Creating history

Every single citizen of this world is creating history by their actions and deeds, or by their inaction and apathy. It is not merely conquerors and political giants that are remembered in the history books: the doings of all the peoples and societies that ever lived are recorded in the shape and profile of this earth.

My thoughts have been influenced in recent years by the extraordinary books of UCLA’s Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Third Chimpanzee, Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everyone for the Past 13,000 years and Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed. Recommended reading for all.

A reviewer of the last book states: “If Guns venerated the role that geographic chance played in societal development, Diamond’s Collapse restores human agency to the picture. Through a grab bag of case studies that range from the Mayan Empire to modern China, Diamond tries to distil a unified theory about why societies fail or succeed. He identifies five factors that contribute to collapse: climate change, hostile neighbours, trade partners (that is, alternative sources of essential goods), environmental problems and, finally, a society’s response to its environmental problems. The first four may or may not prove significant in each society’s demise, Diamond claims, but the fifth always does. The salient point, of course, is that a society’s response to environmental problems is completely within its control which is not always true of the other factors. In other words, as his subtitle puts it, a society can ‘choose to fail’.”

Confirmation of the potential apocalypse comes from other sources: WWF’s Living Planet Report 2010 frighteningly shows that for almost three decades, humanity has exceeded this earth’s ability to support an unsustainable, consumptive and wasteful lifestyle. In this respect, the worst offender country is the UAE! And, us Pakistanis, whose ecological footprint (consumption) is 200 per cent of our biocapacity (ecological capital), are inviting entrepreneurs from Dubai (with ecological footprint  900 per cent biocapacity) to show how to further over-exploit our natural resources, especially along the sea.

An internationally syndicated columnist, Gwynne Dyer, in his recent “Global civilization” op-ed piece is alarmist: “History is full of civilisations that collapsed, and often their fall was followed by a Dark Age. In the past, these Dark Ages were just regional events (Europe after the fall of Rome, Central America after the collapse of Mayan civilisation, China after the Mongol invasion), but now we are all in the same boat. If this civilisation crashes then we could end up in the longest and worst Dark Age ever...

“Unfortunately, the way we are living now is not sustainable. We have taken too much land out of the natural cycles in order to grow our own food on it. We are systematically destroying the world’s major fish populations through overfishing and pollution. We are also driving most of the larger land animals to extinction. This is a ‘six-planet’ civilisation: it would take six Earth-like planets to sustain the present human population in the high-energy, high-consumption style that is the hallmark of the current global civilisation. Not all of the seven billion have achieved that lifestyle yet, but they all want it and most of them are going to get it. And for the foreseeable future we will have only one planet, not six.”

Dyer predicts that our present methodologies (“a bit of conservation here and some more renewable energy there”) will end in a population collapse through global famine and probably civilisational collapse through wars, well before 2100.

In 2009 on BBC’s “Hardtalk”, James Lovelock, a British environmentalist, predicted that the population of the world in 2100 would be less than one billion: “one in seven will survive”.

Mankind’s insatiable appetite to consume more and more belies his intelligence. In this planet’s 4.5 billion year life, man is the first intelligent species to evolve but, unfortunately, not intelligent enough to survive in his present mode. The dinosaurs lived for 165 million years, but vanished about 65 million years ago. Man’s history, in some form or the other, is less than 6 million years.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 29^th, 2012.