A Summer of Extremes: Is It the Great Dissolution?

Environment & Climate

By Dr Shravan Nosib

“The world has enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed.” 
— M.K. Gandhi

By late August 2026, the list of disasters reads like a catalogue of biblical plagues. Europe is baking through its fifth heat wave of the summer, with heat-related deaths surpassing 25,000. Wildfires have scorched over 1.2 million acres across Spain, France, and Italy. Canada is battling more than 600 active wildfires. Monsoon floods have killed hundreds across India, with Himachal Pradesh alone recording over 300 deaths since June, while a reservoir collapse in China’s Guangxi region killed dozens more. And on August 10, a magnitude 7.4 earthquake devastated western Colombia, killing hundreds. Flash floods on the Nepal-Tibet border have wrought havoc days ago. It’s natural to ask: Are we living in the end times?

Pic – WISN

What’s Actually Happening

The heat, fire, and flood events share a common thread — and it isn’t coincidence. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, intensifying both drought and downpour. In Europe, scorched soils and record-low river levels created a feedback loop: dry ground can’t cool the air, so heat builds further, drying the ground further still. That dynamic primed forests in Spain, France, and Canada for explosive fire growth. In South Asia and southern China, added atmospheric moisture turned monsoon rains into flash floods and reservoir failures. Europe, warming faster than any other continent, is also poorly equipped for it: older housing, limited air conditioning, and aging infrastructure make heat there more lethal than raw temperatures suggest.

The Extraction Machine Behind the Crisis

None of this unfolds in a vacuum. Behind the summits and the smoke lies a quieter violence: the systematic stripping of the Global South’s resources by multinational corporations, sold to the public as development. Rio Tinto’s QMM mine in southern Madagascar has, since 2009, dredged one of the world’s last stretches of littoral forest to extract ilmenite for titanium dioxide pigment. Communities living on less than two dollars a day report contaminated lakes, dead fish, and farmland stripped of fertility, while Rio Tinto pays the state a royalty of roughly 2.5% on everything it ships out.

It’s a pattern repeated with cobalt in the DR-Congo, lithium in Chile, palm oil in Indonesia, and timber across the Amazon and Congo Basin: the resource leaves, the profit leaves with it, and what remains is poisoned water, displaced families, and a hollowed landscape that no longer buffers against the disasters described above.

Summits Without Teeth

For over three decades, developed nations have gathered at UN climate summits — Kyoto, Copenhagen, Paris, Glasgow, Dubai — and produced declarations heavy on ambition, light on enforcement. Emissions pledges are voluntary; the promised $100 billion a year in climate finance for developing nations was chronically underdelivered. Fossil-fuel phase-out language gets diluted into softer terms like “phase down,” and lobbyists routinely outnumber delegations from the countries most at risk.

Meanwhile, nations bearing the least historical responsibility for emissions absorb the worst of the floods, heat, and crop failures. As Indian ecologist Dr Vandana Shiva has put it, “those least responsible for climate change are worst affected by it.” That gap between who caused the crisis and who pays for it is arguably the biggest reason summit outcomes keep falling short.

Dr Vandana Shiva’s Stand Against Corporate Agribusiness

Dr Shiva, a physicist-turned-ecologist, has spent nearly four decades challenging corporate control of food and seed. In 1991 she founded Navdanya, which has since trained over 1 million farmers and preserved more than 5,000 crop varieties in community seed banks. Her reasoning: the right to save and replant seeds for free is inseparable from farmer autonomy; patented, corporate-owned seed converts a renewable resource into a recurring cost that forces farmers into debt dependency. She has fought corporate patent claims on traditional Indian varieties as “biopiracy” — Navdanya helped stop RiceTec’s attempt to patent basmati in 1998 and pushed Monsanto to revoke a patent on an Indian rice variety in 2004.

Dr Shiva also disputes the productivity case for industrial agriculture, arguing ecological methods match or exceed Genetically Modified (GM) yields per acre, and frames the fight as structural: corporate control of food, in her view, undermines democracy itself. Worth noting: mainstream agricultural economists have challenged her sweeping causal claims, particularly that Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) directly cause farmer suicides, even while broadly crediting her critique of patent overreach and market consolidation.

The Philanthropist’s Contradiction

A related tension is that some billionaires whose fortunes were built in part through chemical-intensive industrial agriculture have also used their foundations to support initiatives aimed at addressing poverty and food insecurity.

The Gates Foundation co-founded and provided significant funding to the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), which promotes the use of commercial seeds, fertilizers and other agricultural inputs across Africa. The Gates Foundation Trust has also held shares in Monsanto, a connection that has drawn criticism from some advocates who have raised concerns about potential conflicts of interest and the overlap between AGRA’s agricultural approach and the commercial interests of agribusiness companies.

The Foundation has since sold that stock and Monsanto itself no longer exists independently (Bayer acquired it in 2018), but the underlying pattern remains: a foundation funding “pro-farmer” programs while financially tied to the corporations whose products those programs promoted.

Whether GM seed adoption itself caused India’s farmer suicide wave is contested. What holds up: the shift from free-saved seed to purchased seed-and-input packages, often financed through high-interest informal credit, concentrated financial risk onto farmers already exposed by poor irrigation and weak crop insurance — particularly in Maharashtra’s Vidarbha belt, ground zero for both GM-cotton adoption and suicide clusters. GM seed didn’t single-handedly cause the suicides but was introduced into an already-fragile system and changed farmers’ risk exposure within it.

The tension extends beyond agriculture. Some of the same billionaires have invested heavily in private space programs, including efforts to explore the possibility of human settlement on Mars, sometimes presenting such ambitions as a long-term safeguard against an increasingly difficult future on Earth. Critics question this priority, noting that Mars settlement remains highly speculative and technologically distant, while established climate solutions — including grid-scale renewable energy, reforestation and more resilient agriculture — could be expanded today with substantial investment.

From this perspective, directing large sums toward space exploration raises questions about whether similar resources might have a greater immediate impact if invested in addressing environmental and social challenges on Earth.

The Shadow Crisis: Famine

Floods, fires, and heat don’t just destroy homes — they destroy harvests, and the damage compounds silently after headlines fade. The 2026 Global Report on Food Crises found acute food insecurity affecting 266 million people, 22.9% of the population analyzed, in 2025. For the first time in the report’s history, two famines were confirmed in the same year, and acute hunger has nearly doubled since 2016. Climate shocks are a named driver alongside conflict, hitting rural people — especially women and youth — hardest.

The same flood zones in India and China, drought-hit soils in southern Europe, and deforested landscapes in Madagascar feed into this: degraded land and erratic rainfall shrink harvests and push staple prices up, hitting fragile, import-dependent economies hardest. Meanwhile, humanitarian funding for food crises has declined even as need grows.

Practical Solutions Worth Pursuing

Since top-down global agreements move slowly, much of the progress is happening elsewhere: reflective “cool roofs” and urban tree canopy that have cut heat deaths in cities like Ahmedabad and Paris; flood early-warning systems that cut disaster deaths over 100-fold in Bangladesh since the 1970s; decentralized solar microgrids bypassing fragile centralized grids; controlled burns and restored Indigenous fire stewardship; climate finance reform — grants rather than loans, debt-for-climate swaps, and an enforced loss-and-damage fund; and diversified, seed-sovereign agriculture, which builds resilience against both drought and flood. None of these requires waiting on a global treaty — they’re implementable now.

A Closing Thought

Vedic philosophy offers a different lens than the Western apocalyptic one — not a single, final ending, but a cycle: “Srishti, Sthiti, and Pralaya” — creation, preservation, and dissolution — turning endlessly into one another, embodied in the Trimurti of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva.

Pralaya is not annihilation for its own sake; it is dissolution that clears the ground for the next creation, the necessary unmaking that precedes renewal. Read through that frame, the heat, floods, fires, and hollowed-out forests look less like a countdown to a final curtain and more like a civilization straining against the limits of an old, extractive order — one that may need to dissolve, at least in part, before something more sustainable can take its place.

Pralaya in Hindu thought is still governed by dharma — right action — and what follows dissolution depends on what is carried forward into it. The choices made now, by governments, corporations, and activists like Dr Shiva resisting the extractive model, are less a bid to prevent an ending than an act of shaping what the next cycle inherits. That is a harder story than either a triumphant rescue or a final judgment, but it may be the truer — and more actionable — one.

There is no planet B.

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 4 September 2026