June 5 was celebrated as World Environment Day, and one could not have missed it for the sheer number of celebrations that were held across the state. From Goa Chief Minister Pramod Sawant who planted a sapling in his constituency of Sanquelim to Forests Minister Vishwajit Rane who trudged through the muck to plant mangrove saplings on the newly (now, it’s at least a decade old) ‘mankulem’ silt island in the River Mandovi to the Navy, political parties, everyone has been planting trees to signify that they care for the environment and are saving the earth.
While planting a tree makes for a good photo op and is invaluable tokenism, especially for political parties “ mere planting trees does very little for the greater good. Aside from the fact that one needs to ensure the sapling’s survival if one is to get any benefit from the said sapling, planting trees also serves to lull us into a false sense of security that we are actually doing something to save the earth when in reality at a global scale it makes little to no difference.
There are two major environmental problems that the world is facing right now -- global warming and biodiversity loss. While both the problems are interconnected and both are caused by human activity, planting a lone tree or even an entire plantation of them doesn’t help to solve either of the problems.
To solve global warming at the scale we need two solutions -- stop drilling for, extracting and burning fresh fossil fuels and ensure that we do what we can to remove the excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Trees, we are often told, do just that -- they convert carbon dioxide from the atmosphere using sunlight into carbon thus removing it from the atmosphere. But what we often miss out on is realising that unless this carbon dioxide is taken away and buried deep inside the earth, it will simply return to the atmosphere upon the death of the tree. Instead what we need are forests, where when a tree dies it is quickly buried under fresh foliage thus preventing the captured carbon dioxide from returning to the atmosphere.
Similarly for biodiversity loss. No plantation no matter how healthily maintained can replace a thriving forest that comprises not just of trees but also all the creatures from insects, to mosses to animals small and large that call the forest their home. It takes decades if not centuries for a bunch of trees to turn into a thriving forest.
When one compares the willingness with which the politicians of the day are willing to chop down centuries-old trees and forests to make way for ‘development’ and on the other hand without blinking claim that by planting trees they are doing their bit for the environment, they are doing a huge disservice not just to the planet Earth but to the state at large by claiming they are doing something right for the environment.
One hopes that in the future celebrating World Environment Day doesn’t continue to be this ugly spectacle of tokenism that it has now been reduced to.
