Day of the Earth

It wasn’t too long ago when Earth Day seemed like one of those things we marked more out of duty than out of urgency. It was a day when the “tree-huggers” came out to, well, hug trees, as the patronizing label suggested. Yesterday’s Earth Day had none of that. It was a day when the “life-clingers” or “planet-savers” came out to, well, cling to life or save the planet.

Not least we Filipinos. When last year’s Earth Day came around, we had already experienced some of the most crippling storms in recent years, including “Ondoy” which put Metro Manila under water and, far more bitterly, “Sendong” and “Pablo” which brought parts of Mindanao to their knees. The last two storms cost billions of pesos in damage to property and crops (P36 billion in the case of Pablo), quite apart from thousands of lives (1,300 in the case of Sendong).

And then “Yolanda” happened.

To this day, it is not known for certain how many lives Yolanda took. The official estimate puts the number at less than 10,000; the unofficial one—bodies were still being dug up from under debris months after Yolanda flattened Leyte—cites a scale of devastation we had not known before. It rammed “storm surge” into the national vocabulary.

No, even we who are not naturally given to global concerns, let alone planetary ones, marked Earth Day yesterday not with a sense of celebration but with a sense of dire recollection

As well indeed the world itself. For very good reason.

It wasn’t too long ago either when, like the tobacco companies which resolutely denied any connection between smoking and lung cancer, saying the evidence for it was largely incidental, the oil corporations and governments themselves denied global warming and/or that it was threatening the extinction of humankind. Today, those voices have plunged to muted lows, if at all they can still be heard. The evidence provided by the senses, quite apart from science, is there for all to see.

Earthquakes have become a common occurrence the world over, among the latest being the one that hit Chile. Thankfully, and quite miraculously, only six people died from the 8.2-magnitude temblor though the damage to northern Chile was considerable, not least from an 8-foot tsunami that flooded low-lying areas. Part of the miracle came from learning from experience. Four years ago, an 8.8 earthquake killed 500 people there, and since then the government has instituted a regime of drills for earthquakes and tsunamis. The results are, well, miraculous. The work is cut out for us as storm surges go.

Before that, several things happened that proved that the new normal was abnormality, or what was once so. Storms and floods visited the United Kingdom, making it look like a tropical country. The Danube and neighboring rivers swelled and overran parts of Germany and Eastern Europe. Tornadoes swirled in the US Midwest, hurricanes pummeled its eastern seaboard, and arctic weather swept across America, freezing into silence what used to be the raging Niagara Falls. That, quite hilariously, had some holdout environmental agnostics in Fox claiming victory because, they said, this was definite proof that we did not have global warming, we had global freezing.

And of course floods, typhoons, droughts, earthquakes in Asia of increasingly mind-boggling ferocity and unpredictability.

Science has confirmed the precarious state in which we live today. The second Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Japan earlier this month gave irrefutable proof of global warming and warned of its growing irreversibility. It warned as well of the horrendous scale of global warming’s effects, chief of them the ravaging of crops and wildlife, leading to increasing hunger and the extinction of certain species of animals.

“We knew this was happening, but now we have overwhelming evidence for it,” said one of the convention heads. Before, he said, many people were destroying the environment unknowingly. “Now, ignorance is no longer an excuse.”

The convention had a new and particularly disturbing finding, which was that climate change tended to increase security risks—it was a “threat multiplier.” The Darfur conflict in the Sudan, said UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, “began as an environmental crisis.” David Titley, a professor of meteorology in Pennsylvania State University, added: “Climate change will not directly cause conflict, but it will exacerbate issues of poor governance, resource inequality and social unrest. The Arab Spring and Syria are two recent examples.”

It is not unconceivable that we would soon see wars waged over resources, including water. Life imitates art, or apocalyptic movies.

Who knows? Maybe the renewed aggressiveness of countries, first shown by the United States in the invasion of Iraq, and now being shown by Russia and China in the occupation of Crimea and the attempted occupation of the South China Sea, respectively, owe in part to the “threat multiplier” or inducer that global warming represents. But whether so or not, there’s something awesomely mind-boggling about the fact that at the very time we are threatened with collective extinction, we see only the threats posed by one another. That at the very time we are called upon to come together for the very survival of the race, we see the need only to fight for the things that drive us apart.

Of course, humankind has never been known for unadulterated wisdom but has managed to move forward despite displays of monumental folly. But some follies are more fatal than others. Some follies are more suicidal than others.

A sobering thought for Earth Day.