Environment and Humans
Society has become very environmentally conscious these days, especially in developed economies. Media daily reminds us of the damage humans are inflicting on nature and more importantly how climate change is adversely impacting humans. Of course, there are people who do not believe in climate change and I am not going into that argument. What I am arguing is if this climate change is really unprecedented and is it the first time that humans are responsible for such a big threat.
Let us examine the first point — if the change in the environment is new and if not then how humans have responded to it. The narrative we often here is that the environment has been changed beyond control by humans in the past century resulting in an unprecedented increase in the temperature and ‘global warming’. But is this conclusion because our reference is the temperature in the past century? Consider human in “Last Glacial Maximum”, which ended around 14,500 years ago. The temperature on average was 6 degrees cooler than today; most of Northern Europe and North America was under ice and the sea level was 125 meters below the current sea level. Interestingly because of this entire South East Asia and Indonesia was a single piece of land called Sundaland.
Now, there were humans living on the piece of land, which is currently under water. Let us time travel to human society in this era and we had media back then, we would have heard headlines — “Temperature of the earth is increasing and sea levels are rising. This is threatening our existence”. But did it threaten human existence? No, humans simply migrated to the better climates and in fact, climate change has been one of the main reasons for human migration over the millennia.
Let us consider another example. Sahara desert was an area covered by grass and bushes just over 5400 years ago. Again if we had media back then they would have blurted headlines, societies staying in the Sahara region are facing existential threat because of desertification! Again as the desert approached, people just moved on and resulted in the early Egyptian civilizations.
So in my opinion, climate change is nothing new and humans have to adapt to it. If certain cities or places are likely to go underground, people will just have to move to other places. If New York will be under water, some inland city might take its place. Maybe Canada will have warmer temperature and larger agricultural land and can sustain a higher population. Germany may have the Mediterranean Climate and start growing olives and grapes. My point is that climate change is not new and human societies have adapted to them. What is different now is the new world order with countries and economic structure, which makes costly and difficult for humans to migrate. So it is not a climate issue, it is the human social order issue.
Let us talk about the second point. Have humans been responsible for climate change and the negative impact on the environment? One of the false assumptions made by humans is that humans are separate from the environment and their impact on the surroundings is a recent phenomenon. However, humans- being an evolved species- have always had a disproportionate impact on the environment. Humans were responsible for the extinction of all large beasts in North America. Or as Charles Mann points out in his book 1493, humans were responsible for Little Ice Age in the 1500s, which decreased the temperatures around the world, especially Europe. And in some cases, the impact created in the past was much bigger than it is today as is the case of pollution caused by lead. Thus, in the past, humans have impacted the environment in irreversible ways and have been responsible for climate change in the past as well.
This leads to a question, is the proposed course for climate change for ‘saving the environment’ or ‘saving the humans’? After all, we have been altering the environment to suit our needs — right from farming to eradicating diseases can be termed as altering the environment as we are indeed modifying some species or the other. Just because now the changes have started impacting us negatively (though we have faced such negative impacts in the past as explained earlier), we are terming them as negative? Would we have complained if the climate had changed to suit human habitation? Assume a hypothetical climate change, induced by humans, where Northern Europe and Canada become warmer and temperature in the tropical countries drops to mid-20s C — both without a change in the sea level. Would we have fretted so much about human impact on the environment?
To summarize, humans have impacted their surrounding in a way to suit their needs and this has indeed resulted in climate change in the past. But there have been even bigger non-human induced climate changes in the past as well. Humans have coped up with them by adapting. Though the current climate changes could be unprecedented (by human standards), we have better knowledge and tools now to adapt and regulate the impact.
PS: This whole debate raises a question, perhaps a philosophical one — Aren’t we human part of the environment and hence we are bound to impact it? We are not some external agents destroying the earth, but we are residents of the earth who are trying to make it a better place for own existence. And our endeavour to regulate ‘climate change’ is part of that effort.
