STATE OF FEAR In the Techno-thriller, State of Fear, written by Michael Crichton, the eco-terrorist group, Environmental Liberation Front (ELF) wants to draw attention to its cause (global warming) by creating chaos, in the form of natural disasters throughout the world. An environmental lawyer, Peter Evans, has a millionaire client, George Morton, who contributes heavily to the National Environmental Resource Fund (NERF). Morton suspects his donations are being misspent, and they’re. The eco-terrorists are in unsuspicious ways murdering anyone who interferes with their agenda. Morton publicly withdraws his money from NERF, an action which gets him killed in a car accident. Mortons will directs Evans to search for the truth about the environmental terrorists, which Evans and several others do. The investigative group discovers that the so-called natural disasters are man-made acts of terrorism orchestrated by Nicholas Drake, the head of NERF. ELF creates a tsunami and consequently the havoc. Hypersonic cavitation generators, the high energy acoustic devices that produce a radially symmetric cavitation field, create bubbles in a substance like water that is boiled to form bubbles. The generators are designed to induce cavitation fields in a solid, in this case the earth. Morton, who faked his death in order to investigate ELF, appears in time to save Evans and the others. Evans and his team sabotage the tsunami and no one is killed except the ELF terrorists. Imagine a ‘conspiracy theory’ that accuses some agency of having caused, through secret planning and deliberate action, an extraordinarily large scale depression, several hundred miles across, to stagnate in the western region of the Indian subcontinent to result in heavy rains (44-52cms over a period of 4 day) in the Kashmir valley, surpassing the previous high of 33cms......600-1000% times more than the average rainfall that could spread over a month or so. Imagine the ‘fall out’ of a rainfall which is about a thousand times more than normal. The muddy waters rose rapidly and like an avalanche came through, bringing and breaking down houses, bridges and everything that they came across. Srinagar city turned into a huge lake. Six inches of fast water are enough to knock a person off his feet. He slides; it’s slippery, he won’t be able to get back up again. Muddy water has power. A few inches of mud takes a car, no problem. Lose traction sweeps it off the road. Trucks, busses let alone cars and SUVs all bobbed up and down like cork. Perhaps we didn’t realise that 500 volcanoes on our earth mean an eruption every two weeks; a million and half a year earthquakes, a moderate Richter 5 earthquake every six hours, a big earthquake every 10 days; tsunamis race across the Pacific Ocean every 3 months; our atmosphere violent as the land beneath, at any moment 1500 electrical storms across the planet mean eleven lightning bolts striking the ground each second and a tornado tears across the surface every 6 hours besides a giant cyclonic storm every four days, hundreds of miles in diameter, spins over the ocean and wreaks havoc on the land. As we can’t control the climate, the nasty little naked apes can do nothing except run and hide. The reality is that we run from the storm, we run from floods and earthquakes. When Jhelum and other rivers overflew in September, 2014, they took out the entire surroundings. The end result; painters that were driven to draw inspiration from the landscapes, flower beds, green verdure and frolicking streams; poets that were moved by the canopies of Chinar and poplar to write sonnets; composers that were lured into crafting symphonies; and religious leaders and philosophers that were enticed into contemplating the meaning of God by examining His handiwork, up close and in miniature, found like going through life without being able to smell a flower, swim a river, pluck the apple off a tree, or behold a mountain valley and/or to be less than fully alive. The pristine bounty, beauty and colours, without which we’re literally less human, stood ravaged. Natural ecosystem provides a wide range of benefits. It supplies fresh water, controls erosion, buffers human communities against storms and natural disasters, harbours insects that pollinate crops or attack crop pests, and takes CO2 out of the atmosphere. But as humans tend to play lead electric guitar in Nature’s symphony-orchestra, in doing so we forget we’re the only species in the vast web of life that no animal or plant in nature depends on for its survival. We need that web to survive----it doesn’t need us. But we sure need it ---and it thrives only if the whole system works in harmony. Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics. Everything it does is just the sum of these three things. It’s completely amoral. It doesn’t care about poetry or art or whether you’re religious. You can’t negotiate with Nature and you can’t spin it and you can’t evade its rules. All you can do is fit in as a species. And when a species doesn’t learn to fit within with the Nature, it gets kicked out. Mindlessly degrading the natural world the way we’ve been is no different than a bird degrading its own nest; a fox degrading its own den; a beaver degrading its own dam. As we assume that it’s just happening ’over there’, we let our inner ‘grasshopper’ to gorge on the savings and natural world that had been bequeathed to us. To each economic actor, the environment is a place where wastes can be disposed without cost. Pollution by any individual has no noticeable effect on his/her individual environment. But if the actions of all of the individual actors are aggregated every act of pollution does count. At a more trivial it’s, for example, common to find sumptuous luxury houses in a locality where the common areas, drains, roads, parks have been left unattended for generations. Each house owner is proud of his own immediate habitat, but is unwilling to incur responsibility or expense for the areas shared with others. The attitude in the lack of civic culture leaves public spaces dirty and neglected and civic amenities vandalized or not functioning. An acute consciousness of personal hygiene coexists with an astonishing disregard for public sanitation. Sewage released blindly into rivers and lakes, deforestation, and vandalizing flood basins are some of the reasons for the recent devastation in the Kashmir valley. ‘I’m-(being)-privately-smart’ attitude means that I jump a queue at red light; throw garbage on the road just next to my house and/or give damn to building rules. Rationally speaking, all this gets me ahead of others and makes life easier for me. As others are no less rational, intelligent and smart, they too start squealing for the same reason, and before we know it we’ve unruly traffic, filthy and flooded surroundings, collectively we’re all worse-off. And then we complain. We raise concern about misgovernance. Clearly we’re ‘publicly-dumb’. ‘What-difference-can-I-alone-make?’ and ‘but-everybody-else-is-doing-it’ attitudes, lead to the same behaviour. Typically in a ‘social dilemma’, selfishness seems to tell us that it’s entirely rational to take suicidal action. But once in a coon’s age when it boomerangs the consequences are simply unbelievable.
Posted on: Fri, 17 Oct 2014 13:08:17 +0000
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