Daily Times

Dear children, I know this letter does not find you in the best of your health and spirits affected by Corona. Since I’m your mother, it grieves me to see you so sick with the virus. I felt compelled to pick up the pen and write to you while you are home-ridden with am

ple time to pause, reflect and change after reading this letter long overdue.

First and foremost, my children, let me tell you I am very unwell, and my health has been deteriorating since the onslaught of your Industrial Revolution. Believe me or not, my body and soul are now fatally injured by your reckless and ceaseless assault on me. My dear kid, according to your own estimates, our planet is four-and-a-half billion years old. Suppose if you squeeze Earth’s age into 100 years. Humans have been around since the last two weeks or so. No more than five minutes ago, you learnt to undo my labour of millions of years by burning fossil fuels namely coal, oil and gas. Thus, the five minutes of humanity’s impact has been so catastrophic that your disastrous and monstrous impact is now wreaking irreparable havoc from North pole to the South pole and from the tallest mountains to the deepest oceanic abysses. You know what. The burning of fossil fuels is changing the global climate for worse threatening the very existence of life on earth. Today, my atmosphere has to bear the burden of 40 per cent more CO2 than the pre-industrial level. Consequently, the earth’s average surface temperature has soared by about 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the Industrial Revolution, driven by emissions from your means of transportation and factory chimneys. The runaway global warming is causing the weather to behave erratically and violently, glaciers to melt, seas to rise and engulf you, oceans to be acidic and kill its dwellers, corals to die, freshwater reservoirs to deplete, rivers to go dry, floods to be frequent and catastrophic, hurricanes to be more ferocious, heatwaves to scorch you, wildfires to run amok, acid rains to befall you more often and burn you, microbes to mutate and infect you like killer Corona, crops to fail and starve you, desserts to expand, thousands of species to go extinct and so forth. Your toxic industrial waste and general pollution is not only littering but also poisoning oceans, rivers and lakes turning into death zones for life on land and in water. Let us not miss out the space pollution caused by space debris generated by your satellites.

The pandemic has revealed the fragility of your global village more vulnerable to economic disruption due to interdependence

As far as extinction, around 20,000 species of all kinds and sizes face extinction due to habitat loss and poaching. Sadly, you continue to strip Rhinos of horns, elephants of tusks and pangolins of scales, sharks of fins and tigers of skin to embellish your exotic fancies. My jungles and forests are being replaced with the concrete urban jungles you call modern cities whose smog is suffocating you to death. Your insatiable hunger for the earth is resulting in the annual loss of around 1.5 billion trees with catastrophic impacts on climate, animals and bird’s habitat, rainfall patterns, water and soil quality. To be precise, Earth is experiencing the sixth mass extinction resulting from your devastating actions.

Second, the contagion has impeccably exposed your so-called advanced civilization that stands quarantined and besieged by a tiny germ. It has laid bare the hollowness of your much-trumpeted socio-economic, political, religious, and security institutions. Also, the pandemic has revealed the fragility of your global village more vulnerable to economic disruption due to interdependence. Your religions are more about divinity, ritualism and ceremonialism than much-needed humanity. Your society is infected with germs of gender, class, creed, caste and colour discriminations. Your politics is more about power than public service. Your education system is programmed to produce materially productive professionals rather than good human beings at peace with themselves and me. Your overflowing information and knowledge banks are not matched by a corresponding increase in your wisdom as illustrated by the unwise and unending ecological holocaust. Your economics is more about wealth generation than poverty and hunger alleviation as reflected by the 1.3 billion people afflicted with multidimensional poverty. Your economic model is churning out the super-rich and the ultra-poor. How selfish of you! I provide you with free and pristine water without any discrimination. Driven by your unquenchable thirst for money, you are bottling it up and selling to those who can afford, abandoning others to drink contaminated water. Your grain silos are growing fatter and taller but over 800 million humans are victim to hunger-amidst all plenty and abundance. Mind-bogglingly, the 26 richest individuals own as much wealth as the 3.8 billion people on the planet. Key to happiness remains as elusive as ever despite all your material development and modern comforts. Caused by the unfathomable and cancerous craving for more and more, the termite of depression and anxiety are devouring you from within. Your national security is more about the sovereignty of a chunk of territory than the sovereignty of people and human security from poverty, hunger and disease. Unfortunately, at a time when you badly need masks, ventilators, ambulances, hospitals, lockdown plans, doctors; you find yourself awash with modern muskets, nuclear weapons, armoured vehicles, bunkers, nuclear doctrines and soldiers. Your international politics is more about bilateral or multilateral rivalries, the pursuit of selfish interests and power projection than a collective response to your global challenges.

Third, you have caused much intellectual pollution by your unilateral self-proclamation as’ the ‘Best of the Beings’. The so-called ‘Crown of Creatures’ claim is self-congratulatory, misleading and arbitrary. The grand honorific stands challenged by a microscopic Coronavirus. It tempts you to think of yourself as the master of the planet and its content. You are clearly not. You are hopelessly dependent on mother nature for sustenance. You are just one of the millions of species out there. You are just a warp or a weft woven into the fabric of the vast web of life. You are just a small link in the long chain of beings. Pertinently, I must acknowledge what you are best at. You are remarkably unrivalled in greediness, avarice, violence, aggression, recklessness, wastefulness and harmfulness. Undeniably, you have evolved into the most ruthless and destructive predator on the planet. You can rape your own children, gas your millions of own kind to death, crush innocents under tanks, rain bombs and bullets, deny bread to amass guns, impoverish millions to enrich a few, cause artificial starvation, persecute minorities and suppress difference of opinion with an iron hand.

My children are old enough now. Your relentless and ruthless exploitation of natural resources is ecocide and a slow-motion act of collective suicide by your so-called sapiens. My resources are finite and cannot satiate your ever-growing hunger for the resources fueling your unsustainable modern lifestyle at the cost of other millions of species. I know, you toy with the grand plans for the colonization of Mars and other planets to escape doomsday scenario. However, Earth is not disposable. Not yet. Just zoom in on other planets in the solar system. They are barren and inhospitable rocks unable to support human existence. Here on Earth, I provide you a conducive environment that sustains, protects and nourishes you along with millions of other species.

Remember! probing and conquering your inflated ego, hubris and avarice are more important than space exploration and conquests. Let me put you in the cosmic perspective. If you see yourself from space, you will find yourself residing on a blue dot suspended in the infinity of the Universe. Let me warn you that my natural forces of wind, water, pathogens, are in the revengeful and menacing mood now. With unprecedented frequency and ferocity, they will strike you in the form of devastating hurricanes, wildfire, heatwaves, pandemics, epidemics, drought, famine and so forth. Please, end the ecocide. Please, control not only your population but also your unnatural wants. Let me remind you, food to eat, water to drink and air to breathe, are your only natural and indispensable needs. The rest are the ever-multiplying wants of your own making. Please do not cut off your umbilical link with your mother nature by cutting down my forests and hunting my wild animals out of existence. Please come up with a universal declaration of wildlife rights. Please, act and do something about reducing your carbon footprint by emission control victim to your petty politics and myopic geo-economic considerations. Please do not fall for consumerism, its fuels demand more and more resource extraction. Please scale back and adopt a sustainable and simple lifestyle. Go green in air, water and on land. Kindly, priorities human security by reducing defence budgets to beef up health spending critical to winning the evolutionary arms race against pathogens. Do not forget that you are complicit in the Great Crime against wildlife when you order shark fin soup or fancy ivory jewellery, trinket, animal leather or sex-boosting medicines next time. Such exotic products come over the dead carcass of an elephant, a pangolin, a rhino, a shark, a snake or a tiger. The meat of a monkey, a snake or other animal or bird is the destruction of biodiversity rather than a delicacy.

Next time, you use the soya-based product, spare a thought for deforestation and the

consequent habitat loss for millions of species. It is leading you to silent springs and searing summers. I doubt you are being a homo sapiens-a wise creature. It is simply unthinkable if any wise being can be so unwise, reckless and suicidal by destroying its own environmental cocoon. Mark my word, Corona is the shape of the future. It ominously suggests what lies in the store if you failed to make your course correction. So, Please, act and act faster to save yourself from going the way of the dodo in the long run. To put it differently, humanity has to be saved from humans. Last but not the least, on the behalf of more than 2 billion known and undiscovered species, I wish you peace, happiness and quick recovery from Corona. Yours sincerely, Mother Nature.

The writer is a columnist and PhD scholar pursuing his doctoral research on human security and SDGs in Pakistan Twitter: @MunawarMahar