To grasp just how difficult it is to build a sustainable world, just look at what is happening in Kerala. In 2018, the state witnessed its worst ever flood in history. In 2019, floods repeated. Over the last few years, there have been several landslides across the state. Last week’s landslide in Wayanad is the worst Kerala has witnessed.
In the world of policymaking, there is a strong belief that awareness will lead to appropriate action. So, the most prescribed solution to mitigate any human behaviour problem is an awareness campaign. Ever since the Wayanad tragedy, Malayalam TV channels and newspapers have been relentlessly reporting various facets of the tragedy.
There could not have been a bigger awareness campaign about the consequences of not protecting nature than the combined media coverage of the Wayanad tragedy. But the question is: What impact will this media blitzkrieg have on the behaviour of people, at least in Kerala?
Forgetting is an important and integral process of the human brain. Forgetting frees up the brain’s memory storage space. It allows even those who lose their near and dear ones to move on with life. Given this inherent brain process, it is inevitable that once media reports on the issue fizzle out, the Wayanad tragedy too will follow the inevitable forgetting curve.
Evolutionarily, humans are more focused on rewards in the present. The human brain is not really geared to think about the future, even less so about risks that lie ahead. Most humans tend to believe that their future will be better than the present. So, it is unlikely that even those living in Wayanad would be able to foresee a similar tragedy befalling them again.
In the aftermath of the Wayanad landslide, various interested parties are trying to ensure that this tragedy does not become a catalyst for changing the status quo. They want to keep building houses and resorts in the Western Ghats, as done and overdone in the past. They even want rock quarrying to continue unabated.
Meteorologist Edward Lorenz was among the first few to realize that climate prediction involves working out complex relationships between multiple factors. This led Lorenz to combine his knowledge of meteorology and mathematics to create Chaos Theory.
While doing an experiment that modelled a weather prediction, he entered an initial condition as 0.506 instead of 0.506127. The result was surprising. It led to a very different prediction.
From this, he deduced that a tiny change in initial conditions can have enormous long-term implications, and this gave rise to his famous cliché: the flap of a butterfly’s wings in the Amazon can cause a tornado in Texas.
In the aftermath of the Gadgil Committee report, based on a pioneering study of the complex ecological problems of the Western Ghats, and even after the recent Wayanad tragedy, concerted efforts were made by vested parties to disregard the complexities of climate change and reduce this problem to simple linear arguments.
An example of this trend is a video that has been released after the Wayanad tragedy. In the video clip, the narrator says, “In 1924, there wasn’t much cultivation in Munnar.
But disastrous floods happened in Munnar in 1924.” Then the narrator leaps to a conclusion: “If so, how can farmers be implicated for what happened in Wayanad?” The motive of this message is obvious.
Oversimplification of an extremely complex phenomenon is a strategy commonly adopted by vested interests to keep subject experts out of the discussion on that topic. No wonder, the Gadgil report on the precarious state of the Western Ghats was vehemently rejected by them.
By oversimplifying discussions on climate change and making the arguments linear, it is very easy to involve lay individuals in a public debate and convert the real issue into an emotional one.
The justification trotted out for such an approach is that climate change impacts everybody and so everyone must have a say. But then, just because a heart attack could happen to anyone, we don’t keep the cardiologist away from discussions of our cardiac health.
Post the Waynad tragedy, a debate has sprung up over who is responsible for the intense rains in the Western Ghats: Farmers and resort owners in Wayanad, or the city dwellers who contribute to global warming by using private vehicles and air-conditioners. The point of this blame assignment is to avoid taking any collective responsibility for the tragedy.
As the obfuscation and debates continue, there is a truth that no one can deny. The train has already left the station as far as protecting the ecology of states like Kerala is concerned. The consequences of climate change now stare at us. This is a time to take steps to protect those who would be affected by the next landslide waiting to happen in the fragile Western Ghats.
We often think that solving the problem of ecological sustainability is an easy job. Given the belief that humans are rational beings, all we need to do is organize a few conferences and launch a few awareness campaigns about the need for a sustainable world.
But events since the landslide in Wayanad show that even in the aftermath of a horrific occurrence, humans are not really willing to change their behaviour patterns. The forces that want to preserve the status quo are very strong. Making people believe that climate change and its consequences are real remains a challenge.
