Edited By: Maya Haider (UG 20)
If today you burn fossil fuels, then tomorrow you might be a fossil under the sea.
Our blue planet Earth is our only home; the only place where life is possible. We have no second home to live after consuming all the natural resources. Today, man has grown far beyond his expectation, in his march to rule the Earth which once ruled over him. It was a paradise, when we were ruled by our Mother Earth, where nature thrived, and man was just a silent observer. In such a reign fear of pollution and concerns on climatic change would have not serious issues. We the brutal humans are depleting all its resources at a rate that is faster than what nature can replace. We can no longer continue our daily routines unaltered.
Conservation of Nature is regarded as what can help us today even if it begins as concern. Conservation of nature refers to the preservation of natural resources, like the land, air, water, minerals, and every other living thing that maintains the ecological balance. Human beings are incessantly involved in activities such as hunting down animals, cutting down trees, releasing poisonous gases in the atmosphere, and polluting rivers. As a result, we have welcomed ‘global warming’, and climatic change which has a serious impact on our environment today and on the future. Our activities have raised the global temperature by 1oC already, and the effect of this evident throughout the world in the form of extreme weather, rising sea level and melting ice caps. Based on the current rate of temperature rise, UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change foresees the temperature to rise to 1.5oC between 2030 and 2052. We don’t really want to imagine what life would be like by then.
Environment is often overlooked, despite much noise in the global and national discussions over environment. We fail to act from an individual level. We make the bold statement: We need to save nature, but we act less. We ought to start acting first within the four walls of our house. Simple acts like avoiding plastic is a good place to start. When it’s unavoidable we must take responsibility to dispose of garbage appropriately. Even in a leading educational institution like Ashoka, we see the mixture of biodegradable and non-biodegradable waste in the same bin, although three separate bins are placed next to each other. What is painful is that even the supposedly educated act in ignorance.
In this era of consumerism and fast changing fashion, people are lured to shop more to follow trends. This leads to the accumulation of waste. Goods dumbed are actually fit for use but are branded waste. At this point, there is an urgent need to check if we are over-consuming. Although we need to find better means to produce without polluting, we are still going to demand more, buy more and thus put our resources at a risk. We must understand the need to reduce our consumption, which is the ultimate way to put less pressure on resources. This personal choice is something we need to ponder-over. As long as we want more, we will be devouring the limited resources that exist. We must comprehend that the Earth has finite resources, which can be used for our need and not for our greed as Gandhi once said. Because, there is an upcoming generation who will live on what we leave behind and we, as responsible heirs, must leave something for them.
Now is the time to reconsider; now is the time to think and now is the time to act and not merely raise our voice. It is our actions that must speak and propagate further action in the wider community. Let’s build a new sustainable world by revising our routine to incorporate responsible actions and let’s try to leave the Earth a better place.