It’s abundantly clear that we as a poor underdeveloped country can hardly do anything to stop or slow the process of devastating climate change triggered by carbon emissions produced by developed societies such as USA, Europe, Japan and China.

The prosperous societies are the worst polluters as they thrive on the practice of unlimited consumption causing limitless damage to our planet and what surrounds it. They produce more and consume more. They also export more compelling the people elsewhere to consume more. Increased consumption means greater environmental damage as it is inescapably connected with production which in turns implies more and more exploitation of natural and human resources with its ensuing effects. Thus the notion of prosperity becomes the notion of destruction that encompasses human society as well as the nature that sustains us all. The rich societies suffer from a grievous fallacy; they think they can avert the disaster befalling poor vulnerable societies or tackle the fallout. The fact is that we are all inexorably bound together on our finite planet that cannot expand in view of ever-increasing human needs, more superfluous than authentic, created by a particular socio-economic system based on individual and corporate greed. What’s going to happen eventually? Eventually, as Keynes used to say though in a different context, we are all going to be dead. Dead in the present context because of our desire to live more and more comfortably.

Now we can see before our very eyes the deluge of biblical proportions caused by extra-ordinary monsoon prompted by climate change. One third of the country is underwater. Around forty million people, mostly poor in the countryside, have lost little precious they had; homes, crops, livestock and stored grain. They also lost what connected them with cities and provided them with a semblance of service such as electricity, dispensaries, schools, roads. Thousands of human lives have been lost. The overall loss, human and material, is incalculable. Nothing unexpected happened in the process of mitigating the effects of disaster; no governmental agency responsible for rescue has been up to the task. Rehabilitation is a far cry. As to the international aid agencies, they, in the words of George Orwell, will do little more than making ‘pious noises’. Controlled by powerful nations complicit in the crimes against environment they will at best provide a temporary palliative care to the patient. They would never try to root out the disease. That would cut their profits. So instead of beseeching and begging all and sundry we must do at least two things to deal with the crisis; population planning and clearing of all natural drains.

Population planning means population control in the strictest sense. Pakistan isn’t a large country in terms of area. A small country with a big government cannot afford to have as a large population like ours that increases with every passing day. We are 220 million officially but actually we may be around 250 million. How can a country with scant natural resources, low literary rate and mostly unskilled workforce sustain itself? All the claims of having abundant natural resources are little more than populist rhetoric and political claptrap.

We hardly produce anything that can be exported. Things have come to such a pass that naturally fertile Punjab and Sindh, the granary of the subcontinent, can’t produce enough food to feed our burgeoning population. We have to import wheat and edible oil for our kitchens. Bad governance and mismanagement are bane of our life but increased population is simply a disaster in the making. The floods have in fact exposed it as a full-blown crisis which is proving hard to manage. Unfortunately, the paradox is that the poor in our class society who have no material means to raise large families feel compelled to produce more babies. The underlying socio-economic motive is rooted in the belief that more hands means bigger income as the child labour is not considered a social sin here. One is distressed to see crowds and crowds of children of all ages in tents and on the roads in flood-affected areas. Can one imagine their future? Not difficult if you want to. So take all on board, clergy and planners, to slow down the population growth rate if you want a slightly secure future for all of us. The rule should be: one who produces a child must be able to provide him/her with what is needed for normal child growth.

Coming to the second point, it’s very obvious that while we despite being a low carbon economy cannot stall the process of climate change, we at least can girdle ourselves for the crisis which, say the experts, is going to be a frequent occurrence in our life. Bad governance and mismanagement driven by corrupt practices have destroyed what the nature created to deal with the access water; seasonal waterways, nullahs, drains and riverbeds. Images from the north south and south of the country amply show that all the natural drains have been encroached upon. Hotels and restaurants in the enchanting Swat valley that have been washed away were built right in the middle of the streams. The powerful and the rich, and the helpless and the hapless, have played their role in blocking the natural drains all over the country. The former in cahoots with the corrupt state officials, found in an unusually large number, have encroached on the dry riverbeds to grab the large chunks of fertile land and latter having nowhere to go have gone to less fertile and negligible places to erect their shanties on the banks of streams and waterways. The result is that when we have rains especially heavy downpours such as this year’s, access water finds the natural outlets obstructed causing inundation all over the place. Our elders were right when that said: who could withstand the fury of waters. The situation in Sindh is particularly horrifying. Water refuses to recede as its natural outlets have been blocked. Some areas may take six to twelve month to get rid of stinking floodwater. One spectacular example of land grabbing is the bed of the dried-up river Hakra which has been turned into farmlands by the tyrannical landlords and Pirs (so-called spiritual healers) who ruthlessly rule the rural Sindh. So the solution is simple: stop begging and put your house in order first. Force people with might of law and power of persuasion to stop procreating and encroaching. Otherwise there would be no one to procreate and encroach on this fertile but benighted land. —