Why humanity's disconnection from nature is accelerating the climate crisis and biodiversity loss

Mint

2 days ago

My column this month isn't really about climate change, but the human attitudes that enable such a planetary breakdown. This is a lament about the natural world, and more particularly, how cut off modern humans are from nature. It is this alienation that is stopping us from taking meaningful action to stop the climate crisis, and save ourselves in the process.
Self-preservation should be a good reason to stop environmental destruction and the use of fossil fuels, right? After all, we should be able to appeal to human selfishness to ensure our survival? But even self-interest doesn't seem to be working, probably because we cannot think beyond our own lifetimes.
This profound blind spot can only be explained by the fact that we are completely disconnected from nature, from the natural world. In fact, a study published last week in the journal Earth, has shown how the depth of this disconnect can be gauged by the fact that nature words, like 'river", 'wildflower", 'meadow", are increasingly disappearing from the books we read, while urban-centric words are multiplying. The study uses computer models to show that between 1800 and 2020, the use of nature words has declined by 60%.
In one sense, this is not surprising, as global urbanization gathers pace. But the ideas of cities are also becoming increasingly narrow, with no space for natural environments, beyond perhaps highly landscaped parks. In some dystopian hell-hole cities, you don't even get that.
The study finds that this disappearance of nature words is happening due to a combination of factors. The two most important are the fact that cities are becoming ever more overbuilt, with little or no green spaces, and because parents are not passing on a sense of wonder and love for nature to children. The study calls this phenomenon an 'extinction of experience".
The author of the study, Professor Miles Richardson of the University of Derby, links this disconnectedness to a larger environmental crisis. Our love for nature, he says, '...is vitally important for our mental health as well. It unites people and nature's well-being. There's a need for transformational change if we're going to change society's relationship with nature."
But this relationship seems to be breaking apart. An important synthesis report published in March this year, The Global Human Impact On Biodiversity, found that human activity is responsible for global biodiversity loss in every possible habitat—from marine to terrestrial ones.
The report is a collation of 2,133 separate studies conducted around the world, covering 97,783 sites across all continents. Whether it is habitat loss, climate change, the rise in invasive species, pollution of natural environments or direct exploitation of resources, increasing human activity is the culprit.
In India, we pride ourselves about the fact that we still live close to nature. That the bond hasn't been broken just yet. That may be true because we are still a predominantly agrarian society, where a large part of the people still live in rural areas. But we are also one of the fastest urbanizing countries in the world, and soon will come the day when we experience nature purely as something to exploit, not protect.
In fact, this is already happening, even in smaller villages. The horrific landslide that wiped out Dharali village in Uttarakhand last week is a case in point. Only in a society that is losing all knowledge of natural systems, can an entire village with new constructions be laid out at the mouth of a narrow gorge of a glacier-fed river. Only in such a society, can hotels be built in the floodplains of rivers. As the effects of climate change multiply, and landslides and flash floods become common in the Himalaya, we are busy widening precarious mountain roads by cutting into fragile hillsides.
For me, it was a reminder of a similar catastrophe that happened in the Alaknanda Valley in February 2021. In that instance, downstream hydroelectric power projects amplified the destruction. In the case of Dharali, it was unregulated construction that turned the village into a death trap.
Or take the example of Mumbai's Aarey Forest, a vital green area which provides exactly the kind of services that people living in a city need: clean air, water and biodiversity. But far from heeding citizens' demands to save the forest, we see instead constant encroachment under the amorphous guise of 'development'.
A few years ago, my colleague Jahnabee Borah, who lives in Mumbai, wrote a long, beautiful story on 'solastalgia', a distress that human beings feel when their home environment is threatened or lost. In the story, she painstakingly connected the dots between the uprooting of natural areas in India's cities and a profound sense of loss that this causes to residents.
We can only hope that where such sorrow exists, so must care and love for nature. Forging bonds of love with our environments is more vital now than ever. Without the natural world, we are nothing, because we are biologically unequipped to transcend nature; it is sheer hubris to think otherwise. It is very easy to lose oneself in the brain rot of digital screens—the risk we run is that one day when the spell of the artificial breaks, we may look up to see that it's already too late.