Why the environment matters

Over two decades ago the Supreme Court directed the government to make the subject of the environment mandatory in colleges across the country. After much pushing and prodding, the University Grants Commission (UGC) came up with a broad list of subjects that would form this course. It was made compulsory for under-graduate students, but its importance was destroyed by awarding it just four course credits in the total course of the student.

The fact is that ours is the age of the environment. This is also the anthropocene — the age in which humans are dominant and have influenced even the climate to change. Globally, it is clear that climate change is happening and has made economies and people insecure. The weather will change, become more variable and extreme, and lead to increased threats of disasters like cyclones, sea storms, drought, and floods. Climate change has been created because of human-made emissions largely owing to the fuel we use to run our industries, homes, and economies. So, it is we who must now learn (or re-learn) the art and science of building futures, without destruction.

It is for this reason that we must learn that the environment matters. This is about our economies, our survival, and our well-being. The environment is not yesterday’s concern. It is not peripheral to the real business of governance or the real business of providing basic services to meet the needs of all. In fact, it is central to the business of growth. But it is about doing inclusive growth, because only then can it be sustainable. It is also about doing sustainable growth because only then can it be durable.

So teaching and learning about the environment is learning about everything in our lives. This is the connection we need to make. Environmental studies is the textbook of the world around us. It is also about the inter-connections that make life — all subjects from chemistry to geography to history come together. The best way to imbibe environmental studies is to learn from events that are happening around us.

There is another reason that environmental studies can never be a standard textbook, but instead must provide lessons on real matters and their complexity. There is no one solution to the problem of environmental management. What works for some situation may not work for another. Also even as we find that we have a solution, another problem will emerge and get us back to the drawing board. The way to learn the environment is to learn to ask questions — being open, curious, and, most importantly, humble enough to know that we do not know enough of environmental studies. 

Take the example of local air pollution control in cities of the rich world. Economic growth in the postwar period saw it struggling to contain its pollution in each of its cities: From London to Tokyo to New York. It responded to the growing environmentalism of its citizens by investing in new technology for vehicles and fuel. By the mid-1980s, the indicators of pollution, measured then by the amount of suspended air particulates, declared the cities to be clean. But by the early 1990s, the science of measurement had progressed. Scientists confirmed the problem was not particulates as a whole but those that were tiny and respirable, capable of penetrating the lungs and the circulatory system. The key cause of these tiny toxins, this respirable suspended particulate matter, was diesel fuel used in automobiles. So vehicle and fuel technology innovated. It reduced sulphur in diesel and found ways of trapping the particulates in vehicles. It believed new-generation technology had overcome the challenge.

But this is not the case. Now scientists are discovering that as emission-fuel technologies reduce the mass of particles, the size of the particles reduces and the number emitted goes up, not down. These particles are even smaller. Called nanoparticles (measured in the scale of a nanometer — one billionth of a metre), these particles are not only difficult to measure, but also — say scientists — could be even more deadly since they easily penetrate the human skin. Worse, even as technology has reduced particulates, the tradeoff has been to increase emissions of equally toxic oxides of nitrogen from these vehicles.

But the icing on the cake is a hard fact: The already rich world may have cleaned up its cities. But its emissions have put the entire world’s climatic system at risk and made millions, living at the margins of survival, even more vulnerable and poor because of climate change. In this way, the world remains behind the problem and, worse, it also externalises the problems of growth to others, those less fortunate and less able to deal with its excesses.

It is for this reason that there is no country that can say that it knows what “sustainable development” means. There is no one that has practised it so that it is perfect — makes for wellbeing in the present, secures the future, and does all this in costs that are affordable and so can meet the needs of all.

Teaching and learning about the environment is about learning how to push the envelope of ideas. Not dogma. Not rote.
 

The writer is at the Centre for Science and Environment

sunita@cseindia.org

Twitter: @sunitanar