I have been trying to tie together some loose thought-threads that had formed in my head after reading different books and essays, watching various documentaries and interviews on the climate crisis. To illustrate my thoughts, I searched for and found an image from NASA’s website, which was one of their data images on the extent of snow cover across the globe.
The image may be seen as visual evidence of the starting point of my hypothesis. In the map by NASA, as we can see, most of the Northern Hemisphere is covered in snow, which, some three hundred years ago, would have been far more than what we see today. It has reduced due to the effects of global warming, which, as you read this essay, is melting the Polar Caps. And as can be seen in the map and the graphics below, the Southern Hemisphere is not covered with snow, and is therefore warmer.
The conducive climate in the Southern Hemisphere allowed human beings to develop cultures that were able to live in balanced harmony with nature; thus, human beings lived in these parts of the world without over-exploiting nature for thousands of years. Many different cultures existed and thrived in the southern part of the globe because of its geographical advantage, which allowed them to develop a way of life that was easier than that of the northern part of the globe.
Living in a conducive climate also required far less consumption of energy when compared to those living in the much colder northern parts.
Whatever was necessary for human life to flourish — food, clothing, shelter, critical tools and devices that were required to create products of daily use — were obtained easily from nature. Nature, therefore, provided all the raw materials required for the production of food for consumption and articles of use, which were mostly found or grew above ground. These basic resources were supplemented by a small quantity of raw materials that were sourced from under the earth, such as minerals and metals like copper or iron, which were critical for many applications, but were used very sparingly.
If we look at the Northern Hemisphere, their ease of living is limited to just two or three months of spring-summer-autumn. Therefore, it was not possible for them to develop a way of easy living based on the abundant natural resources available throughout the year. Till even about three hundred years ago, most people in the northern part of the world adapted to their natural environment by enduring more hardships than their counterparts in the Southern Hemisphere. Indeed, in both hemispheres, a variety of sophisticated cultures developed as different ways of living in their own geographies.
So what am I trying to explain here?
I am saying that the Southern Hemisphere was endowed with a geographical advantage, which enabled people there to develop extremely sophisticated technologies to make their living comfortable and enjoyable. Whereas, in the Northern parts of the world, with longer spells of very cold weather, living comfortably would have been a huge struggle.1
And by understanding this, we can understand the story of industrialisation a little differently from the common version available on internet searches.
Initially, the wealthier people in the Northern Hemisphere, to supplement their lifestyles, imported products and produce that were not locally made or grown from the countries of the Southern Hemisphere. The flourishing trade that developed was because of the domestic demand from European markets for a variety of products ranging from textiles to tea. The European trading companies imported most goods from two main production centres — India and China. But to find an everlasting supply of gold and silver to pay for the imports posed a problem — just as it had between 100 and 300 BCE, when the imports from India were emptying the coffers of the Roman Empire!
The European countries increased their stock of gold and silver in various ways, including exterminating the native population of the Americas and appropriating their gold and silver. But even such measures would be short-term. The conquest of the countries in the Southern Hemisphere would have been the logical next step. This required the Europeans to invent superior military technology that could be manufactured in greater numbers, ranging from better ships to more efficient gunpowder-based armaments. These inventions then allowed them to subjugate the Southern countries they had hitherto traded with. These inventions, therefore, also laid the foundations for a full-blown Industrial Revolution — in other words, the development of technology to mechanically mass-produce the very products that were so far imported.
The ever-rising profits of the traders gave them greater strength and power. With the collusion of the kings and nobility, the traders were thus able to command warships and armies, which then invaded the southern countries of the globe to take control over them, often through extremely brutal and ruthless ways. In this manner, the merchant corporations gained complete control over the very resources, production processes and the people from whom they had bought their merchandise in the past.
The heavy machinery-industrial process, by its very nature, was the antithesis of the traditional decentralised, low-wastage, efficient, and high-quality handcrafted production processes of the Southern hemisphere. Indeed, industrial processes were and still are inefficient methods of making; for each product that is made, the waste generation and levels of pollution generated in the entire chain of sourcing to selling have created the degradation of the natural environment.
What this means is that the method of industrial production is one of exploitation and seizing control: of countries, their natural landscape/resources, and their very people. The industrial production system, as it exists, is therefore inherently an act of aggression on both people and on Nature itself. 2
Once production processes moved away from a collaborative and empathetic relationship with Nature to an aggressive and exploitative one, the agrarian economy that had functioned well for thousands of years was abandoned. A purely market-driven capitalist economy was put in its place. As we can see around us, this change brought about huge amounts of waste and pollution globally, along with a substantial increase in the profit margins for the merchants who had driven the industrial technological revolution. These profits never reached most of the people, and poverty, in different measures, became a reality across the globe.
Governance in the Global South accordingly transformed from a feudal one to colonialism, which in turn has today transformed to what is being called globalisation. The merchants operating as multinational corporations have continued to expand; more and more “markets” have been “opened” to feed the ever-growing curve of profits. Such a situation can be achieved only by selling more and making more and more products, many of which are not really required for a healthy way of life.
In the process, we have degraded the Earth and brought ourselves into the midst of a very visible Climate Crisis, with unpredictable, devastating weather patterns and vanishing species of flora and fauna.
This, in essence, is the way we got to where we are today and why we are still in the stranglehold of a destructive economic structure, which we don’t seem to be able to opt out of. The reason is not only the fact that merchants are now even bigger corporations. We now have individuals who are super billionaires, who can influence the masses as well as dictate terms to the governments.
People are controlled through framing legislations that benefit a minuscule few. This is a repeat of what had happened at the start of the Industrial Revolution, when Britain enacted laws to force the rural population off the lands and commons, forcing them to migrate to the cities and work as cheap labour in the newly formed factories. Today, we have an additional powerful control, that of influencing the masses with the latest technological developments of the internet and mass/social media platforms.
This, then, is my hypothesis or realisation of what has happened — and is still happening.
If things are not drastically restructured right away, the NASA map will probably show the areas under perpetual snow shrinking substantially over the next few years, and heat the planet to a point of no return. All along, the corporations and their technocrats will continue to use the crisis to their advantage as an opportunity to follow their single-minded pursuit of even more money.
The method is simple: promise to sell more “Green-Washing Technology” to solve the Climate Crisis, which will be accompanied by the rise of dictatorial governments across the world, to control the people and the natural resources even more.
- As can be seen from my polemic essay, the sun plays an all-important role in our lives. Here is a quote from another related post:
“As another 15th August comes and goes, it is time that we proclaim our Independence from current conventional industrialised notions and try to rediscover appropriate ways in our own culture of dealing with the sun and the rain.”
Anisha Shekhar Mukherji in her post: In Search of the Sun … and the Rain ↩︎ - For a more critical analysis to understand what the Europeans actually did through Colonialism and Capitalism/Neoliberalism to the countries in the Southern Hemisphere, please see this YouTube video. It is a book discussion between Thomas Piketty and George Monbiot, the author of the book The Invisible Doctrine, at The World Inequality Lab. ↩︎
