Yesterday was “Earth Day 2017”. It marked the 47th year the event has been commemorated since a huge oil spill in the US precipitated massive protests against their governmental complicity in environmental degradation. It was the birth of the “environmental movement”, which took as its mandate a commitment to prevent further damage to the planet which is the only home for sentient beings in the trillions of planets in the universe known at this time.
It was fitting that the event was launched in the West, which has inflicted, and continues to inflict, the most extensive environmental damage on the Earth. For millennia before their conquest of the world, other cultures had placed the need for co-existing with their environment at the centre of their cultural practices, but all of this was swept away with a world view that insisted “man has dominion over all he surveyed”.
When Columbus, or Pizarro, or Cortez, or Amerigo Vespucci encountered the continents in the “New World”, they found peoples who lived in harmony with nature. They reasoned that because the forests had not been cleared, the peoples could not therefore be “civilised”, giving Europe the “right” to assume sovereignty over these lands and lay waste to them in their divine mission of “mission civilesatrice ”. The same assessment was made and the same process was attempted in Africa and Asia with varying levels of “success”. A book recently launched here has described the heritage of our European forbears; and while these have been myriad, they were not all positive — such as their view of the relationship between man and the Earth.
In Guyana, as we commemorate “Earth Day”, the descendants of the Indigenous, African, Chinese and Indian peoples must be reminded of their ancient but now “modern” view of Mother Earth. The Hindus from India, for instance, worship the Earth as “Dharti Mata” or “Prithvi Mata” (literally “Mother Earth”) as a necessary and prefatory rite before each ceremony to worship God in whatever manifestation.
This remembrance of our own traditions will allow us to indigenise our commemoration and revalidate ourselves in the long process to emerge from the debilitating mental shackles placed over our minds during the colonial period and into the present. It is perhaps not coincidental that Guyana led the world in environmental concern through the sequestering of the Iwokrama Rainforests back in 1989, the Low Carbon Development Strategy in 2009, and the “Green State” this year. It would appear that the urge to save and revere Mother Earth survives in our collective cultural genes.
The theme for Earth Day 2017 is “Environmental and Climate Literacy”, but unfortunately, there appears to be a growing and studied effort to practise “environmental and climate illiteracy” in the United States, which became the most “developed” country in the world through practices that led to global environmental and climate degradation. It is just over a year since 196 countries signed the Paris Agreement and agreed to cut their carbon emissions in an effort to keep the increase of average global temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels.
But while US President Obama agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across the USA’s economy by 26% over the next decade – leaving it at 28% in 2025 when compared to 2005 levels, President Trump does not even accept that Climate Change is grounded in reality. He is presently engaged with his advisors to declare his administration’s position on Obama’s agreement, but has signalled he would rather spend US funds on colonising the solar system. If the US were to abandon its Paris commitments, it would be the nail in the coffin to head off the tipping point on uncontrolled global warming that would asphyxiate Mother Earth.
But this does not mean we must give up on our efforts to save her. It is our moral duty to do what we can to reduce carbon emissions. Maybe the Government will now go ahead with the Amaila Falls Hydro Project.
