Climate Change: A Solution

In June 2020, the Modi government launched an auction of 39 coal blocks in the country. Enormous areas of forests and farmlands were auctioned off to the corporate sector for mining. The livelihood of thousands of poor people was taken away from them by the proposed mines. Worse, the entire ecological system of the country would be ravaged.

“Respect for nature is an integral part of our culture and has been passed across generations,” Modi was exhorting the nation while his friend Adani was getting his bulldozers ready to clear forests and farmlands for mining. “Protection of environment comes naturally to us,” Modi said while his government was selling the environment wholesale to the corporate sector.

“Can greed ever be green?” The Guardian asked once while discussing ‘Capitalism v environment’. Capitalism is all about profit. Profit before all else: before people, before environment, before the nation itself. The capitalist economic system has been thriving on exploitation of nature and people. It has now become unsustainable. It has breached several ecological boundaries. It has brought in disastrous climate changes. It has led to the extinction of thousands of species of organisms.

The system has to change if we want to save the planet. There has to be a shift from the government serving corporations to a government that serves the people. Political power should not be moving into a Central Vista anymore. It has to move out to the people who actually work with the planet: the farmers and the fishers, the forest dwellers and the road builders. A lot of decisions have to be taken at the local levels.

Whenever power can reside at the local level, it should reside there. That’s what the principle of subsidiarity is all about. That principle demands that we respect the cultural diversity of the country which has its own local ways of protecting the planet. All our efforts to create a homogenous culture [One country, one culture, one religion, one language!] rebel against the very survival of the planet which thrives on diversity.

We desperately need a paradigm shift. Capitalism and its individualism have to give way to some cooperative vision that upholds harmonious relationships, particularly one between humans and the nature. We need an alternative system which, in the words of Fritjof Capra, “understands that life, from its beginning more than three billion years ago, did not take over the planet by combat but by networking.”

By networking, Capra means relationships. Sustainability has nothing to do with the Forbes list of billionaires. Those top rankers there are lonely people. Sustainability is about communities of organisms that live in harmony together. It is about cooperation, not competition. It is about mutual support, not aggression and conquest. It is about inclusiveness, not drawing more and more boundaries. And most of all, it is about integrity, not glib talks.