To Earth, With Love

Capitalism has gifted us with a comfortable, modern lifestyle, replete with technological advancements. The same market forces have killed the ecosystems all around, rendering the planet gasping for respite from this onslaught. We are facing a tipping point. Punya Srivastava highlights the need to re-evaluate our lifestyles, and our concepts of growth and development

- Punya Srivastav

‘The earth is a living system just like us.’ This was no revelation to the primitive and indigenous people who gently walked this earth for tens and hundred thousands of years before civilised man appeared on the scene. The Red Indians, the Pygmies, the Yanomamo, the Eskimo, the Adivasi, and innumerable other indigenous cultures, all the way back to hunter-gatherers, derisively called primitive, always perceived every part of the earth as a single, living whole. The rivers, the clouds, the wind, the rain, the soil, and even the rocks and mountains were all limbs and organisms of one living entity—mother earth. And that is why they treated it with humility, reverence, and a sense of gratefulness. This, in turn, preserved the earth for so long in its awesome grandeur and beauty— the original and true Garden of Eden.

Then came along a totally different kind of culture called civilisation. This culture was diametrically opposite to all the others before it. With its peculiar worldview of ownership, civilisation, starting with agriculture (last 10,000 years) and then the building of the Modern Industrial Civilisation (last 150 years), has efficiently destroyed much of the living planet in an ecological blink of the eye. It treated the earth as a one-time, exploitable, and disposable source of goodies that is needed to run our financial system, meaning to make money grow.

The above excerpt is from former filmmaker Mansoor Khan’s revolutionary book, The Third Curve: The End of Growth as we know it. Published in the year 2013 after a lot of dedicated and thorough research that he started in 2001, the book talks about the faulty expectation of exponential growth on a planet with finite resources and the hard-hitting reality of our era—the ‘peak oil’.