World Environment Day: Have you paid attention to the ground beneath our feet?

DNA India , Sunday, June 04, 2017
Correspondent : PRANAY LAL

There are several ways to see a landscape. I, for one, think that there is no better way to understand our natural world than to start with what lies beneath our feet: soils and going deeper, rocks from which soils are made. Soils influence the variety and abundance of grasses, shrubs and trees that grow on it, and this in turn determines the small and large creatures that will inhabit the ecosystem. Eminent British paleontologist Richard Fortey speaks of the profound effect of geology, thus: “Geology acts as a kind of collective unconscious for the world, a deep control beneath the oceans and continent”. Geological forces shape our landscapes and rocks and manipulate the size and expanse of geographic features like mountains, plains and deserts, and chart the course of rivers, and therefore the evolution and distribution of plant and animal life. Sadly we overlook the “deep control” of geology or the natural world in our lives.

So why is it that we don’t see things this way? There are no simple answers as to why there is a general apathy for not just plants and animals, but also for mountains, rivers, valleys, rocks and soils. Perhaps, it is because we are not taught to see things this way when we are children, and later when we super-specialise and become “experts” and almost take pride in excluding other disciplines. For instance, take the climate change debate. Most climate scientists typically view climate change as a linear input-output model. To put it very simply, they have traditionally held that it is important to reduce emissions and improve carbon capture through tree-planting and conservation. This was a good starting point but does not really serve the purpose of mitigating climate change comprehensively. Several disciplines of sciences along with the humanities and arts have been ignored from the wider discussions of climate change and conservation. Geology (and geologists), for example, can contribute significantly to our understanding of climate change, conservation and evolution, and yet they find little space in policy-making. Consider this: more than 20 per cent of the global carbon burial is orchestrated along the slopes of the Himalayas by the rivers that carry the silica-rich sediments and deposit them deep under the Bay of Bengal. This fact has barely received any attention in global or national debates but if it is taken into account, it will help determine how industrialisation, urbanisation, agriculture and development must take place along the banks of the Himalayan rivers.

Geological enlightenment

And how much attention do we pay to our soils? Petrologists (scientists who study soils) have found that fluctuating temperatures are expected to change microbial composition and increase the decomposition rates in soils, thereby releasing carbon stored in soils rapidly — potentially reducing the ability for soil ecosystems to store carbon. This will also lead to rapid decline in agricultural and forest productivity. Similarly an ocean dwelling phytoplankton Prochlorococcus (the most abundant photosynthetic cell on Earth was discovered only in 1988) along with its cousin Synechococcus produces more oxygen than all the forests combined. Soil microbes found in a variety of forest litter and grasslands are both — sink of carbon and exhalers of oxygen. Beetles, earthworms, pill bugs, millipedes that reside along with roots of plant and a network of fungi turn and till the soil and create opportunities to fix carbon into soil. Yet, very few efforts have been made to understand and incorporate these aspects into the climate change analysis.

Perhaps it is because of our hangover of the past 50 years where we have focused our conservation efforts on dominant species (like the tiger in India, the rhino in Java and condor in the Americas) and the need to protect against habitat destruction that we have forgotten to look at any creatures beyond them. Some efforts in protecting dominant species have been enormously successful but thousands of creatures continue to arrive at the brink of extinction every year. We, therefore, need to look beyond single species or tracts of forests alone to design effective, meaningful or sustainable efforts for conservation. Conservation and development efforts now need to look at not only what lies above but also what lies beneath our feet. To do this, we need what Fortey calls “geological enlightenment”.

Paradigm shift

Corporates and governments may congratulate each other for their respective contribution in developing technology to avert crises in the past. But from the perspective of the natural world, this is not true. The spread of industrialisation and intensive agriculture has changed the chemical composition of the air, acidified the oceans and the Earth is warming. The crises may have only have been delayed. Kenneth Boulding, President Kennedy's advisor on environment said something to this effect, “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a physically finite world is either mad or an economist.” How then must we change the paradigm to save our natural world?

There are no tested recipes but logically it needs to begin at the very beginning. Like geology, the “deep control” that acts on our collective conscience is the way we learn about the natural world as children. Plain textbook teaching is grossly inadequate and fails to interlink disciplines — geography with history or physics, chemistry, math with biology, or music with math. Schools and universities continue to train children of diverse abilities with a cookie-cutter curriculum. Over time, all children become blind conformists and less inquisitive, and blunt the talents they inherently had. Very few children escape from this treachery. As they grow up, they are forced to depend on more textbook and less on their intellectual curiosity to explore on their own. If changes are not made, our children may not be able to understand the fascinating phenomena of the natural world or will remain ignorant about the past. This callousness may push us far down the slope of complete annihilation.

To make learning fun, schools and colleges need to engage deeply with museums (and visitor centres, libraries, university repositories, etc.) and public places. But for that to happen, first the museums also need to improve.

Most museums — permanent and living ones — in the country are unwelcoming and boring. This needs to change. We need to make these places fun, interactive and entertaining. Once people, especially children, begin to love and appreciate nature, understanding and empathy will naturally follow. For this, we need to innovate. National parks, fields, ponds, wetlands, riverbanks, open spaces along with natural history museums should transform into spaces that people want to spend time in. Only then will the public value them and be concerned about local and global environmental degradation and global climate change. Why don't we have theme-based museums on natural history like museums on the Deccan, Himalaya, Ganga (without an overload of mythology), Indian Ocean or Gondwana? Graduate students from universities could link with museums and get mentored from experts. Should museums forsake this responsibility, they would ultimately become nothing more than repositories of dead things and cultures of the past. This inertia can be broken by infusing small but sustainable investments, but more importantly, people need to throng existing museums and make them accountable.

Adopt a new lens

Missing in all this are scientists and a culture for fostering rigorous and accessible science. The past decades has seen that scientists and intellectuals are increasingly not being heard. Policymakers have chosen to stay ignorant and make ill-informed policies that have little basis in science and proven scientific theories. If scientists receive pitiful research grants, it is partly because society and governments see little value in their research. Scientists will need to step up and reach out to people and communicate more effectively to inform people, policies and programmes. They need to do this not only for the sciences they serve, but also for the larger good of saving the natural world.

The natural world is not linear and its algorithms are ever-changing. We need new ways of seeing to understand how forces of nature shape our immediate environment and how they will determine our future. More importantly, we need to teach our children to see things through the lens of “deep history” to solve the complex problems that we will leave behind for them. So from this World Environment Day, reconnect with nature. You do not have to make an arduous journey to feel it; you could start from a plant or pebbles found on the street near you, a stand of trees, an edge of a pond or even your neighbourhood park. Tread softly. Try flipping a log or overturning a rock and lookout for the little guys who scramble for cover. Feel the cool soil from under the rock and log and smell the ferment of the litter, and you will see that here dwell myriad creatures, most of whom are unseen, unappreciated and many have remained unnamed. They too have interesting stories to tell. Once you look at nature from the bottom up, its grandness will stay with you for the rest of your life.

 
SOURCE : http://www.dnaindia.com/lifestyle/report-the-ground-beneath-our-feet-2460709
 


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