Translator and academician Himansu S. Mohapatra shares a translation of an editorial article on climate change, published in the Odia daily Sambad on 27 September 2024.
Lines of thirsty camels and their heat-baked and sun-tanned Bedouin riders, trudging across the limitless expanse of a parched Sahara, may now witness at the distant horizon not mirages but miracles. The satellite images beamed by NASA over the last few years have shown this miracle of oases to be real, namely the slowly burgeoning green foliage in the desert. So, one can say that the pitiless Sahara is seeing the mystery of enactment of plant life, leading to the generation of vestigial woodlands where some minimal animal presence is also detected.
Kristen Hurst, the renowned environmental scholar of Germany’s Leipzig University, and other major environmentalists of the world believe that the reason behind such a positive and welcoming change may well be the rise in global temperature and consequent reverses in climatic conditions. If this is true, then are we to conclude that the bane of ‘climate change’ is soon going to turn into a boon?
Scientific research has established beyond doubt that some twelve thousand years ago the dry and sand dune filled Sahara Desert was a lush green terrain of huge proportions, much like the African savannah. It was also the treasure trove of rare biodiversity. It gradually became a waterless and lifeless desert due to dramatic changes in the pattern of rainfall that occurred over thousands of years. Climatologists also say that global warming is currently causing the same precipitous changes to reappear, as a result of which Sahara seems poised to revive its past.
A question naturally arises at this juncture: was the mother earth also subjected in the remote past to such phenomena as environmental pollution, increase in the global temperature and the resultant changes in climate that have become the signature of our time? How else can one explain the current irregularity in the pattern of rainfall?