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The global heatwave and the ongoing flood situation in north India show that there is no conquering nature

In a world suffering from a pushback from nature, the sooner we realise our precarious situation, the better

A flooded road behind the Red Fort as the swollen Yamuna river inundates nearby areas, in New Delhi. (PTI Photo/Kamal Singh)

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Whenever I see pictures of Shimla or any of our tottering tacky hill stations, I am uneasily reminded of my walk-in closet. When I have to open the closet door, I brace myself. Stacked almost ceiling high, higgledy-piggledy one on top of another are decades worth of empty cardboard boxes, brown-paper bags, carry-on luggage and even a couple of perfectly good printers rendered obsolete due to the criminal unavailability of cartridges and miscellaneous items. I open the door and step back. Removing a single item means you have to deal with the consequences — an avalanche of stuff tumbling down at your feet.

Built up as precariously are our once sylvan hill stations. All it takes is a burst of heavy rain, or, god forbid, a tremor, and they will all get washed away or come tumbling down, sweeping away everything in their path. On land, in the air, in water, we’ve been fidgeting with nature for far too long and are now paying the price. We’ve mowed down our rainforests, hacked and mined into the sides of fragile mountains, whether to construct expressways or plunder them for building material and precious metals, erected multi-storied structures on shaky, glutinous ground, dammed rivers back-to-back and are thinking of idiotic ideas such as linking rivers. From the West, we’ve learned the concept of ‘conquering nature’, something indigenous people around the world have always known was a foolish, suicidal idea.

Mountaineers crow that they’ve “conquered” this peak or that, big game hunters stand proudly over the beasts they have needlessly slaughtered with high-powered rifles and we boast that we have used the secrets of the sun itself to make the ultimate weapon against which even nature has no answer. Sure, but use that and we’ll be dead too, so nobody is the winner, except maybe cockroaches. Maybe we should pray to be reborn as cockroaches in our next lives – it’s the best chance we have of surviving!

We toot that we have the best brains in the business, and yet, fervently, believe that rhino horn (made of the same substance as our hair, keratin) can do wonders for our love lives. Sure, diversity of ideas is great, but not idiocy! Body parts of hundreds of (especially rare) species of animals are ground up and used as “traditional” medicine with absolutely no scientific backing.

We want to harness nature, to tame and control her, but this is one entity that cannot and will not be tamed or controlled. Constrict her here and she’ll wreak havoc elsewhere. Heat her up and she’ll respond by melting icebergs the size of small countries and let them loose in the oceans. See how you like that at your beach resorts! Or else, she’ll set fire to vast forests (as is happening in Canada, as I write this), choking swanky cities thousands of miles away with toxic fumes. Other options in her arsenal include earthquakes, cyclones and tornadoes — what are we going to do against them?

Europe and the US are, at the moment, experiencing the kind of temperatures they only associated with hopeless, backward or developing countries in the tropics, where the only recipe for survival is a gin and tonic at midday. They’re getting their just desserts, you may think, for their past sins, where they pillaged those same regions for their rich natural and human resources to build their skyscraper economies. But now some of those same “victim” countries, alas, are doing the same thing to even poorer economies. Everyone makes mistakes, but the idea is to learn from them, not deliberately repeat them ad nauseam.

As we have seen, nature will from time to time take back what we have taken from her. At the moment, the Yamuna must be gloating as she flows beneath the iconic bridges behind the Red Fort in Delhi once again, for the first time since the Mughals (but, who were they?) built them. Ah, so good to be back in my old bed, she must think!

We dump billions of tons of toxic muck into our rivers, lakes, and oceans and then moan that the sturgeon and salmon are dying! Some say that we’ve pushed nature beyond her ‘tipping point’ and, like a runaway, rogue nuclear reaction, there will be no going back to how things once were.

Indigenous people living in forests, and those living off the land have long learned how to read her moods and swing with her punches. More importantly, it is foolish to try and punch her back. It is astonishing and frightening how swiftly she can bring us to our knees – despite all our scientific advances.