On Tuesday it was hot, the kind of hot that made a discussion on the climate crisis affecting Karachi seem even more urgent if you could sweat through it. Bilal Zahoor, who straddles the subjects of Philosophy and Ecology, was a good choice to get the conversation going. He said:

“If there were an Olympic race of all the crises humanity has ever faced, climate change would win.”

This was the sobering missive that could make for the headline for the talk he gave on Tuesday at the HRCP office. The HRCP and Pakistan Institute of Labour Education & Research were taking advantage of Zahoor’s whirlwind visit to Karachi. (He also spoke at the University of Karachi, the Federal Urdu university and Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum.)

Zahoor is a good choice of commentator on the climate not just because he teaches philosophy and ecology at Beaconhouse National University, but because he is a member of the anti-capitalist Haqooq-e-Khalq Party and he works as the editorial director of Folio Books.

The anti-capitalism argument is actually saying what mainstream political parties have been saying on the global stage. The Global North or rich regions, like Europe, the US, are mostly responsible for industrialization and carbon emissions that have changed the earth’s climate.

The rise in the Earth’s temperature impacts the entire globe and not just the Global North. This means that countries that do not emit much carbon still have to deal with harsh climate change consequences. Pakistan contributes less than 1% to global carbon emissions but is the eighth most vulnerable country to long-term climate risk, according to the Global Climate Risk Index (2021). “The entire Global South contributes less than 10% to global greenhouse gas emissions, but we are the most vulnerable” Zahoor said.

“Even if Pakistan goes through a revolution and a socialist system comes in place, it cannot do much to reverse climate change.” Zahoor declared. But if Global South unites and resists, change might be possible, he added.

Climate change is the biggest crisis ever because the Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate (not seen in the past 10,000 years), leading to floods, heat waves, drought. This is an overpowering crisis as it takes over our social, economic and political systems.

The 2022 floods in Pakistan were a consequence of global climate change. More and more heat waves and record-breaking high temperatures are too.

Zahoor added, however, that while Pakistan has not contributed much to the global carbon emissions, it has still worsened its own environmental and ecological conditions. He gave the examples of Bahria Town, DHA Multan, DHA Lahore and Thar, where profit for a select few was prioritized and indigenous people, the environment and nature paid the price.

For Zahoor, the military, politicians, bureaucrats, real estate mafia and land mafia are all involved in what he calls the “real estate-ization of land”. Forests and farmlands are shrinking, while concrete buildings are emerging everywhere. Urban flooding in Karachi could have been avoided with better municipal planning.

Asad Iqbal Butt of the HRCP added that ‘developers’ are building a road in Karachi’s sea from DHA Phase 8 to Bundal Island. This infrastructure is not taking the ecology of the area into consideration and will badly affect fisherfolk.

Ahmad Shabbar of GarbageCAN (an environmentally friendly waste management company), also spoke at the HRCP. To him, the Pakistani government has used climate change as a cop-out response to evade accountability for disasters. “Earlier they (the government) would say that these are natural disasters sent by God,” he said. “Now if any issue comes up, they say it’s a climate change issue and we can’t do anything about it.”

Moving away from Capitalism

In late 20th century India a “Chipko movement” started in which women from villages would hug trees to stop them from being cut down. The movement was largely led by women, and it resulted in a 15-year ban on cutting trees in 1980, announced by then prime minister of India, Indira Gandhi.

Zahoor gave the example of this movement to talk about eco-feminism and how (pre-colonial) native or indigenous culture and knowledge among the people of the land give importance to Nature. Compare this to the starkly different wave of western philosophy that became popular in the 16th and 17th centuries. According to this thinking, “They considered Nature their slave; something that should be controlled, mastered and exploited.” We had South Asian philosophers and poets like Abdul Latif Bhittai and Bulleh Shah who extensively talked about nature and did not center their teachings on humans.

“This illness (western philosophy) was not part of our land,” he said. “This has been imported from the west and has now spread almost across the world.”

The fact that so many people around the world are not participating in the degradation of our environment leads us to the philosophical question of should we blame all humans for climate change?

Anthropocene or Capitalocene?

Earth’s history is so long that ‘years’ is a very small unit to measure time. It would be like measuring sea water in milliliters. Scientists developed a time-scale to measure time according to the Earth’s rock record or its geological time scale (GTS). An epoch is one of the units of time measurement in this system, and the Anthropocene is the most recent (and unofficial) epoch.

The word Anthropocene is made from two words, Anthropo, which is Greek for ‘human’ and -cene which means ‘new’ or ‘recent’. Humans have been part of the Earth for a relatively small period, but we have managed to destroy its natural systems so drastically in the past 300 to 400 years that some scientists proposed a new epoch called Anthropocene: An epoch caused by and dominated by humans.

“This illness (western philosophy) was not part of our land,” he said. “This has been imported from the west and has now spread almost across the world.”

But is Anthropocene a good enough term to describe the current epoch, as it blames humans. Are humans the real cause of it or is the economic system of Capitalism to blame?

The indigenous or native populations across the world and especially in the Global South (countries such as Pakistan) are emitting a negligible amount of greenhouse gases. It would be unfair to hold all humans equally accountable for the climate crisis when only some of us are causing the most damage.

This is why some scientists started using the word Capitalocene to highlight how the economic system that pushes industrialization and consumerism is behind the Earth’s changing climate. Bilal Zahoor puts it this way: the fisherfolk of Pakistan or the aboriginal people of Africa are not the ones who ever participated in Capitalism, so why should they be included in the blame?