The Other Side of Progress.

The Other Side of Progress.

Rabinarayan Senapati,

SDH Anandapur, Keonjhar,Rabi.325@rediffmail.com

Last week I read an article that told; human species is naturally destined to have the longevity of fifty-five years, and to procure on an average seven children by each woman out of which five would be dying. Anything better is because of advance science.

 Who can disagree?

Nagada, a minute valley on the top of the hills of Sukinda in Jajpur district is in the news for last three years for wrong reasons of the high death rate due to malnutrition and poor health care of the Juanga tribe residing there. I worked in the area as a doctor for twelve years. I visited the place in 2005 and again in 2009 when there was no road communication. On either occasion, our team stayed in their village funded Kothaghara  or community house where minimum necessary provisions and logistics were available for strangers like us. This facility we won’t get in our villages.

Interesting interaction with a young man having some school level education provided food for my thought. I never forgot that. The boys played the changu drums on our request, without any pre-plan the girls came out of their houses from their sleep after a day’s hard labour and started dancing around the bonfire. Almost after an hour’s performances, they retired.

On asking about how they managed in acute diseases and when a woman went to labour, he narrated the difficulties and sometimes accepting death as their natural fate.

Why did not you accept the government offer to settle at the foot of the hills?  

His answer was as logical as possible.

On the high ways, many traffic accidents happened. People are still travelling in vehicles. Do they fear?  So also we manage here to protect our forefather’s dwellings with Hill God’s wish.

 Being an Obstetrician, I instantly thought about labouring mothers who required a caesarean section would be dying. A woman with narrow pelvis perished from the earth. She would not be bearing a daughter who again should be having a narrow birth passage. For such a natural selection since the evolution of Homo sapiens or even before that in the predecessor apes, the female pelvis added its curve of parturition fitness. Science essentially has stopped this, and added women into the herd who are not as suitable for delivering her foetus. Certainly, this is a welcome move, but over the time the species added unnaturally selected population.

 In many other diseases like young diabetes, sickle cell disease, haemophilia, and so on the affected survived with the modern interventions, and added offsprings with a trait.

Yes sure, without Science, the man was destined to die with an average life span of fifty-five years, but only the fittest survived. With modern health care, the race as a whole has become more unfit.

In every other field, the human race has developed to a level not imagined a century back. We are modern, and our great grandfathers were less civilised. So it is a developed world, the planet earth!

 Is it not so?

Why not?

We have consumed most of the natural resources; we have poisoned the air, water and atmosphere. We are at the verge of large scale water shortage, many natural streams are dead, the hills became planes, and the planes turned to lakes. Lakes pooled mercury, and the fishes became inedible. Twenty-five years back, we did not hear about heat-stroke death in Odisha now it is a seasonal terror.

Our lifespan increased decades after decades; the research on immortality remained in the news. But what about the life span of the habitable planet earth? Will it remain forever?

Washington Post has reported, on thirty-first July this year, ten billion tonnes of ice melted in the territory of Greenland within hours, and 197 billion tonnes melted in July, too high in comparison to the previous years. The addition could raise sea levels by 0.02 inches in a month. We can’t ignore this small rise; it would be bringing heavy cyclones and other climatic changes.

Similarly, year after year, the Mercury is rising and reaching the fifty-degree Centigrade mark. Sometimes birds are dying en mass; we ignore it knowing we are not flying birds. The ground-water table is receding. Large trees must be adapting by growing their root deeper and deeper. But there would be a threshold, beyond which they might dry up en mass. We cannot ignore it, saying; we are not trees. We know what happens when trees vanish from the green earth. These discussions no more are theoretical dilemmas; we almost have reached the edge. These things certainly would be happening in front of our eyes, but who knows; the species may not survive to see the devastation.

So, the world has become very sick and weak, bearing all these scientific progress on its surface. Like an individual is addicted to opium or cocaine, the nations are addicted to their mode of progress. We knew about the hazards of fossil fuel burning, yet we aggressively pushed new vehicles on the road, not improving mass public transport. We add on chimneys. We are euphoric about progress, and we cannot restrain. Is not that an addiction?

Progress never came without a price.

 The first industrial revolution brought forward the colonialism and who knows its sufferings better than mother India. Four centuries ago, the earth certainly was far healthier, glowing with green and too many species playing hide and seek.

With the invention of machines, the man got leisure and rest to make him physically unfit — the sedentary lifestyle brought in diseases not known before. In the past, we wanted to gain weight to hide our poverty. We got the pleasure to avoid manual work.

They had fewer babies survived; we have no time to take care more, and the result is all the same. The author is not arguing for more number of babies but only drawing a comparison.

The selfish human has a long lifespan, helping the health industries; they are assets for their ICUs. Our progress has endangered other species. Not only that, we have put our house, the green earth on fire to bake our cake.

Scientific ideas in medicine are always taken skeptically. Don’t we see a disclaimer at the beginning of every standard textbook that medical science is an ever-changing subject and so on? We progressed from collecting river water to drinking bottled mineral water only to add plastic load on the surface and inside of us. We protected our children,  making them germ-free as far as possible, and now we say, children, need microbes more than they need antibiotics. We de-wormed them from time to time, and now we say, the worms were as friendly as enemies.

Ironically the three respected elders in my village died in the last one year became near centurions, never went out of the village to avail better health facilities. They bathed in the same pond we raise our nose to enter inside. They remained active for long, and they died gracefully.  We, as physicians, must learn the reasons for their happiness, their cheerful life in places having less pollution and lesser life support.   

Fortunately, the entire world has become concerned about the danger inherent to our progress and trying to retard the imminent looking destruction of the planet. Let us hope that the only species, the human, which is the cause of this damage, find out an adequate solution before it is too late, and develop earth-friendly means of progress just before the otherwise end of this era.

Yes, we agree about the benefit of science and technology, and this article does not appeal to stop scientific progress, but this is the other side of the story to appeal the very Scientific community to develop sustainable methods of progress and development.