Mumbai was spared by Cyclone Nisarga today. Neighbouring Raigad district was not so lucky. With wind speeds of up to 120 kmph, the storm felled hundreds of trees and blew away metal and asbestos roofs. Nisarga was the first tropical cyclone to hit Maharastra in 122 years – closely following Cyclone Amphan that hit Bengal on May 20.

Not only is there a correlation between Nisarga and Amphan, but there also exists a link between Covid-19 and the locusts ravaging standing crops and orchards in Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra.

So, who or what connects these seemingly disparate occurrences? The answer is simple. It is us – the Homo sapiens – who are singularly responsible for bringing all of these disasters on ourselves.

Let me start with Covid-19. Whether it came from a bat or a pangolin, we aren’t sure, but one thing is certain: The outbreak that has already killed an estimated four lakh individuals globally and brought our world to an economic standstill comes from the animal world.

The name given to such diseases transmitted from animals to humans is ‘zoonosis’, based on the Greek words for ‘animal’ and ‘sickness’. And, these are not new – plague, tuberculosis, rabies and malaria – are all examples of zoonosis. Historian Yuval Noah Harari writes in his book, Sapiens, that “Most of the infectious diseases that have plagued agricultural and industrial societies (such as smallpox, measles and tuberculosis) originated in domesticated animals and were transferred to humans only after the Agricultural Revolution.” This means we, humans, have been contracting such diseases for 12,000 years now. But something has changed in recent times.

Human greed has led to such unprecedented loss of forest land over the last two decades that animals and humans are coming in close contact than ever before. And, this is despite specialists persistently warning that if we do not desist, many other pandemics of this nature will follow. Human greed and the term anthropogenic are interrelated; the latter word means ‘man-made’.

To understand why super-cyclones are battering our world with increasing frequency and ferocity, one needs to only look at the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, published as recently as September 2019. The IPCC report spoke of future life on our planet, a world of multi-metre sea-level rise, and of category 5 cyclones hitting multiple times a year, and coastal cities and populations devastated by extreme weather events.

And, why will this happen? Another IPCC report says that our oceans have, since the baseline year of 1970, absorbed 90% of the excess heat generated by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Critically, as compared to the period between 1969 and 1993, the rate of ocean warming has doubled during 1993-2017. Also, marine heat waves have doubled since 1982, and such waves have also become more long-lasting, more intense and more extensive. This explains the severity of last week’s Amphun, and 2019’s Fani. Thankfully, Nisarga was not as devastating.

Statistics on wind-speeds and the resulting scales of devastation, however, speak of an unforgiving story. Cyclone Aila came to Bengal with a wind-speed of 120 kmph in 2009: Fani made landfall on the Odisha coast with a speed of over 170 kmph in 2019. Till last year, Fani was only the second cyclone in 128 years to have made landfall in India in the pre-monsoon season. Last week’s Amphun and today’s Nisarga with wind speeds of 185 kmph and 120 kmph, again in pre-monsoon months, rewrote record books.

According to UN reports, what used to be such once-in-a-century weather events are set to become as frequent as once-a-year in tropical regions. One also has to bear in mind that our country has the seventh longest coastline in Asia – stretching for over 7,500 km. Thus, we are very, very vulnerable.   

I will now delve into the third part of this article – the desert locusts or Schistocerca gregaria. This type of locust is one of about a dozen species of short-horned grasshoppers. These are unique animals in the way how they change their behaviour – turning from solitary to ‘gregarious’ or social insects that coalesce into a swarm and forage for food together – when the climate becomes conducive for their breeding. This particular swarm – which has already eaten through parts of Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra – originated in the ‘Horn of Africa’, where excess rains triggered a breeding boom. The Horn of Africa is the easternmost projection of the African continent, lying along the southern side of the Red Sea and is closest to Asia.Isn’t it interesting that the first human migration out of Africa followed the same route some 70,000 years ago?

But what brought in that excess rain in that impossibly arid eastern African region? Again, it’s a ‘man-made’ disaster. The ‘greening’ or afforestation of the Thar desert in Rajasthan has also apparently contributed to the growth of the locust swarms. In short, we have caused so much global warning that the seas, winds, and clouds are all conspiring together and behaving in unprecedented patterns. It seems that these forces of nature are in an unforgiving mood – wanting to punish humanity for all its misdeeds.

I have already written about how anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have led to doubling the rate of ocean warming between 1993 and 2017, but the after-effects of our evil deeds haven’t stopped there! Because our oceans have absorbed 20-30% of anthropogenic CO2, the water has undergone increased acidification with a loss of oxygen from the surface down to a depth of 1,000 metres in many areas.

To add to that, marine heat waves have led to large-scale coral bleaching events. This particular loss has extreme ramifications as although reefs occupy less than .01% of the global ocean floor, these actively support 25% of the global ocean ecosystem.

Thus, the heat wave across the Indian Ocean to the West Pacific region is severely affecting marine life and schools of fish. Many lives have been already lost, and more lives are being lost every day.

This brings me to the genesis of the Kurukshetra war in the epic Mahabharata. The Vishnu Purana says the Earth Goddess, in the form of a cow, complains to Lord Vishnu that she has been milked so terribly by the greedy kings of the earth that her udders are sore. The Lord promises retribution and spills the blood of these kings on earth so that like a lioness, the earth goddess can drink their blood. Thus, the Kurukshetra war was preordained and it ended with a monumental loss of lives.

P.S. I still haven’t touched upon the issue of rapidly melting permafrost in the Arctic regions and the many million-year old bacteria that hides beneath this veil. Our science is defence-less against it, and many rounds of pandemics may be on their way to exterminate humanity.

However, I feel there’s still hope.  We, hopefully, will mend our ways of unchecked industrialisation and greed, and Mother Nature will relent in her fury. Amen.

(Aditya Chatterjee is an award-winning communications professional with more than 25 years of experience, which includes rich editorial stints at leading newspapers)