Climate Change: A World without Humans

A Story by Shubham

Pondering over the slogan "Save the Planet"

It’s the 26th of April 1986, here in Pripyat, a town close to the Chernobyl Nuclear Reactor in Russia, and the time is 1:17 AM. There’s still 6 minutes before a catastrophe. Now 5…4…3…2…1…and the Chernobyl Nuclear Reactor has just undergone a meltdown, spewing radioactive waste in all directions, its area of damage spanning a huge number of offices and residences. People are hurrying to vacate their homes and schools and leave this once peaceful town that has now been rendered uninhabitable by the continuous shower of radioactive waste for 10 long days.

Coming back to the present, if you were to visit Pripyat today, you would find that even though the town still seems to have a long road of recovery ahead of it, the place is not as “uninhabitable” as it was originally thought to be. For a human, living here would be no less than a nightmare but, for other species like the native wolves and the fauna of the area, it’s an amazing opportunity. Now that the humans are gone, the forest is reclaiming all the land and tall trees have grown in areas which didn’t have any greenery prior to the disaster. With no one there to destroy their home, the forest, animals are flourishing in this area, rendered “habitable” for them by a nuclear meltdown. This irony showcases a rather disturbing fact about ourselves, the ever growing human race. If nature, which includes all the flora and fauna of an area, were to be personified and given a choice between two evils: a townful of people or a Nuclear Meltdown, the nuclear meltdown is hands down the lesser of the two.

How did it all come to this? A simple Wikipedia search for “Human Impact on the environment” is enough to send shivers down the spine of any individual who is even remotely concerned about the environment. It seems that the smartest species that has ever evolved in the 4.5-billion year-old history of Earth, does not seem to ever have done anything that helps nature. The first few lines of the aforementioned Wikipedia article aid this point by listing all the effects that we have had on this beautiful blue-green ball revolving around the sun. The list includes global warming, environmental degradation (such as ocean acidification), mass extinction and biodiversity loss, ecological crisis, and ecological collapse. Essentially, there seems to be no difference between the phrases: “Effect of humans on the environment” and “Negative effect of humans on the environment”.

The truth is, the Earth can do very well without us but we can’t, without her. In fact, the phrase “Save the Planet” is a little too arrogant for a species such as ours. As George Carlin said, “Did you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We’ve been here, what? A hundred thousand? Maybe two hundred thousand, and we’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over two hundred years. Two hundred years versus four and a half billion and we have the conceit to think that somehow we’re a threat? That somehow we’re gonna put in jeopardy, this beautiful blue green ball that’s just a-floatin’ around the sun?” The planet is not in any kind of danger, we are. Humans are the only species on this planet which possess the ability to destroy themselves. We could very well go extinct of our own actions. The planet, on the other hand, is a self correcting system. Once we go extinct, the planet will heal and repair itself, slowly but surely, over the course of thousands of years. Within a few million years of our extinction, all evidence that an intelligent species once dominated the planet, will be lost. We would be nothing more than a lost chapter in the history of the Earth.

Our planet is a lonely speck in this huge universe, and there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. We are on our own. There is nowhere else for us to go, it’s just us and this planet of ours, which we take for granted. I think we would all agree with Carl Sagan when he says, “To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”