Recently I read an editorial piece titled “Buriganga’s Silent Scream.” The article focused on the constant decline of the river due to the large amount of toxic chemicals dumped into it every day, and on the river’s body and soil, which soak them up until they cannot. It also pointed out that many significant initiatives have been taken, such as the relocation of tanneries from Hazaribagh to Savar, with slogans like “SAVE the Buriganga” still echoing in our ears.
However, none of the initiatives seem to be working to save the river; instead, it keeps deteriorating. Most people would say it is easy to guess the cause, and only a fool would not understand such easy math. They would say, “It is politics! People are corrupted, don’t you understand? People will feed their stomachs first, only then would use the leftovers of the leftovers for the cause,” or the most popular phrase that I have heard, “Is this your first time in Bangladesh?” I am not saying they are wrong; yes, there is political affiliation, greed, and corruption involved. My point, however, concerns our detachment from Mother Nature; the severing of the umbilical cord. Similarly, Aldo Leopold, considered the father of wildlife ecology and modern conservationist once stated in his The Land Ethic that man has “outgrown” land. Man has become so invested in themselves and being blinded by their anthropocentrism, they forget that they are simply another character in the play; another member of the biotic community. Leopold also stated that humans tend to care about the environment only when there is economic gain. To attain our profits, we enjoy the privileges granted by the land but do not fulfill the obligations we owe to it. The land that sustains us all, yet we forget to take care of it. Therefore, land is still “property.”
Ecofeminist and environmental activist Vandana Shiva did not shy away from calling men the rapists of the earth. Violating the environment, its ecology, its systems, its ethics until we are satisfied and then leaving it as if it only exists to serve us. Maria Mies, a Marxist feminist, reminded us in her Ecofeminism that we are “part of nature, not her masters and owners.” The world might be divided into many religions, castes, and classes, but it is the pseudo-religion called Capitalism that rules us all. We may love to remain in our comfortable bubble of our notion of advancement like genetic engineering, superfoods, and bringing back “Dire Wolves” but when will we realize that, with all these scientific advancements, we are constantly pulled deeper and deeper into the lair of Capitalism? Rob Nixon had talked about “superpower parochialism” in his Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor,where superpowers like the United States, with their right hands like Bretton Woods institutions, have given birth to Neocolonialism. Greenwashing the world; showing love for nature and the environment whilst dumping their garbage in third-world countries. Not long ago, in 2019, Malaysia declared, “Malaysia will not be a dumping ground to the world”, as reported by Al Jazeera. While Malaysia saw through their charade, many developing countries often fail to see it or are too vulnerable to acknowledge it. That is when these superpowers make their entrance, especially when these developing countries are facing the drawbacks of being their dumping ground; they come as guardian angels to “save” us, to give us what we “need” to trap us into their game. Instead of getting colonized directly by taking over our land, now we are indirectly colonized, our economy infected, our minds whitewashed, then greenwashed, thus weakening our backbone so that we may never aspire to dream high.
So, when will this delusion of “advancement” break, and will we realize we are not thriving, we are regressing? Our salivating nature over our own gain has deluded us into thinking “everything will be okay.” We have damaged the earth so much that we have been moved to a whole other epoch. Paul Crutzen, an atmospheric chemist and Nobel Prize winner, exclaimed in The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us, that “We are no longer in the Holocene but in the Anthropocene!” Congratulations, everyone! We have significantly altered the earth through our glorious technological advancements, and today the entire earth bears the imprint of human power. It is strange, how we have to create monsters like “Godzilla”; an apex, greater than humans; as a protector of the earth; a corrective force to remind us how nature is so much bigger than us, and if we do not care for it, it will not care for us either. It is strange, in this sense, that we feel the need to create a giant to scare us into thinking about the very place that holds us, nourishes us, and protects us.
On the topic of monsters, Rob Nixon discussed “slow violence” and the need for “spectacle.” We, humans, need a “show”, we need something major to happen, something that outsizes us, frightens us, something that violently moves us physically to acknowledge the profound aftermath of our selfish actions that we have been doing since birth. Slow violence is not like a volcanic eruption or an instant earthquake, but a gradual destruction that slowly builds over time, eventually collapsing on us like a thunderbolt. Why should we care? We are thrilled that scientists working day and night have successfully brought back a species that has been extinct for over 10,000 years, the Dire Wolves. I, being a Game of Thrones fan, was thrilled as well, but then it dawned on me, how necessary was this endeavour? How much money went into it? What is the purpose of the experiment? Digging deeper, I found from the article “The Return of the Dire Wolf” covered by TIME that Beth Shapiro, Colossal Biosciences company’s chief science officer, mentioned that since we are now an “evolutionary force”, we should “reverse” some of the terrible things that we did. Have we wondered what this new inclusion would do to our ecosystem that has already adapted to the absence of this species? How would it affect the other habitats sharing this planet with us? Instead of creating more, why can’t we fix what we already have? Why not try to bridge the chasm we have created, instead of widening it?
I have decided to agree with Aldo Leopold. We have outgrown land; we have outgrown our surroundings to the point that the whole earth is a laboratory for us to test our experiments. We take “initiatives” to repair this laboratory, only when it is literally our last option. Otherwise, we would have discarded it and shifted to Mars the moment it could not deliver the benefits we desired. We are rapists, violating the Earth’s ethics, trampling the rights of other species and plants, tampering with the whole ecosystem because now we feel “guilty”, thus destroying the possibility of a healthy future on this planet. Saving the environment is boring. Dire wolves are much more fun. Instead of creating Monsters for the screen, how about we fix the monster that resides in us?
- Sarah Siddiqui Deeyahttps://www.thepapyrus.org/author/sarah-siddiqui-deeya/
- Sarah Siddiqui Deeyahttps://www.thepapyrus.org/author/sarah-siddiqui-deeya/
