When Nature strikes back, does it leave behind some harsh lessons? Yes, but who wants to listen??

Thousands of people stranded in Uttarakhand being guided to safety 

When I was in the college I remember watching a film about angry birds and animals. It was not a suspense/horror film nor an animation but depicted what can happen some day when angry birds hit back. After all, how long can the birds (and animals) take it lying down? How long will they continue to suffer and tolerate all the torture that mankind has been inflicting upon them with utmost ease?

I don't think we took it seriously.

Last week's disaster that struck the Himalayan region of Uttarakhand in India -- some call it the Himalayan 'tsunami' -- left thousands missing and several times over stranded when nature hit back in all its fury. Within minutes, several parts of Uttarakhand were left devastated. Till the time of writing this, the rescue operations were on, and reports said the death toll may be in multiple of thousands. Swathes of metalled roads had been washed away, massive landslides taking place all along, a large number of villages swept away from the face of the earth leaving behind almost 10-12 ft of accumulated silt. Reports talked of dogs and vultures feeding on the dead bodies. You have all read it. I don't want to re-write those horrific stories of what appears to be clearly a man-made disaster.

It is not that warnings had not been sounded earlier. But a political class -- along with a dominant section of Indian media -- were so swayed by the magic of economic growth that they went on hammering on the need to bring in more investments into the Himalayan region. Any move by saner voices to raise the issue of environmental consequences of lop-sided development were run down as obstacles to growth. Not only for Uttarakhand, they also heckled down a miniscule of TV panelists who would talk of balancing growth with environment. So when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh decided to override Ministry of Environment & Forests right to view environmental cost of financial investments being made in the country, he set up the National Investment Board. The TV channels had backed the wrong move saying that it was required for country's development. I am sure when a disaster strikes these projects, for which fast-track investment clearances are now being made, the same media will never question its own nefarious role.

Policy paralysis is another term that has been coined to explain the obstacles been thrown at industrial growth in the name of environment protection. Investment worth thousands of crores was struck because environmental clearance was not coming. In fact, many a time idiotic questions like why do we need environmental clearance were being also asked. The same media -- perhaps to overcome its own guilt -- is now shrieking and shouting asking why the politicians ignored the warnings on the environment front. The same experts, who kept quiet all these years, are being invited to explain how and why environment protection was ignored. But the bigger question is -- what were they doing when the Himalayas were being ruthlessly raped by the mining, timber and construction mafia?

It is all because not only the political leaders and the mafias, we, the people, too are at fault. We have always preferred to remain a mute spectator when ecological devastation is underway. Not many of us dare to step out, and do whatever he/she can do. While the local communities have been on the forefront of raising their voice, its the educated and the elite who try to run down the ecocide saying its a collateral damage and is inevitable. Even those in public limelight, more often than not, remain quiet hoping that their opposition would block their own chances of being on a State or Central committee. Sad but true of the ways the educated are part of the compromise. By keeping quiet, we only lend support to the mafias.

So when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh approved the Amritsar-Kolkata industrial corridor along the Grand Trunk Road, no questions were asked. earlier, all opposition to the New Delhi-Mumbai industrial corridor had been brushed aside. All environmental norms and the resulting socio-economic cost of a faulty development model were simply ignored. I am illustrating with these two examples to show that the probable damage that can happen is not confined to the Himalayas. It can also happen in these very industrial corridors. Does anyone care? When was the last time you saw Indian TV channels asking the right questions about the completely flawed and environmentally catastrophic industrial growth model that is being aggressively pushed?

Nature has its own ways. It can tolerate to an extent the havoc that is being played around. But when you stretch the extremes, it has its ways of striking back. Uttarakhand just witnessed the nature's backlash. But will we draw any lessons? I seriously doubt. After the relief is operations are over, the weather returning back to normal, and when another match fixing scandal breaks out, the great Himalayan tragedy will be all but forgotten. We will once again return back to our wayward ways of exploiting the hills, make our money and leave the poor hapless millions to face the fury of nature whenever it decides to strike back. Till then we can continue to bask and soak in the glory of rising GDP numbers.

For those who have forgotten the massive destruction Tsunami caused along the coast of South India, here is what I wrote at that time: Tsunami, mangroves and Market Economy (http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/opin/devsh_tsunami.html)  Although this essay was reproduced/printed very widely across the globe, I don't know whether we got the message right. With the passage of time, we will also forget the underlying message from the great Himalayan Tragedy. We have always refused to learn from our past mistakes.

Tsunami, mangroves and market economy: No lessons learnt

The terrible earthquake and the disastrous sweep of the tsunami has left a trail of suffering in Japan. As our hearts go out to the Japanese, and to the impacted people, every natural disaster should provide us an opportunity to access where we have gone wrong. In the midst of all the technological prowess that the world boasts of, nature still has its own ways of making us realise that we are not on the right track, we need to set our house in order, and we need to redesign our policies and approaches in a sustainable manner.

I am not sure whether we will learn any lessons from this mega-disaster. Earlier too, we have as a humanity risen to help our fellow brethren in distress, but once the so called rehabilitation is done it is business as usual. It happened when tsunami had struck the southern coastline of India a few years back on Dec 26, 2004. The terrible disaster did bring support from across the world. But somewhere the international community and the national leadership failed to draw any lessons and be prepared. The southern coastline of India remains as vulnerable to any impending threat of tsunami as it was.

Here is an article that I had written when tsunami had struck India. This article was published in numerous publications and web portals across the globe. I think this analysis remains valid even today. Please have a look at the article below, and I am sure you will find it so topical and relevant today.

Tsunami, mangroves and market economy

By Devinder Sharma
http://indiatogether.org/2005/jan/dsh-tsunami.htm

11 January 2005 - As the first news reports of the devastation caused by the tsunami killer waves began to pour in, a newsreader on Aaj Tak’s Headline Today television channel asked his correspondent reporting from the scene of destruction in Tamilnadu in south India : “Any idea about how much is the loss to business? Can you find that out because that would be more important for our business leaders?”

Little did the newscaster realise or even know that the tsunami disaster, which eventually turned out to be a catastrophe, was more or less the outcome of faulty business and economics. Since the 1980s, the Asian sea-coast region has been plundered by the large industrialised shrimp firms that brought environmentally-unfriendly aquaculture to its sea shores. Shrimp cultivation, rising to over 8 billion tonnes a year in the year 2000, had already played havoc with the fragile eco-systems. The 'rape-and-run' industry, as the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) once termed it, was largely funded by the World Bank. Nearly 72 per cent of the shrimp farming is confined to Asia.

Shrimp farms are abandoned every 2-5 years, leaving behind toxic waste and destroyed ecosystems. The whole cycle is then repeated in another pristine coastal area.

The expansion of shrimp farming was at the cost of tropical mangrove forests -- amongst the world’s most important ecosystems. Each acre of mangrove forest destroyed results in an estimated 676 pounds loss in marine harvest. Mangrove swamps have been nature’s protection for the coastal regions from the large waves, weathering the impact of cyclones, and serving as a nursery for three-fourth of the commercial fish species that spend part of their life cycle in the swamps. Mangroves in any case were one of the world's most threatened habitats but instead of replanting the mangrove swamps, faulty economic policies only hastened its disappearance.

Ecologists tell us that mangroves provide double protection – the first layer of red mangroves with their flexible branches and tangled roots hanging in the coastal waters absorb the first shock waves. The second layer of tall black mangroves than operates like a wall withstanding much of the sea’s fury. Mangroves in addition absorb more carbon dioxide per unit area than ocean phytoplankton, a critical factor in global warming.

Shrimp farming has continued its destructive spree, eating away more than half of the world's mangroves. Since the 1960's, for instance, aquaculture and industrial development in Thailand resulted in a loss of over 65,000 hectares of mangroves. In Indonesia, Java lost 70 per cent of its mangroves, Sulawesi 49 per cent and Sumatra 36 per cent. So much so that at the time the tsunami struck in all its fury, logging companies were busy axing mangroves in the Aceh province of Indonesia for exports to Malaysia and Singapore.

In India, mangrove cover has been reduced to less than a third of its original in the past three decades. Between 1963 and 1977, India destroyed nearly 50 per cent of its mangroves. Local communities were forcibly evicted to make way for the shrimp farms. In Andhra Pradesh, more than 50,000 people were forcibly removed and millions displaced throughout the country to make room for the aquaculture farms. Whatever remained of the mangroves was cut down by the hotel industry, virtually aided and abetted by the Ministry of Environment and Forests and the Ministry of Industries.

Five-star hotels, golf courses, industries, and mansions sprung up all along disregarding the concern being expressed by environmentalists. These two ministries worked overtime to dilute the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) norms thereby allowing the hotels to even take over the 500 meter buffer that was supposed to be maintained along the beach. In an era of market economy that was reflected through a misplaced Shining India slogan, bureaucrats are in league with the industrialists and big business interests. 

The tourism boom in the Asia-Pacific region coincided with the destructive fallout of the growth in shrimp cultivation. Over the last decade, tourist arrivals and receipts rose faster than any other region in the world, almost twice the rates of industrialized countries. Projections for the year 2010 indicate that the region will surpass the Americas to become the world's number two tourism region, with 229 million arrivals. What is being projected as an indicator of spectacular economic growth hides the enormous environmental costs that these countries have suffered and will have to undergo in future.

In the past two decades, the entire coastline along the Bay of Bengal, Arabian Sea, and Strait of Malacca in the Indian Ocean and all along the South Pacific Ocean has been a witness to massive investments in tourism and hotels. But Myanmar and Maldives suffered very less from the killing spree of the tsunami because the tourism industry had so far not spread its tentacles to the virgin mangroves and coral reefs surrounding the coastline. The large coral reef surrounding the islands of Maldives absorbed much of the tidal fury thereby restricting the human loss to a little over 100 dead. Coral reef absorbs the sea’s fury by breaking the waves.

The tragedy however is that more than 70 per cent of world’s coral reef has already been destroyed. The island chain of Surin off the west coast of Thailand similarly escaped heavy destruction. The ring of coral reef that surrounds the islands did receive some punching from the furious waves but remained firm and thereby helped break the lethal power of the tsunami. Mangroves also help to protect offshore coral reefs by filtering out the silt flowing seawards from the land. Tourism growth, whether in the name of eco-tourism or leisure tourism, decimated the mangroves and destroyed the coral reefs.

If only the mangroves were intact, the damage from tsunami would have been greatly minimized. It happened earlier in Bangladesh. In 1960, a tsunami wave hit the coast in an area where mangroves were intact. There was not a single human loss. These mangroves were subsequently cut down and replaced with shrimp farms. In 1991, thousands of people were killed when a tsunami of the same magnitude hit the same region. In Tamilnadu, in south India, Pichavaram and Muthupet with dense mangroves suffered low human casualties and less economic damage from the Dec.26 tsunami. Earlier, the famed mangroves of Bhiterkanika in Orissa (which also serve as the breeding ground for the olive-ridley turtles) had reduced the impact of the ‘super cyclone’ that had struck in Oct 1999, killing over 10,000 people and rendering millions homeless.

The epicenter of the Dec 26 killer tsunami was close to Simeuleu Island, in Indonesia. The death toll on this particular island was significantly low simply because the inhabitants had the traditional knowledge about tsunami that happened after a quake. In Nias Island, which is close to Simeuleu, mangroves had acted like a wall helping people from the destruction. The challenge for the developing countries is to learn from the time-tested methods that have been perfected by the local communities.

Look at the comparative advantage of protecting environment and thereby reducing the havoc from the growth-oriented market economy. Having grown tenfold in the last 15 years, shrimp farming is now a $9 billion industry. It is estimated that shrimp consumption in North America, Japan and Western Europe has increased by 300 per cent within the last ten years. But one massive wave of destruction caused by the Dec 26 tsunami in 11 Asian countries alone has surpassed the economic gain that the shrimp industry claims to have harvested by several times. With over 1,50,000 people dead, the staggering social and economic loss will take some time to be ascertained.

World governments have so far pledged US $ 4 billion in aid. This does not including the billions that are being spent by relief agencies. World Bank is in addition considering boosting the aid packet to US $ 1.5 billion. It has already given (Jan 10, 2005) $ 175 million, and bank President James Wolfensohn has been quoted as saying: “We can go up to even $ 1 billion to $ 1.5 billion depending on the needs…” In addition, the World Food Programme (WFP) plans to feed some 2 million survivors for the next six months. The feeding operation is likely to cost US $ 180 million. But if only successive presidents of the World Bank had refrained from aggressively promoted ecologically unsound but market friendly economic policies, a lot of human lives could have been saved.

But can Wolfensohn justify the financial backing doled out to the aquaculture and tourism sectors by drawing a balance sheet of the costs and benefits, including the social cost involved? After all, despite warning by ecologists and environmentalists, the World Bank turned a deaf ear. The magnitude of the disaster was only exacerbated by the neoliberal economic policies that pushed economic growth at the expanse of human life. It was the outcome of an insane economic system – led by the World Bank and the Internation Monetary Fund (IMF) – that believes in usurping environment, nature and human lives for the sake of the unsustainable economic growth for a few.

Take the shrimp farms, for instance. The life cycle of a shrimp farm is a maximum of two to five years. The ponds are then abandoned leaving behind toxic waste, destroyed ecosystems and displaced communities, annihilating livelihoods. The farms come up at the cost of natural ecosystems including mangroves. The whole cycle is then repeated in another pristine coastal area. The WWF and other environmental organisations have quoted one estimate -- economic losses due to the shrimp farms are approximately five times the potential earnings.

It was only after tsunami struck that the Kerala state government was quick to announce an Rs 340-million project aimed at insulating the coastline against tidal surges. Tourism is no better. Kerala in south India, marketed as “God’s own country”, destroyed the mangroves in a desperate bid to lure the tourists. It is only after tsunami struck that the state government was quick to announce an Rs 340-million project aimed at insulating the Kerala coastline against tidal surges. Other tourist destinations in Asia will now probably go for a rethinking.

The question therefore that needs to be asked is whether we need to extract a heavy human toll before we realize the follies of aping the market economy mantra blindly? How many more need to die and how many millions we want to go homeless before we realize the grave mistake? Who will hold governments and free market economists responsible for the human loss and suffering?