicles and small planes for recreation, even though the noise disturbs everyone else's recreation and causes resource depletion, pollution and habitat destruction.

During the past few decades, the environmental movement has fought against motorized recreation, throw-away containers, resorts in the wilderness, road construction, suburban development and other growth issues. This sort of mass political movement never existed in the past. These issues have become important now, because we have reached a point where many things that we consume bring only trivial benefits - smaller than their social and environmental costs.

After Economic Growth
Endless growth does not make sense in human terms, any more than it makes sense in ecological terms. Once growth ends, the economy will not be stagnant and unchanging: There will still be technological change as existing products and methods are continually replaced by new ones.

There is probably a limit to how much work-hours can decline. Some services can never be automated: We will always want people raising children, producing art and literature and making laws.

What will people do with their free time? Rather than working to earn more money to spend on healthcare, education and suburban housing, people will spend more time exercising to improve their health, more time raising their children, more time working in local governments or community groups to improve their neighborhoods.

The world economy has reached the point where we must decide how much is enough. Growth should end when economic needs are satisfied. Like a living thing, the economy should stop growing when it has matured.

If people consume less and work shorter hours as their wages rise, there is clearly less chance of ecological disruption. If people work shorter hours, the labor supply will dwindle, and wages will go up more quickly. However, businesses will try to use advertising and government policy to stimulate global consumer demand in order to maintain their profits. Business won this battle in the US in the 1930s, they will fight it even more fiercely in the next century when the world's future is at stake.

The most likely prediction for the future is that rising resource prices, global warming, and other ecological problems will prevent most of the world from emerging from poverty. There will be pockets of uneasy affluence in the US, Europe and parts of Asia, and there will be a series of crash programs to get the world economy back on track and deal with ecological catastrophes.

The more we do to limit wasteful consumption among the affluent, the better chance we have of creating a future where growth ends - not because of an ecological crisis, but because everyone has enough.

Three Possible Futures

The world population is projected to level off during the 21st century at about 11.6 billion. But before the rest of the world tries to imitate US-style consumerism, economic planners should consider whether we would be better off if growth ended at a lower income level.

Scenario 1: Endless Growth
Imagine that the entire world promotes development and stimulates demand to create more jobs, as the US did after WWII.

To absorb extra purchasing power after everyone has cars, governments and industry might promote the production of helicopters. At first, helicopters would be a luxury: People who owned them could live in the country and vacation in the unspoiled wilderness. Once they become more common, helicopters would become a necessity. Businesses would locate in Nevada, knowing they could hire employees who could commute from California by helicopter. Couples could take jobs hundreds of miles apart. New housing, shopping and workplaces would be built to accommodate helicopter commuting. The wildernesses would fill with campers in their recreational helicopters. To avoid accidents, the helicopters would be guided by centralized computer systems, reducing a once-exhilarating form of travel to just another boring commute.

Helicopters would only absorb excess purchasing power for a few decades. Once everyone had them, it would become necessary to invent some new expensive habit so growth could continue, even after per capita Gross World Product (GWP) is $15 million per year.

Meanwhile, there would be a constant race to develop technologies to provide more raw materials and more energy, to control new pollution threats, to restore the environment, and to manage new forms of social breakdown. The faster the growth rate, the more likely that we will lose this race.

Scenario 2: Growth Ends in Consumerism
Imagine that present US-style growth does not end until everyone has the income that more affluent Americans have today. Imagine that everyone owns a house in suburbia and drives at least two family cars (one of them a sport utility vehicle). This would require a GWP of about $600 trillion (in current dollars). At the 1970-1995 growth rate, the world will reach this level in 2103.

The world would be less livable in this scenario than in the last. About 5.2 billion acres would have to be suburbanized (compared with about 700 million acres for streetcar suburbs). In densely populated countries, low-density suburbs would eat up virtually all the open space. Any open space preserved as park land soon would be filled with jetskiers, snowmobilers and off-road vehicles. There would not be many quiet places left in the world.

Scenario 3: Growth Ends in Comfort
Imagine that people decide they have enough at the economic level of the US in 1960, before our economy was geared toward waste. Imagine that individuals chose additional free time rather than more income.

This is not an austere future. When America's per capita GDP reached this level in 1960, the nation was calling itself "the Affluent Society." If people rejected consumerism and shortened their work hours, the same per capita income would be enough to let everyone live well. Children could all get a good education. Everyone could have healthcare. Families could own their own homes. Most families would not need to own cars, though they could rent them for vacations and day trips. People would vacation at local beaches rather than at high-rise resorts on tropical islands.P To give everyone in the world basic middle-class comfort with the per capita GDP that Americans had in 1960 would require a Gross World Product of about $150 trillion ($13,000 in 1995 dollars times 11.6 billion people).

The US would need a period of negative economic growth to get per capita GDP back down to 1960's level - half what it is today. Most people could begin reducing their work hours and doing less shopping. Transportation policies and zoning laws would be changed to encourage car-free, pedestrian neighborhoods. Negative growth would have to be gradual: It would take many decades to re-invent car-free neighborhoods.

We would still have to solve many technical problems to make the world economy sustainable, but if there were a strong effort to design non-polluting manufacturing processes, to redesign products so they could be fully recycled, and to develop solar power and other renewable sources of energy, we could all afford to live comfortably without resource depletion or serious global warming.

Shall We Fail Ourselves?

[I dedicate this blog to two guys with whom I connect -- one on the iLand one offline. The iLander is Sunshine, with whom I disagree on a number of issues including his dislike of stray dogs. But I connect with the genuineness and essential gentleness that shines through his writings as well as his comments to othe people. I dedicate this particular post to him because he has inspired it this morning through his reasoning, which is representative of the thought-process that all of us have.

The offline person is Tejus Coulagi, the guy who named our tiny fledgeling group Children of the Earth, and gave it the catch-phrase, Protecting Our Mother. Tejus is characterised by his innocence and earnest good intentions, which shines through the name and catch-phrase, and indeed, much of what he says. He asked me to design this logo for our group-of-three; I hope he likes it.]

Something that Tejus said in the course of a discussion keeps playing in my head several times a day:

"Maybe this whole Global Warming thing that is happening is a blessing in disguise," he said with childlike sincerity, as we stood at the seaside at Nariman Point. "Fighting a war unites people by making them sink their differences. All the other wars that were fought to save the world were against 'other people' -- against the Nazis, communists and so on. But this time there is no external enemy; this time the enemy is within. We are ourselves both the bad guys and the good guys. And so maybe fighting this war will unite all humans in a way that no previous war was able to do."

At the time he said it, I was struck by the naivete of the statement. It seemed like such a childlike and simplistic vision of the world! Imagine all humankind being united forever in harmony! It was a laughable thought, I felt.

To a large extent, I continue to feel that way.

And yet I find myself hoping that we can nurture this childlike thought within us. I hope we can take this tender sapling-of-an-idea of home and water it, and against all odds, try to grow it into a tree.

Something that Sheila Das quoted comes to mind here: Yoga kshemam vahamiyam. "To whom I alone am the only refuge, it is my responsibility to grant everything needed (yoga), And to preserve everything granted (kshemam), That responsibility I take up on me(vahaami-aham)," Sheila explains.

I interpret it like this: The good Earth depends on me and I on her. Will I take the responsibility for her well-being, or will I shrug and say that I am not a big influential man like Al Gore or a Mahatma like Gandhi? Will I shrug and say that I'm anyway polluting a lot less than the typical American, and go on with my life?

At first sight, these thoughts seem like empty idealism; Sheila's thought seems like a nice thing to think about and feel a bit saintly about, but not like a good basis for action. In good faith and seriousness, we all advise each other to be practical and not 'an idealistic fool.' Because we are well-versed with the dangers of unrealistic behaviour based on false, idealistic notions of our place in the world.

It was in this spirit that Sunshine, Sheila and Lissome Lady advised me not to do anything foolish such as disposing off my car. Sunshine said: "ES, Dont get carried away by that spirit of self sacrifice. I did not mean to goad your conscience into making sacrifices... rather i would ask you: will you stop breathing because you emit Carbon Dioxide? or stop using electricity? Come on!!! The only way out is to make others aware of the dangers of global warming. Anyway, where are the roads in mumbai to drive? Take care and dont walk too much on those polluted roads .. you will ruin your health. We need you to spearhead this campaign. :-)))"

Sunshine went on to add: "I used the car only as an example but you need not take it to heart. Each one as an individual is like an ant when earth is taken as a whole. So selling your car will definitely not solve the issue of CO2 emmision."

My thoughts, hopes and fears

When Sunshine and LL ask me whether I have sold my car before I preach, I really do take their question to heart. No, I'm not about to sell it as a kneejerk reaction because that would deeply hurt my wife and children, but their question goes deep nonetheless.

Because in the context of Global Warming, our enemy is not someone else out there, it is our own selves. So we must introspect and direct our actions inwards... otherwise it will all be so much empty talk and no action. We will all keep pointing our fingers at one another.

Yes, I am part of this whole thing, this economism-consumerism syndrome. I hope to muster the vision to see it with clarity. And I hope to grow the inner strength and conviction needed to tear myself away from it.

As Sunshine points out, selling my car (or destroying it for that matter) won't solve the global problem of CO2 emissions, because I'm only one among 6.5 billion human beings.

BUT such steps may go some way towards cleansing myself internally of this pollution, this poisoning that is killing my planet. I am internally polluted by my dependence on a variety of external things for my daily life. I have all sorts of dependencies... I can't even start naming them clearly because they are so much an inseparable part of me!

So my little inward-directed acts (like bathing with cold water, giving up sugar and artificial sweeteners, consciously walking home from the railway station instead of taking a rickshaw) are aimed at recovering my own freedom from my habitual 'modern' behaviours. Of course they won't solve the CO2 problem!

Currently, I'm not on my way to solving the WORLD PROBLEM OF INACTION on the issue. I'm not anywhere near making a dent in that problem, and I have no illusions about my ability to do so.

I'm struggling with myself to solve the more immediate problem of MY OWN INDIFFERENCE & INACTION on this issue. If I can take care of that, then I can implement in my own little life that concept that Sheila Das quotes about: taking responsibility for someone who depends on you and you alone.

Because to me, my relationship with Planet Earth is personal, not general. Earth is not a PLACE where I live, it is a PERSON with whom I live and breathe and constantly interact. Maybe the Earth as I know it is fated to die, and I am indeed too tiny and insignificant to do anything about it with my foolish, ineffective idealism.

Well, I am fated to die too, so that is no big deal. I can go on with my tiny insignificant life, constantly seeking the path of least resistance.

Except for one tiny detail: I shall meet my Mother face to face, I shall rest my head upon her lap and sooner or later, I shall have to look into her eyes.

And if I have failed her, she will say with her eyes, "I trusted YOU. I'm not asking about all the billions of other people in this world, my child; but I thought I could trust YOU." And silently, she will brush away a tear.

No, this is not about what other people will do or not do to save the earth, this is about what I do or fail to do.

I don't pray for the world to be saved; the world is too big and too complex for insignificant me. I can only pray that I do not fail myself.

"There is enough on Earth to satisfy every man's need, but not enough to satisfy even one man's greed." We need to keep this thought at the centre-pinning the hub around which we build our lives.

We are historically in a period when wants and comforts are confused with needs. Thanks to many decades of relentless industrial development and advertising, our psychology and culture is one of Endless Consumption and Insatiability.

Please let us take perspective: Each modern middle-class individual enjoys the level of comfort that was not available even to kings and aristocrats less than one century earlier.

What do we take for granted today?

Instant atmosphere-modification

Instant personalized communication

Rapid personalized transportation

Endless variety of entertainment options

Endless variety of foods and beverages

Endless supply and variety of clothing & personal possessions

Elimination of need for manual labour and repetitive tasks

Ask whether any of this was available to a Mughal Sultan, or to the richest man alive in even early 20^th century. The answer is no. We are incredibly privileged to be alive today.

But we are not satisfied, and we want more. We crave for growth in the level of our personal gratification. This is not realistic in terms of the earth.

Why is this unrealistic?

Because privileges come at a huge cost that has been concealed from all of us. For billions of years, Planet Earth has taken carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and stored it away in the form of trees in forests, and buried vast reserves in the form of coal and oil. But ever since the industrial revolution, goods of various kinds have been increasingly produced through technologies involving combustion of these buried hydrocarbons.

Through massive deforestation and burning of hydrocarbons, we are undoing each year millions of years of geological processes! This is an accelerating process, in direct proportion to the growth of our economies, and growth in per-capita consumption.

Humankind has become a geological force that has released massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere (besides hundreds of other substances whose effects on the complex web of climatic causes and effects is as yet unknown.) This is unsustainable.

The immediate effect of our collective economic actions as consumers and producers of goods is that an estimated 53,000 species of various flora and fauna ( 27,000 in depleting tropical forests alone) are being driven to extinction every single year. This is a rate of extinction that is in the scale of the one that occurred at the time of the dinosaurs' extinction. Clearly, the complex fabric of life on the planet, of which humankind is only a small part, is coming apart.

This is a clear indication that our planet is rapidly becoming uninhabitable. If we continue to ignore this clear writing on the wall, we do not deserve to be called Homo Sapiens. We will just have proved that we were a mindless technologically and economically driven species called Homo Suicidal .

In order to reduce our collective burden on the environment, we must adopt a new and different way of living. As individuals and as families, you are urged to tone down your pattern of mindless consumption, and establish new patterns of behaviour. You are urged to rethink the way you live and the reasons for which you work. We must cease to be driven by the compulsive urge to consume more, earn more and produce more year after year.

India has hitherto been the land of Simple Living & High Thinking. Let us adopt that paradigm of living once again.

Deep down inside, we already know that there is far more satisfaction in this mantra than there is in the endless quest of ever-higher levels of luxury and personal wealth.

Let us lead the world by example.

(Note to fellow-ilanders: This is acknowledgedly a simplistic post. I want to keep it simple without getting into technicalities here. I'll deal with technical details elsewhere; indeed, I already have done so in the past.)

The Global Environment Outlook 4 (GEO4) report from United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) reckons that a much lower rate of economic growth -- the so-called Hindu rate of growth -- seems to be the only sustainable option.

Check it out!

-- Friendly Ghost

UNEP GEO4 report says...

Only Hindu way of life can save the earth
By Aditya Pradhan

The UNEP report GEO4 though does not condemn progress, states that technological advances should be used to curb further damage to the environment, be it ozone layer hole over the Antarctic region, chemical pollution that now is considered the biggest source for carcinogenic material or various other facets of environmental degradation.

The latest UN Environment Programme's (UNEP) report released last fortnight states unequivocally that man's development and progress are responsible for the environmental degradation and the fast approaching doom's day. The Global Environment Outlook 4 (GEO4) report from UNEP says that the factors for "environmental change include population growth, economic activity and scientific and technological discoveries. As these intensify, they exert new pressures on the environment, which have huge effects on human well-being".

This is probably the best testimony ever to be made by a world body on how progress, technological and otherwise, that we sing paeans to everyday causes the biggest damage to mother earth and will sooner than later, consume us all.

Years ago the Left had coined the term 'Hindu rate of growth' quite derisively to suggest that India in all its past glory of Hindu way of life registered zero growth rate, and for thousands of years had the same standard of life for its people.

For instance, a potter by virtue of his birth in that family would remain a potter just as all his ancestors down the line. This system of society was considered anti-progress, anti-technology and anti-modernism as the western lifestyle propagated furiously by the developed countries was the panacea for all ills. It had such an appeal for the western educated new breed of citizens that today technological progress is considered the only sign of success in the globalised world.

The UNEP report GEO4 though does not condemn progress, states that technological advances should be used to curb further damage to the environment, be it ozone layer hole over the Antarctic region, chemical pollution that now is considered the biggest source for carcinogenic material or various other facets of environmental degradation.

Further, the UNEP report says that the world has changed radically between 1987 and now, economically, socially and politically. "Population has increased by 34 per cent, trade is almost three times greater, and the average income per head has gone up by about 40 per cent". All this in just 20 years.

To understand the gravity of the situation one has to just go through the 1911 British census conducted in undivided India. The total population then was 31.16 crore. But undivided India included Baluchistan, Burma and Pakistan. After discounting for the people living in these regions in 1911, the population of India at that time would be more or less 30.57 crore (it is difficult to come to a definitive figure for India from 1911 census as places like Punjab, Bengal and several other states have been partitioned).

This essentially means that since time immemorial till 1911 the population of this country didn't go beyond 30.57 crore, simply because there was little growth, little technological advances and a way of life that was integrated to nature.

A stagnant population growth ensured that the number of births was equal to the number of deaths occurring in the villages. This in spite of the fact that Hindu undivided family was large—with a large number of children per married couple. But low or no growth in population also, most significantly, ensured that there were enough natural resources for people to live on, be it water, food, shelter, land to till and other requirements of life.

Between 1911 and 2000, within a span of 89 years India's population burgeoned to over 100-crore from 30.57 crore. We might celebrate the largest market status in the world and all its attendant benefits, but will the planet be able to sustain our position and growth rate is the frightening thought.

A few years ago, a report in a leading newsmagazine said that the human gene pool in India has been considered to be the best in the world by the scientific community. The most important reason for it was stated to be the weeding out of disease-causing/ defective genes from the gene pool during thousands of generations; because only the most fit human beings survived. The Hindu health system assiduously kept away from treating life-threatening diseases like coronary heart ailment, diabetes, hypertension, organ failure, etc. which was prevalent even then. This only helped the following generations to get better and stronger genetically.

It can be argued that before the advent of modern advancements in medical research the situation was the same all over the world, not just in India. But it is undeniable that the Hindu way of life even during its golden period emphasised on a system of life which was closest to nature. The Hindu system of life encompassed almost every aspect of life—education, health and hygiene, music, dance, cuisines, farming and other livelihood, architecture, transport and god, what have you. Almost every sentence of the GEO4 report reaffirms the sustainability and importance of the ancient system of life prevalent in this subcontinent for an unknown number of millennia.

On the other hand, the latest report released by the International Energy Association (IEA) to the world media on Diwali day does not pull the punches. Even President George Bush bluntly put it that the energy crisis is triggered by the growth rate in the two most populous countries in the world — India and China.

"How China and India respond to the rising threats to their energy security will also affect the rest of the world," said the Paris-based agency in its 2007 World Energy Outlook, which concentrated on the implications of energy developments in the two emerging economies for the rest of the world.

The irony of it all is pointed out by IEA Executive Director Nobuo Tanaka: "the rapid economic growth in China and India was a legitimate aspiration that would improve the quality of life of more than 2-billion people and that needed to be supported by the rest of the world.

"Indeed, most countries stand to benefit economically from China and India's economic development through international trade".

The world needs to act now to bring about a radical shift in investment in favour of cleaner, more efficient and more secure energy technologies, according to Mr Tanaka. But R&D in vehicle technology and fuel has often revealed that fuel efficient machines though save on precious petrol and gas, have higher CO2 emissions.

In the midst of the raging oil prices that is all set to cross $100 per barrel breathless analysts on foreign news channels are predicting "abrupt escalation" in oil prices before 2015. The fear is also that the increased demand and shorter oil supply will become more concentrated in a few West Asian countries.

Even as Indian newspapers report everyday about new gas finds the International Energy Association says that "although production capacity at new fields is expected to increase over the next five years, it is very uncertain whether it will be sufficient to compensate for the decline in output at existing fields and meet the projected increase in demand.

Unsustainable land use and climate change are driving land degradation. This could bring about the biggest economic devastation on mankind, what with water scarcity, soil erosion, nutrient depletion, salinity, desertification and disruption of biological cycles. The per capita availability of freshwater is declining globally, and contaminated water remains the greatest single environmental cause of human sickness and death, the report points out. "If present trends continue, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity by 2025, and two-thirds of the people in the world could be subject to water stress".

Global marine and fresh water catches showed large-scale decline because of persistent over-fishing. The report does not reveal how much has environmental changes led to drop in the seafood production. But the fact that over-fishing because of increased purchasing capacity of the people leading to bigger markets in fast developing economies should not be lost on global policy-makers.

"These unprecedented changes are due to human activities in an increasingly globalised, industrialised and inter-connected world, driven by expanding flow of goods, services, capital, people, technologies, information, ideas and labour, even affecting isolated populations". UNEP's desperation is evident when it says: concerns about global environment may have reached a tipping point of their own, with the growing realisation that for many problems the benefits of early action outweighs the costs.

It might be easy to mock at the Gandhian way of life of self-denial, living for one's needs rather than one's greed, wearing handloom clothing, abstinence of every kind, and strengthening the village as a self-sustaining unit, but the consequences of the alternative life-style as propagated by the West is driving us to the end of the world. The high growth of developed economies and industrialisation in the second half of last century itself had such a perilous effect on the fragile ecosystems the world over. Now the new emerging economies — India and China, could hurtle the planet to complete ruination. India and China could have also joined the developed world's club without having to create so much environmental damage beyond that tipping point only if the two countries had smaller population to bear the burden of development.

If India were to be a developed country by say 2025 then the scenario is not just frightening but also bleak for the survival of the planet. As said in our earlier reports in this magazine, if every family in India were to own a car (many middle-class families after the new-found real estate boom and stock market surge own more than a car each) the number of cars plying on the road would reach the figure of 250 million! The same estimation would extend to other vehicles. Can we develop the infrastructure to accommodate that many vehicles, and does the planet have that much natural resources to provide for the development of India and China to a first world status?

It might sound stupid to suggest that we need to bring down our growth and abjure the western luxuries of life, but the effect of our insatiable quest for more and more resources to fulfill a resplendent consumerism can only be devastating. As Shakespeare once said, "but yet the pity of it, Iago! Yes, the pity of it all"!

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