This is a wake up call for young parents. The coming decades would be the toughest for the children and their children. So it makes sense to prepare them to face a very disturbing future in a different world. Nature shows no mercy to anyone. We have entered an age called Anthropocene. Geologists do not recognise it officially - for them we are still in holocene.
Anthropocene begins from the dawn of the industrial age and encompasses the past 150 years when humans began to cause more impacts on the earth system then what ice ages or cometary collisions could do. If we believe Frank Fenner, who is perhaps the world’s oldest living virologist - Anthropocene may come to an end in about hundred years. People like doomsday theories, predictions, legends, novels, movies. After HIV created global havoc – science-fiction movies based on viral epidemics (eg ‘Outbreak’, ‘28 Days Later’) were made. Climate change spawned a whole genre of Hollywood movies (eg ‘The Day after Tomorrow’).
Global warming and climate change has also caused nervousness among the people. They don’t understand much of the science behind it. But people watch snapshots, videoclips of heat wave and cold wave victims, cloudbursts like in Mumbai, July 2005, retreating glaciers, melting ice caps, stranded polar bears, unseasonal flowering and fruiting of trees - and get concerned - the question in everyone’s mind is – where all this is going to lead, how it would end? Do we have better or worse days ahead?
We had triple eclipses last year. Out came books predicting massive catastrophes. Nothing happened. But when a responsible scientist, a microbiologist makes a statement then the world begins to take notice and discusses its significance. The dreaded small pox had tormented humankind for centuries. But Frank Fenner helped to eradicate it. It is the first animal virus in the history of humans to be totally destroyed from the earth.
Fenner, now 95-years-old, is an emeritus professor of microbiology at the Australian National University. Recently he has claimed that the human race will be unable to survive population explosion and unbridled consumption. "Humans will become extinct, perhaps within 100 years," Fenner is quoted as saying. "A lot of other animals will, too. As the population keeps growing to seven, eight or nine billion, there will be a lot more wars over food," he says. "The grandchildren of today’s generations will face a much more difficult world." Fenner said all this and more in an interview. His argument is based on "unbridled consumption", "population explosion", failure to impose drastic cut in emission of greenhouse gases, reverse the global warming process and universal lack of political will to take action.
The vagaries of monsoon this year is an example - when did we hear about successive cyclones in the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea? Oceanographers know that the seas are heating up. Dr Joaquim Goes, Goan oceanographer from Bigelow institute, USA had warned in his lecture at Goa University that – the Arabian Sea would heat up, lose oxygen and become acidic. That would doom the fisheries. He did not specify the time scale but he was not optimistic. What happens when you don’t see any fish in the sea? From where will the substitute food products would come?
Fenner was trying to synthesise different facts and figures - data on climate change, pollution, material consumption, energy demand, population growth, food availability and capacity of the earth’s system to maintain itself. Fenner said in the interview- "We’ll undergo the same fate as the people on Easter Island. Climate change is just at the very beginning. But we’re seeing remarkable changes in the weather already. The Aborigines showed that without science and the production of carbon dioxide and global warming, they could survive for 40,000 or 50,000 years. But the world can’t. The human species is likely to go the same way as many of the species that we’ve seen disappear."
Fenner believes that it is an irreversible situation. He thinks it’s too late. He has no faith in the various treaties and conventions which are trying to find out some solution to climate change. He feels that these attempts would slow down climate change a bit but would not curb population growth accompanied by unbridled consumption. Fenner had done a lot of work on development of anti-viral mutation among Australian rabbits. Basically he seems to be a neo Darwinist. He is not sure that humans have the intelligence and capacity to reverse the negative trends. That’s why he says "it is too late".
This is indeed a frightening thought. It is like postponing today’s death tomorrow. What is not easily recognised is Fenner’s rejection of the global resource economics model. It all boils down to failure of the market economy. Although it has been known that all the economic systems are subsystems of ecological system - markets are concerned with only demand-supply, problem-solution, import-export situations. Markets do not work for internalising the negative externalities which Fenner has been talking about. There is a vertical division between economists and ecologists about the Fennerian scenario.
Economists have optimists who believe that such a thing would not happen - better policies and technologies would take care of the problem. The pessimist economists suggest reorientation of the global economy from high carbon to low carbon to hydrogen and solar. The optimist ecologists believe that earth has seen much worse situations, humanity has survived several catastrophes and there would be trouble but no extinction of the human species. The pessimist ecologists are not so sure. They would have complete faith in the Fennerian scenario.
Hundred years is still a lot of time on the technological scale. Humans would have colonised the Moon and Mars by that time. May be asteroids would also have small human colonies. I belong to the cautiously optimist ecologists. I don’t believe in the Fennerian scenario because there are forces other than economic and ecological in the human society. It is the spiritual force - when humans come to their senses - there would be a global movement for an inner change-reducing consumption, having simple lifestyles, having low carbon footprints. If we teach our children to care for the planet then the Fennerian scenario would not happen. After a troubling transition period, our grandchildren would be well trained and well equipped to create an enlightened humanity which would build a new civilization which Fenner would never be able to dream about. What do the readers think?
