Yesterday's newspaper had a picture, an aerial shot of Agra-Jaipur highway, with a bold headline; 'There is not a single tree on this highway for about 10 kms'. When the highway got converted from two lane to four lane, about 1700 trees had to be cut. In principle, about 3400 trees needed to be planted, but the company which undertook highway construction merely did a formality and planted some trees over a small stretch of the road. The rest of the highway is barren.
You travel to any metro city in India these days, overladen concrete jungles brings back the memories of a prominent road in the city once laden with trees ..... 'Ajmer road was once beautiful, trees on both sides, Neem, Banyan, Gulmohar, Sheesham... ', MG Road had so many trees, Bangalore's claim of being a 'garden city' is lost now', 'Full grown trees from Camac street have been cut now, Kolkata as it is an overcrowded and polluted city', the conversations go on. We discuss about trees giving way to highways, metro train, buildings and so on. What we do not understand is that this simple change that we encounter around us leads to a horrifying global phenomenon - which is known as climate change.
Emission of green house gases causes global warming, which in turn brings climate change. Tree take away C02 and thus are most effective in saving us from global warming. There are other methods too but they are far more complex. At Paris climate agreement done two years ago, the world pledged to keep global warming well below 2 degrees centigrade hotter than pre-industrial times. In simple words we get back to the kind of climate we had some 300 years ago.
In any realistic scenario emissions cannot be cut fast enough to keep the stock of green house gases in the atmosphere low so as to curtail the rise in temperature. In fact, the development of India, China and Africa in the next 20 years is likely to increase the stock of these gases. In that case we have to find ways to suck CO2 out of the air. How do we do that? Carbon can be sucked directly from the air, using chemical filters and stored. Or minerals could be ground up and sowed over land or sea, natural weathering process will bind them to CO2, to form carbonate rocks. These were the fancy ideas that I read about in one of the recent issues of Economist. I am not sure whether I have understood them clearly or not, I am not sure whether it will work or not.
A simpler option is to plant more trees, because they are natural carbon suckers. If you find a tree being cut in your vicinity, be prepared for a more terrible summer the next year. If you can't prevent it, plant one in its place. Plant a tree when you buy a new car, a new AC, construct a new house, or board an aircraft to make your travel quicker and comfortable. As a human kind, we have to plant forests for our survival. Its a question of survival now. Plant or perish!
Comfortable life has a trade off with climate change. Next time you crib about extreme whether, just look around and see if you have a space where you can plant a tree. Its not that difficult a point to understand.
You travel to any metro city in India these days, overladen concrete jungles brings back the memories of a prominent road in the city once laden with trees ..... 'Ajmer road was once beautiful, trees on both sides, Neem, Banyan, Gulmohar, Sheesham... ', MG Road had so many trees, Bangalore's claim of being a 'garden city' is lost now', 'Full grown trees from Camac street have been cut now, Kolkata as it is an overcrowded and polluted city', the conversations go on. We discuss about trees giving way to highways, metro train, buildings and so on. What we do not understand is that this simple change that we encounter around us leads to a horrifying global phenomenon - which is known as climate change.
Emission of green house gases causes global warming, which in turn brings climate change. Tree take away C02 and thus are most effective in saving us from global warming. There are other methods too but they are far more complex. At Paris climate agreement done two years ago, the world pledged to keep global warming well below 2 degrees centigrade hotter than pre-industrial times. In simple words we get back to the kind of climate we had some 300 years ago.
In any realistic scenario emissions cannot be cut fast enough to keep the stock of green house gases in the atmosphere low so as to curtail the rise in temperature. In fact, the development of India, China and Africa in the next 20 years is likely to increase the stock of these gases. In that case we have to find ways to suck CO2 out of the air. How do we do that? Carbon can be sucked directly from the air, using chemical filters and stored. Or minerals could be ground up and sowed over land or sea, natural weathering process will bind them to CO2, to form carbonate rocks. These were the fancy ideas that I read about in one of the recent issues of Economist. I am not sure whether I have understood them clearly or not, I am not sure whether it will work or not.
A simpler option is to plant more trees, because they are natural carbon suckers. If you find a tree being cut in your vicinity, be prepared for a more terrible summer the next year. If you can't prevent it, plant one in its place. Plant a tree when you buy a new car, a new AC, construct a new house, or board an aircraft to make your travel quicker and comfortable. As a human kind, we have to plant forests for our survival. Its a question of survival now. Plant or perish!
Comfortable life has a trade off with climate change. Next time you crib about extreme whether, just look around and see if you have a space where you can plant a tree. Its not that difficult a point to understand.
I would like to plant one tree every year on my birthday in my vicinity henceforth.
ReplyDeleteThank You Dharmik !
ReplyDeleteAnother wonderful write-up from my dear Professor! This kind of planetary thinking reminds me of all those trees I planted in my medical school. Although I planted more than 50 trees during 2008, very few survived by 2014 when I finished my internship and left the school. Surprisingly on that year all those remaining trees started to blossom, which I perceived as a true farewell from the campus where I spent more than six years!
ReplyDeleteIndeed, trees are the best friends mankind can ever have. We forgot their role while chasing the avenues of so called "development". In the ear of deforestation and extreme pollution, we thrive for excellence in the physical world which is not sustainable at all. Several natural disasters have proven the futility of our approaches to build the world ruining its own course of being. As stated in this blog, each degree of increased temperature affects all the living species and the coming generations who contributed nothing for the disasters they will experience tomorrow. Is it what we did want long back when we started to create civilisations? Three oldest civilisations were born near rivers and all of them shared a common vision- to expand. On that time, few people realised the actual peace of life is being distorted. They made an informed decision to leave the cities and went back to jungles. Were they wrong to do so? I doubt. Mathematically, if we keep our achievements as numerator and what we have lost as denominator, the ratio of our existence would be much lesser than those who lived closer to the nature. The quality of living was much better than what we are enjoying(!) today. James Scott and many other historians have discussed the unwise choices we have made whereas physicists like Max Tegmark describes a horrible future in the era of artificial intelligence where we might have three zones in this world- one, where human being will be living; two, ta zone of machines and three, a mixed zone where human being will upscale their body parts to survive among the machines. I think this will be a moment which Don McLean would sing as "this will be the day that I die" resembling the death of humanity.
Till now we have hope and opportunities to recover the damages that wee have done. Rethinking the ways we live our modern life can change our actions to manipulate the collective natural resources that all the nations share together. Planting trees would be the beginning of the same which would need much more efforts to revitalise the natural systems of cleansing the planet. It is high time for all of us to change the directions of our destiny from sustainable development goals to sustainable living vision- which can secure all the dimensions of life in coming days!
Thank You Mahbub for such an elaborate comment. It is young people like you who have to take initiatives. Tegmark's three zones is an interesting anomaly. But I don't think that time will come. We will vanish before that.
ReplyDelete