'Nature's Edge' challenges complacency, alarmism about saving environment

The set of essays suggests that though the problem is global, humans must look for local experiences and solutions

A few decades ago a short film, whose title or origin I can no longer recollect, described how the earth would look to a distant observer from another planet. The film begins by zooming down to an aerial view of Los Angeles and then narrating that the earth is inhabited by brightly coloured creatures with round legs who travel down grey pathways and congregate in grey courtyards and feed themselves by putting a pipe into their mouth. At the end, the narrator from outer space says, “The only problem earthlings have is that they are infested by parasites.” And the film zooms on four people stepping out a car! Los Angeles is hardly typical of the planet's landscape.  But this bit of cinematic satire reflects the growing belief that the impact of humans and their artefacts on the environment has reached a point at which it is deep, profound and deleterious.

This debate on the scale of the human impact on the environment is the starting point for Nature’s Edge, edited by Gunnel Cederlöf and Mahesh Rangarajan. “Humans, animals, and plant species share living spaces — interact, come into conflict, or live in a relative harmony — and all are subjects of history,” say the editors who have put together a collection of 12 articles and an introductory overview. The overview and Kathleen Morrison’s opening piece provide a broad overview of the themes that come through the book as a whole.

One theme is the importance of a “longue-durée” history of human adaptations of and to local ecosystems.  Vasudha Pande’s long essay on the Central Himalayas, Anneli Ekblom’s explanation of human-cattle-landscape interactions in Mozambique, Sandra Swart’s impassioned piece on the Khoisan in the Kalahari, David Biggs’s exploration of warfare and environment in war-ravaged Vietnam and Alon Tal’s exposition of the restoration of biodiversity in Israel make a strong case for looking back not just over centuries but millennia.

The contributions of Michael Adams and Shankar Raman stress a related theme, that of looking beyond stereotypes of noble savages to the willingness of traditional communities to share space with other species, their acceptance of the risk and uncertainty this involves and their adaptability. 

Another theme is the lack of attention to ecosystem concerns in human interventions in river systems or in urban and industrial development expounded in Ravi Agarwal’s contribution on the Yamuna river, Harini Nagendra’s piece on wild beasts in Bengaluru and Sunil Amrith’s study on the South Asian coast.

In many ways, this book questions the proposal to label the period from the mid-eighteenth century, when the Industrial Revolution started in Europe, or even later from the end of the Second World War and the start of the Great Acceleration in global growth as The Anthropocene Age, or “The Age of Humans” in geological stratigraphy. 

When did the impact of the human species on nature becomes so different from that of other living species? When they started using tools? When a small group of hominids migrated out of Africa settled and multiplied in widely diverse environments? When they converted land for settled agriculture? When they built great cities, diverted water from natural courses, mined minerals on a grand scale, started generating huge quantities of waste? When they introduced exotic materials like plastics and GMOs into eco systems? 

These transitions took place at different times in different regions and no one date can mark a global break. The real reason for the proposal to label current times the Anthropocene Age is the growing evidence that human activities are pushing certain natural systems to limits beyond which survival of all humans and many other species would be threatened. But though the threat is global, the response must be geographically differentiated. 

The emphasis on the impact of humans on nature is often framed within an ethical concern about humans vis-a-vis other species. This misses out the fact that those humans whose activities and lifestyles are altering nature are far fewer in number than those whose activities and lifestyles are still shaped and determined by nature. The threat of climate change is one example. Moreover, to speak of humans shaping nature seems rather strange in countries where millions live with the threat of floods, droughts and cyclones not very different from when the current Meghalayan Age began 4,200 years ago with a destructive drought, whose effects lasted two centuries, and severely disrupted civilisations in Egypt, Greece, West Asia, the Indus Valley and the Yangtze River Valley. A more provincial view of global ecological challenges brings out this distributional dimension more clearly.

The book correctly argues against nostalgia for the pristine past with noble savages and unspoilt nature, against a faith in a techno-utopian future where we can engineer our way past all ecological problems and against a belief in the human supremacy over all living systems.  This is a global message; but what lies behind it are hundreds of local histories of humans and nature shaped by diversity of the experienced interaction between ecology, economics, ethics and politics.  This book challenges both complacency and alarmism as we approach the boundaries of the earth system's resilience. We may have to look for global solutions; but we must learn from local experiences, both recent and ancient, if we are not to fall over nature’s edge.

Nature’s Edge: The Global Present and Long-Term History

Author: Gunnel Cederlöf and Mahesh Rangarajan (Eds)

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Price: Rs 1,195

Pages: 331