Looking out on the Pir Panjal

The ‘Asian Brown Cloud’ is estimated to be responsible for over two million deaths annually in India alone.

The dirty, yellowish-brown haze, hanging ominously over the snow-clad peaks of the Pir Panjal Mountain Range — where Azad Jammu Kashmir merges with Indian Kashmir — is a frightening part of the view eastwards from Murree and the Galiyat, as has become ‘normal’ at this time of year. Its invidious presence is ignored by those who have no understanding of what it is and causes worry for those who do. Yet both, knowingly and unknowingly, contribute to its menacing, now annual, appearance.

Scientifically referred to as the ‘Asian Brown Cloud’, this concentrated mass of pollution, largely comprised of airborne particles arising from the incomplete combustion of vehicle exhausts, factory emissions and cooking fires, drifts westward on winter monsoon currents crossing India. It picks up atmospheric poisons and density as it travels towards Pakistan where, aided and abetted by the highly illegal, totally uncontrolled seasonal burning of forests and rangelands, it makes its noxious influence known — in the form of chest and nasal complaints being of paramount concern — until brought down to earth, quite literally, by rain or snowfall. The toxic elements thus deposited are obviously detrimental to the environment as a whole, contaminating, as they do, water supplies, plant life and the very earth itself.

First observed, or at least, ‘first scientifically reported’, in 1999, it is not actually restricted to Asia as during the dry weather of late autumn through winter into early spring, this manmade phenomenon now manifests itself in many other parts of the world, too, and yet despite periodical avalanches of climate change information, few people appear to take this massive, highly visible atmospheric pollution seriously. That is, if they bother to think about it at all.

This killer cloud — it is estimated to be responsible for over two million deaths annually in India alone — intensifies each year as mankind goes about the daily grind of decimating, in the names of progress and ‘modernisation’, the planet on which they depend for their very survival. It must be said, this is done without any thought for the generations to follow as currently evolved selfishness neither knows nor understands any sustainable boundary.

This toxic cloud, now also known as ‘the Atmospheric Brown Cloud with focus on Asia’ is also responsible for increasing the intensity of cyclones in the Arabian Sea and for increasing the melting rate of the polar ice caps. Climatologists predict that as soon as 2030, the Arctic could be without any ice cover at all and this, obviously, has tremendous global ramifications including that of sea levels rising to swallow densely populated regions such as the Kolkata delta and Kolkata city itself.

Despite all of this, however, mankind is doing nothing concrete to at least reduce the intensity of the cloud, continuing willy-nilly to pump deadly amounts of pollution into the atmosphere on a never-ending, indeed increasing basis. Dependency on machines and supposedly high-technology is escalating out of control. This, compounded by rampant consumerism, has severely degraded the environment.

Lifestyle changes right across the board are imperative if this world and life forms inhabiting it are to survive.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 22^nd, 2011.