In the month of March 2011, a massive earthquake rocked Japan. This was followed by tsunami which left reactors in a nuclear power plant damaged. Thousands of people lost their life and the damage to property runs into billions of dollars.
Reports of radioactivity spreading into the environment are causing concern world over. Japan has asked importers not to impose any “unfair” import bans on its goods as a result of the nuclear accident that resulted from an earthquake and tsunami in the country on 11th March. Japan has tremendous capability of overcoming disasters. It is the only country in the world to have faced nuclear weapons attack.
The earthquake and the tsunami bring home one point very forcefully and that is the nature always has an upper hand. At times one feels that human beings consider themselves above the nature and overestimate their capabilities to impact the environment as compared to the nature and the process of evolution. I say this not only in connection with the capability of avoiding or overcoming the natural disasters but also in the context of the campaigns like ‘Save the Nature’ or `Save the Earth’.
Human beings are but only a small segment or part of the nature. We are not distinct or separate from the Nature. Can human beings really save the Nature, halt or even slow down the process of evolution. We talk about maintaining balance in ecosystem. But has there ever been balance in nature? Both in the Nature and market driven economy, there is never a state of equilibrium. It is only because there is imbalance that there is constant change.
The law of the Nature is `survival of the fittest’. Can we then really go against that law and stop the extinction of species that probably are destined to get extinct? When human population is rising is it not but natural that humans will look towards new places for settlement including the forests? At every stage of human development, humans had to ‘encroach’ on the territories of other species. This is also true with other living beings. Can we turn the clock back? Can we even think of farming without using chemical fertilisers? Today we can feed population of over 1 billion largely due to improved yield from the land achieved using fertilisers. Can the developed economies advice the developing economies to halt industrial progress, stop building cement plants because it causes climate change?
Possibly one way to look at the things is human beings are also part of the nature, what they do is due to their survival instinct that exists in all species. Yes, it may cause changes in the environment, climate; may have an impact on other species. But all that is part of the process of evolution. We have always heard the stories of there being deluge on the earth and that also is part of the process of evolution that earth goes through over a period of billions of years.
This thought may not gel with many. But it is a counterpoint that one needs to consider so we don’t go overboard with the campaigns of the environmentalist.
India is celebrating having won the semi-final of the World Cup against Pakistan. On the backdrop of the World Cup matches the Prime Ministers of Pakistan and India are meeting. Let us hope something positive comes out of the Indian initiative. It is in the mutual interest of Pakistan and India that both countries share good relations, there is peace between them, trade, cultural exchange flourishes between these two countries which not too long ago were one country.
Maybe one day in this part of the world also we will have a structure like European Union and it will be a force to reckon with in the global economy as well as on the political canvas of the world.
Sanjeev Pandit
Editor
