My earliest memories of Kathmandu are that of a rain-soaked bowel-shaped town of sweeping paddy fields and tightly clustered settlements with balmy summers, pleasant springs and foggy winters. During monsoon, the din of raindrops hitting the tin roof of our house would go on for days at time and the surrounding fields would erupt in greenery.  In winters, the Valley, wrapped in fog, would look like a giant furry beast in hibernation, patiently waiting for spring to come.

But then things began to change. The rainfall became more self-indulgent and erratic, summers became hotter and winters became devoid of the dewdrops that would once speckled the landscape like diamonds on a tiara. Finally, springs and autumns virtually disappeared, giving way to a weather pattern that now just swings between hot and cold.

What went wrong? Though some might still attribute these to the tantrums nature throws in its backyard, there is mounting evidence to suggest that the recent manifestations of these changes in weather patterns are largely man made. Scientists have already reached a consensus that human activities (like deforestation and over reliance of fossil fuels) are the primary cause of the global warming that has occurred over the past 50 years. The average temperature of the planet has risen between 0.4 to 0.8 degrees Celsius over the past 100 years, and going by the prediction of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, average global temperatures could increase between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees Celsius by the year 2100. 

Thus, even as Kathmandu has recently received the much-awaited drizzles, places around the world are experiencing record summer temperatures.  Closer to home, in India, more than 330 million people are suffering from droughts. In Nepal, cases of huge forest fires have been reported in Tarai and in areas as high as Dhorpatan, while reduced, lower than average rainfall seems to have become the norm. Not only has this shattered the expectation of a bountiful harvest this year but has also led to the scarcity of drinking water throughout the country.

Experts even have a name for the geological epoch that we are living in: Anthropocene. Unlike the geologiocal periods preceding it, Anthropocene is marked by excessive human interference on nature, leading to permanent, indelible changes. It can be located in the way we have polluted our rivers and air, in the holes we have bored deep into the earth in our search for hydrocarbons, in the changes we have induced to the global weather pattern, in the plastic that has made their way to all corners of the planet (and will soon exceed the number of fish in the seas) and, most importantly, in the ongoing mass extinction of species we have triggered. 

The hallmarks of Anthropocene can be found in places as remote as the Arctic (where, thanks to us, the ice cap is melting at an unprecedented rate) and as small as Kathmandu. In fact, in its rapid, unplanned sprawl of brick and mortar buildings, polluted, filthy rivers, increasing numbers of motor vehicles and depletion of ground-water level, The Valley has become a perfect tableau of Anthropocene.  

But despite the overwhelming necessity to change things for the better, very little has actually been accomplished by way of work. The government still lacks a proper framework to fight climate change.  Our greatest desire to move away from hydrocarbons to clean, renewable hydroelectricity has yielded a little more than a thousand megawatts, deforestation is still endemic and air, land and water pollution looks nowhere close to an end. 

Since the very beginning, humans have always aspired to leave their mark on the planet. Be it in the forms of the ancient hand prints in the Cave of the Castle, in Spain, or the prehistoric tools of stone flakes and bones found all over the world, our ancestors have always left traces of themselves. But nothing done by our ancestors can even remotely match the indelible marks we will be leaving behind for our descendents.  

Hopefully, we will realise soon that we have become passengers in a train hurtling towards destruction, Maybe we will stop before it is too late. There is still time for improvement. But maybe, we won’t. And in case we don’t, our descendents will curse us for all that we did rather than looking at our achievements with the same love and reverence with which we look at the tools and marks left behind by our ancestors. But again, maybe, they won’t get that chance at all.