The lifestyle of the global middle class is destroying the Earth's environment, warned Indian historian Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty in an online address from Chicago on Monday. He was speaking at the National Academy of Performing Arts (NAPA) during the launch of the "Imagining Life" project, organised by the Climate Action Centre. The session also featured a discussion on the Urdu translation of his book The Climate of History in a Planetary Age.
Prof Chakrabarty said that until the start of the 21st century, climate change was not a central theme in major intellectual or academic debates, even though measures to counter it had already been initiated a decade earlier. Citing an example, he noted that a prominent Harvard professor had written an entire book on the 20th century without any mention of the climate crisis.
He recalled that by 2003, scientists began to realise that the destructive force of human technological progress was comparable to the asteroid strike that wiped out the dinosaurs. Reflecting on his own academic journey, he said that during his student days in India, the focus was entirely on industrial growth and every parent wanted their children to become engineers. He himself studied physics, later completed a master's degree in management sciences.
Highlighting population growth as a key driver of the crisis, the professor noted that the world's population increased from 1.5 billion in the early 20th century to six billion by 2000, and has now reached nearly eight billion. This surge, he said, pushed demand for food and resources, compelling reliance on industrial methods, which became the main cause of today's environmental crisis.
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