Kishor Basyal

If the coronavirus pandemic has taught us anything, it is this: the human civilisation is far more fragile than we have known or believed. Technological prowess that came with the scientific knowledge has for centuries enabled mankind to achieve many a feat. With the mastery of knowledge about natural forces, we have not only learned to insulate ourselves from a litany of problems threatening our survival and longevity, but we have also been able to accustomed to the periodic shocks unleashed by the natural events. Consequently, we became capable of keeping hostile forces of nature, such as floods, sweltering heat, famine, pandemics, etc. at bay.
Then along with the growth of cities, human population has only grown nonstop. Great cities have always been emblems of great civilisations. But the onslaught of the pandemic has shaken that deeply-held belief. Immediately after the outbreak, untold number of city dwellers left the cities for suburbs or villages in a bid to protect themselves from the spreading pandemic, effectively making them ghost towns.
Recently, the city of New York reported losses in revenue of almost US$100 billion after it went into lockdown to rein in the virus’s transmission. All of a sudden, the city came to a grinding halt, with zero tourists and a few inhabitants. According to the city’s official date, some 66 million tourists visited the city in 2019. And the hundreds of businesses catering to tourists went out of business in a flash. The situation was and still is almost no different in London, another mega city, and so in other cities from Delhi to Mumbai to Kathmandu to Sydney to Melbourne to many others.

Problems of cities
The intrinsic problems with the cities have now come to surface. Since they are crowded places and densely populated, cities greatly facilitate the transmission of virus, which can easily and rapidly transmit from person to person in no time owing to the close proximity of the dwellings. To be sure, the signs of stress and strain in the civilisations have started becoming unmistakably visible. Against the backdrop of climate change that is inflicting damage on the world, the outbreak only changed things for the worse, leaving a lasting impact on every aspect of our lives. More than a one-and-a-half years into the pandemic now, virtually all places are yet to recover to the pre-pandemic days. Because a vast majority of people are yet to fully vaccinate, nobody knows for sure when the world will be able to emerge out of the limbo it’s stuck in.
To make things even worse, heat wave has now emerged as a new menace to the civilisations. The threat is so omnipresent that even the richest city in a rich country hasn’t been able to ward off its devastating consequences. Some two weeks ago, when the American state of Texas sweltered under the blanketing heat waves, the grid system that supplies electricity to the state became so overwhelmed because of rising electricity demand for air conditioners and refrigerators that some grid companies literally asked their customers to lower their electricity consumption in an effort to save electricity. The infrastructures we have put in place aren’t designed to work in such extreme climatic conditions. Nor is our ecosystem accustomed to function in such scorching heat.
Not just Texas, entire north-western US and several cities in Canada witnessed a record rise in temperature in June. The authorities linked 200 deaths to the heat wave in the US and 500 in Canada. Canadian scientists have said that as much as 1 billion marine animals perished in the heat wave. Meteorologists have long warned that the world is poised to witness more frequent heat waves, wildfires and extreme weather conditions. However, what they found shocking was that full five degrees Celsius rise in temperature breaking previous records by a wide margin was unprecedented, to say the least. Additionally, various other parts of the world, including Finland, reported warmest June temperature. Last month, Markus Rex, the scientist who lead the biggest-ever expedition team of 300 scientists from 20 countries to the Artic, presenting the finding warned that climate change had reached an irreversible tipping point. The situation is grimmer than many like to believe.
Amidst the ongoing pandemic and natural calamities, which have posed a threat to our survival, the countries have suffered steep price hike of food, and looming starvation. On July 8, the United Nation’s World Food Programme made public a report stating that food prices have soared by 40 per cent this year, putting some 270 million people at risk of starvation or inadequate food to function optimally.
Soil erosion
The ingenuity of human mind has been able to prevent famine despite droughts because of international trade. That means that surplus food produced in “breadbasket” regions of the US, Ukraine, Russia and China, among others, has reached the faraway places languishing in food insecurity by means of transportations. But climate change has put these “mega crops” producing regions under such stress that they are increasingly seeing less harvest, say the climate scientists. Compounding the problem, according to them, is the loss of top soil, the fertile part of soil where crops are grown. Our conventional farming practice, which include chemical-heavy farming techniques and deforestation, among others, pave the way for soil erosion, along with global warming, has greatly endangered top soil. It takes some 500 years to form a healthy top soil, but needs less than a century to degrade it. It is said that about a third of the world's soil has already been degraded.
“Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years, and if current rates of degradation continue all of the world's top soil could be gone within 60 years,” said Maria-Helena Semedo, a senior UN offcial at the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) at a 2014 forum marking World Soil Day. If that is the case, we are already in a precarious state, and are hanging by a thread. It is only on the foundation of a few centimeters of soil, our civilisational edifice has been erected. And that is eroding, year by year.
Challenges of human civilization abounds. So what is/are to be blamed for causing this life-and-death problem? Is it because of our impressive progress and the resulting complacency? Or is it because of our addiction to fossil fuels and consumerism? Or is it because of the impermanence inherent in all civilisations?
Only time will tell.

(Basyal is a journalist at The Rising Nepal)