Dear Editor, I Disagree: The ‘long haul’ is a luxury the planet cannot afford

‘Long haul’ is, after all, a profoundly human luxury. The rest of the living world does not operate on such indulgent timelines.

This is not a call for a human-free planet. It is a call to question the assumption that more — more roads, more extraction, more consumption — is inherently justified.

Written by:

Arefa Tehsin

This refers to the editorial, ‘Together & apart, animals in a human world’ (IE, May 23). First of all, thank you for the information about this important research. GPS collars, camera traps, drone surveys… we have perfected the art of watching, even as what we watch steadily recedes. We have learnt to follow every moment but not step back. The editorial tells us, quite sensibly, that nature is complex, that animals respond differently to human presence and that conservation requires long-term, painstaking effort, not slogans like “nature is healing” that went viral alongside the coronavirus. I agree. Nature is not healing. It is negotiating. And not from a position of strength.

Where I must disagree is with the comfort embedded in your phrase, “long-haul work”. “Long haul” is, after all, a profoundly human luxury. It assumes there is enough time to conduct long studies, refine them, design policy, convene conferences, organise debates, publish papers, and not to forget, plant a symbolic sapling during a dignitary’s foreign visit. The rest of the living world does not operate on such indulgent timelines. The ancient forest in Nicobar will not survive a land policy to come somewhere in 2040. A tigress displaced with cubs cannot wait for “granular approaches” that arrive a decade too late. The current rate of species extinction rivals that of the K-Pg event — the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs — with no asteroid to blame this time.

The editorial cautions against “glib formulations” like the idea that “humans are the virus”. Fair enough. What we are not admitting is a far more persistent belief: That human material expansion — not balance or well-being, but accumulation — must remain the accepted principle of our species’ time on Earth. We speak of coexistence. We practise displacement. We expand, they adjust. We extract, they retreat. We debate ethics, they become data points in our “painstaking accumulation of knowledge”.

When human activity slowed during the pandemic, the world did not descend into ecological disorder. It exhaled a long sigh. Wild animals appeared where they had long been absent. Soundscapes shifted. Air cleared. All for a brief moment. We dismissed it as romanticism. Perhaps it was. But it also revealed something deeply inconvenient: The scale of human presence matters.

This is not a call for a human-free planet. It is a call to question the assumption that more — more roads, more extraction, more consumption — is inherently justified.

The editorial urges patience. I urge urgency. In the long run, as John Maynard Keynes once observed, “we are all dead” (though I suspect cockroaches may negotiate an extension). We must continue the research, refine the models, embrace complexity and give it the deserved space in editorials. But we must not let complexity become an excuse for delay. Or let our quest for nuance dilute the clarity of the crisis. The time to act is not in the long haul. It is in the vanishing present. While we debate how nature responds to us, in this tragedy of the commons, the commons itself is quietly slipping from tragedy into memory.

Tehsin’s latest book is The Great Indian Safari