Letter to your children: This is what has been lost forever

Announcement of THG for the youth and my upcoming book.

Dear THG readers. This is a unique post at THG, intended to you as well as your kids of reading age. I know it is painful to let your kids read about such damning reality but hiding things from them is all set to worsen things. Things have been even more urgent with the record-breaking temperatures and natural disasters sweeping across the world right now.

So, here is my challenge: read this, let your kids read it and discuss it with them. Do I overstate or understate the risk of climate crisis in this text? Please comment below this post or reply me in the email below this newsletter.

This post is, in fact, the intro section of my upcoming book for students in grade 9 and higher. The slim 14k words strong book titled ‘The whole story: From Big Bang to Climate Crisis, life of a planet in trouble’ will be out in a few months for students in Nepal. I am eagerly looking for International publishers for other countries, for both the students and adult readers. I would be grateful if some of you could connect me with the agents who could be interested in this kind of work.

If you find this kind of work really interesting and potentially helpful to your children, you may guide them to the new youth section of THG where this post features at the beginning. I plan to send regular newsletters to the young people soon.

Above: Clear winter air from Nepal's hills taken in 2009. Below: Kathmandu in its spring glory over recent years. Image: Amit Machamasi; Courtesy: Nepali Times, published in February 2022.

Dear young friends, what keeps you up at night?

Is it the anxiety about performance in the exams? Is it the uncertainty about your future career? Is it some illness in your family? Is it the crime rate in your country? 

Or, is it a pandemic like covid which can start any time and engulf the whole world? Is it the war going on in some remote part of the world which is nonetheless affecting life in your country by, say, raising food prices? Is it the possibility of a nuclear war?

Any of these threats to your future is worth worrying about. But do you ever worry about the air that you breathe, though? The water you drink? The food you eat?

You may. But it may not top the list of your worries. Or, you may be worrying about them for the wrong reasons. 

In this slim book, I want to give you the right issues to worry about. Once you identify them, it will be possible for you to take action to tackle them. That, in turn, may change things for good for all of us in the long run.

It is with this hope that I am going to tell you a number of intertwined stories starting with the creation of our universe and ending with the climate crisis that is rapidly enveloping us from all sides.

Let's take the issue of the air we breathe first.  In South Asian countries, have you noticed the quality of air during the spring season?

Around thirty years ago, when I was growing up, the spring air was crystal clear. The sky was clear blue. The light breeze of warm air was a relief after the freezing cold of the winter. The shrill songs of the newborn coming from crevices in the wall of your mud-and-stone house in the mountains let us know that a new generation of birds would soon be populating our village.

Nature would be rejuvenated soon and so would lives of all kind.

As flowers bloomed, you could suddenly notice the fragrance of changing season in the air. That fragrance instantly lifted your mood.

In the moonless nights you could see the entire Milky Way galaxy and innumerable other cosmic bodies in the sky. Star-gazing made us wonder about the sheer enormity of the universe.

Now, the late winter and spring air has the worst quality of any time in the year throughout the South Asian countries. The sky is enveloped by a grayish to orange haze throughout the day. Both the sun and the moon are dim. Moonless nights no longer display the Milky Way and other galaxies.

Moreover, the air in the urban areas is acrid and often full of stench. When the wildfires start and an almost immovable blanket of smoke covers the valleys for weeks on end, every breath feels like an assault on the lungs. People fall sick and have to be hospitalized. 

The nests of birds with eggs and the newborn are decimated by the flame. Life cycles of all kinds of animals are disrupted.

In our immediate neighborhood, the Indian capital of Delhi has gone as far as opening oxygen cafes so that people can come and breathe in pure and oxygen-rich air by paying hundreds of rupees for less than an hour.

If we do not break the pace at which our air is being polluted, it won't be long before oxygen cylinders are traded widely for breathing oxygen the way bottled drinking water is traded today.

I'm asking you this again: has air pollution ever been at the top of the list of your worries?

Even if it was, please recall if these questions came to your mind: Who precisely is responsible for this level of air pollution? Is there any solution to it? If there is one, who is going to implement it?

Will we solve this perennial problem ever? Or are we in a doom-loop in which the air gets more and more polluted with passage of every New Year?

Then you can move ahead with a new set of questions: What is my agency and responsibility in this evolving crisis? What precise actions can I take to improve things? If I am doing nothing to change things, am I too reseponsible for this terrible state of things?

If you never asked these questions to yourself before, this is the right time to start asking them.

Now, let me ask you the question with highest stakes of all: do you miss the clear and pleasant spring days of my childhood?

I am sure you do not. The reason: all your life, the spring days have been hazy with heavy smog in the atmosphere. You never had the opportunity to see the world that preceded this era of choking air pollution.

In other words, you brains were forced to register the acrid air and the dim skies with barely visible stars as normal. This has made it exceedingly difficult for your generation to even imagine a world that we used to call normal during our childhood.

I think that is the biggest and most tragic loss that my generation handed over to yours.

Among a number of interrelated environmental disasters unfolding around us, I have focused this much on air pollution for a reason: the quality of air is the most urgent matter of life and death for all of us.

That, in turn, is so because there is no boundary between you and the air and the atmosphere. You are enveloped by it on all sides. You are swimming in it all the time.Without air, there is no life. Yet, we appreciate the importance of air only when there is serious problem with it.

When you breathe in, a part of the inhaled air remains in the lungs for some time. There it is in contact with the lung cells which in turn, are in contact with the tiny blood vessels. Oxygen from air travels from the lung cavities to the blood through this barrier and CO₂ travels in the opposite direction. 

The problem is, many toxins can also cross that barrier and reach the bloodstream and cause problems ranging from allergy to cancer. 

Either way, there is no point at which the atmosphere strictly ends and the body begins. That is how intimately we are connected to the nature. By poisoning air, we are poisoning our own bodies. By burning plastics, clothes and other trashes and sending the cancer-causing fumes to the atmosphere, we are transporting them from the dust bean to our bloodstream and different organs in the body.

 Let's look at the relationship between air and life in a different and more playful way.

According to the calculations by a scientist, a breath of air that you exhale while reading these lines contains 10¹⁸ atoms of an element named Argon. Those Argon atoms disperse as soon as they are out, eventually escaping the room you are now in. They keep diffusing and eventually reach every corner of the world. 

The scientist's calculations show that if you trace all those Argon atoms for a year, the breath you take this time next year, wherever in the globe you are located, will contain about 10 Argon atoms from that one original breath of air. 

That is because unlike Oxygen, Nitrogen and many other elements, Argon is chemically inert and remains in the elemental form.

It logically follows that we are now breathing the same Argon atoms that were inhaled and exhaled by Gautam Buddha, the Neanderthals and even the Dinosaurs. Those Argon atoms and their precursors, in turn, were developed using particles named protons, neutrons and electrons that came to exist in the universe long before even the solar system was born. 

It is possible that most of the elements in your body were first composed in the core of a star that is long gone, having dissipated the energy and particles in the space which were then recycled in the formation of our solar system.

Even if you didn't know so far, be proud from now onwards: you all are made of stars!

It is also likely that some of the elements in your body were once part of earth's mantle layer, were spewed out by a volcano and were integrated into the biological process for the first time by some apparently inconsequential moss. 

Does this larger story matter for your daily life, though? 

It does indeed. First part of this book is all about that link between the human life and the scientific creation story.

The second part will explore how the delicate balance in the biosphere that has sustained life so far is in grave jeopardy now thanks to the activities of human beings.

Now that we have briefly explored the connection between nature and life, let's examine those connections from another angle.

Where did you come from? Your parents gave birth to you.

Them? Their parents.

And so on.

But what if we go on asking this question indefinitely? How indeed did life appear in this planet for the first time? Have human beings been here ever since the creation of life or did we develop from some other—and simpler—life forms?

These questions may be nagging you ever since your early childhood. After all, we think, we doubt and we learn.

This new set of existential questions may then follow: what will the future be like? Will it be brighter or darker in terms of human progress and suffering?

You may have already read about the scientific creation story in your textbooks: some 4.6 billion years ago, the earth was born. Some 3.5 billion years ago, the earliest life form was developed in the water in then oceans.

The life then kept growing and evolving over billions of years eventually leading to the development of rich and diverse ecosystems.

Also, an intelligent creature named Homo sapiens developed in this process.

My guess is, you have been seeking a far more complete picture of development of life on earth.

Let me start telling the scientific story of our creation now.