I woke up the other day and found myself fretting, as ever, about my commute to office, the day at work, dinner and keeping my circadian clock in rhythm. When I come to think of it, this thought goes on subconsciously everyday in my mind. Well, now on a grander scale, this is what most of us go through each day - ask your friends & colleagues if you will. What we forget to fret about is our health and principally the health of this planet - "our very home". Given that the increasing waistlines raise the hair on the back of our necks and we find ourselves (maybe more often than not) clad in sneakers and a workout outfit, sweating in the gym. But what about our planet's health? Who's taking care of it? She is ill enough already of human activity to be taken to the ICU!
We have become immune to the thought that one day we will exhaust the resources (much quicker than we think) and then we'll have no where to go - I mean not even to an asylum anywhere. I reckon the problem starts at a very local level. How many times we have witnessed a car, a bike, a scooter, an auto, a truck, a bus belching out a thick plume of black smoke? Doesn't it add to ecological destruction? But so absorbed we are being ignoramus that we let it go by and turn a blind eye to it.
Scientists and environmentalists say that Arctic will be lost in a matter of decades. Galciers will melt away right before our eyes. Rivers will run dry and some will overflow to greet our cities with floods. Smog will curtain our city skies. The sea level is increasing (by 2040 Maldives will sink!) Great Barrier Reef will die in 10 years. We have heard it all but choose to take no cognizance. Perhaps if you still don't want to believe in all the trite reminders then just consider what has been happening of late to our weather pattern. Last year (in North India) monsoons brought an overwhelming deluge and this year it has been a draught situation. Summers used to be less harsh few years back, but are fully realizing their glory now. Winters are becoming shorter and laconic. But all these fail to move our society out of comfort zone and get down thinking in a responsible way about what we should actually be doing.
The upcoming Copenhagen Climate Summit is surely a step forward, but we all know that those people are not meeting to discuss how to stop the climate change (the irreversible damage has been done), but how to prolong the life of this sustainable ecology employing a life-support-system of mutual understanding (if it exists at all). The Nature is a sustainable system that unfortunately is not engineered to grow like our voracious economies. Our economic social model is the subsystem, which is stretching the resources and annexing the parent economy - Nature. The weapons of mass destruction today are not the Nukes but the heedless environment-insensitive activities of human beings. The ultimate consequence of our bringing about the global warming is that the temperature increase might become self-sustaining, if not already! Well I guess this becomes undisputedly the upshot of humankind's wise thinking.
The planet will survive and can survive well without us, as it did earlier. It has aged for 5 Billion years and will age for another 5 Billion years (I'm being over-optimistic assuming our red dwarf Sun won't wolf us down!), evidently without human beings, for we are orchestrating and hastening up our own extinction. The problem lies in the way we all are thinking right now and waiting for the tipping point, the inflection point to be reached and go scramble at the last moment - only to be decimated by Mother Nature!!
