Will it be a tryst with an environmental cataclysm?

“You’ve got a beautiful country but take care of your garbage heaps on an emergency basis for, if you don’t, then another five years and these heaps will outstrip the Nanga Parbat and you all will have died because of epidemics.”

That was the piece of advice rendered in this daily by a German overland tourist two years ago. Most of those who read it may just have brushed it aside as a routine ceremonial newspaper interview but delving a little deeper one could detect the grave overtones of the advice. 

Take a jaunt along any of the thoroughfares in Karachi’s Saddar and you’d be reminded of this horrifying forecast. Karachi, which till two decades was referred to as a gateway to the West, is now a picture of urban squalor.

Even areas which were synonymous with urban suavity are now an eyesore, what with all the garbage heaps gaining in height with the passage of each day. Passing by them is an ordeal given the way they assail one’s olfactory senses.

Consequently, viruses hitherto unheard of are assailing our citizenry. Epidemics previously unheard of are making their way into the city’s scenario. Many people today go about with anti-pollution face masks.

Trucks transporting sludge from the various decrepit parts of the city are to be seen taking it to the beach and the sludge meandering its way into the sea where it pollutes our fish stocks.

Giant hulks of rickety buses belching dense diesel fumes most ‘generously’ are a common sight on our thoroughfares, a sure cause of pulmonary cancer and other respiratory disorders. 

What compounds matters is that civic authorities are just not bothered. Such vehicles which are, by law, not supposed to ply our thoroughfares, do so with impunity.

The city’s water supply is another major cause for worry. Water-borne epidemics – such as the brain-eating amoeba colloquially known as Naegleria fowleri – are commonplace in Karachi. 

Greenery is a really welcome influence on any place. However, here continues constant denudation and felling of trees to make room for those concrete monstrosities, the multi-storeyed apartment blocks and shopping plazas. Apart from the fact that they have imparted a very grey, unattractive look to the city, giving it a blighted appearance, it has raised the average city temperature by a couple of degrees. 

Yet these structures (read eyesores) are coming up round the clock, catering to the capitalist avarice of the minions of the construction industry. It is tragic to see the city’s puny wealth of greenery dying away so rapidly.

The situation in other parts of the country too is least enviable. The 42 miles of highway between Lahore and Gujranwala, which was once a picture of delight with the lush green countryside, is not so any more. There’s hardly any countryside left. 

The area is saturated with screeching industrial plants discharging their effluents into the waterways nearby and deleting the freshwater fish stocks which were supplied to the surrounding cities like Lahore.

The area which was the country’s largest rice-producing belt and even supplied the commodity to the erstwhile East Pakistan where it was the staple food, is just home today to low income housing colonies, car showrooms, and other manifestations of urbanisation with the greenery having made its way into the past.

According to a study conducted by the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics at Islamabad back in 1983, a whopping 3.3 million arable acres of our land were lost to urbanisation in the form of small towns, railway halts, housing colonies, and other manifestations of small towns. 

No wonder while at the time of our inception as a nation in 1947-48, we were exporting wheat, now we have to import it.

Besides, people uprooted from these agrarian lands crowd into the big cities creating urban squalor and slums and are a dead weight on these cities’ ill-planned civic infrastructure. 

Small wonder then that today diseases like hepatitis and ringworms are so common in Karachi, thanks to the terribly polluted water we are condemned to consume.

As for deforestation, the less said the better. Being an avid hiker and trekker, I visit the upper reaches of the country almost every year and it is painful beyond description to see the denudation of the mountainsides. 

Every year the tree cover on the mountains seems to be thinner. Just one of the examples, Thandiani, a once-picturesque little village nestled 9,300 feet up in the Himalayas, 16 miles north of Abbottabad, is now a sight of tree stumps and trees falling away. 

An official once told me that minions of the furniture industry in Lahore and Karachi bribed the forest guards who allowed them to come and chop the majestic pines and cedars down in the light of gas lamps in the middle of the night.

The worst effect of this deforestation is the flash floods we have. Those of us old enough to remember would recall the year 1988 when we had two floods within the same summer.

Reason for that is that once a tree goes, it takes with it the topsoil which acts as a barrier to raging waters and it takes 2,500 years for the topsoil to regenerate itself. The trees act as a barrier to raging waters and the consequent floods cause immeasurable damage to human life and property.

Of course, we are not alone at the helm of this cataclysmic stage. The whole world is undergoing an environmental crisis.

The Amazonian forests in Latin America which were a highly balancing influence in the climate of the region are rapidly vanishing, all capitulating to the capitalist avarice of developers and builders. 

With the global climate change in the throes of which our planet finds itself right now, resulting in rising oceans, the picturesque island of Tuvalu in the South Pacific will have gone into the icy depths of the ocean forever. 

President Donald Trump’s pulling the United States out of the Paris Accord on Climate Change and Environment is certainly not going to make things any better.

He seems to read political implications into it when he says, “The agreement is less about climate and more about other countries gaining a financial advantage over the US.”

Environmental degradation is a very real threat to the perpetuation of the human race and a person in Trump’s position in global affairs where he is supposed to be guiding the destiny of the world is expected to have the intellectual acumen to gauge the dilemma stemming from the environmental rot that the world finds itself in the throes of today.