W Environment Day:We Have Only One Earth And Lets Protect It From The Irreversible Decline In Its Health
By D N Singh
Time is running out fast and there is hardly any room for celebrations. We all know nature restores itself but with a vengeance. But now the nature seem to be in an emergency mode, to restore itself. The earth is heating up very fast.
Slogans are not going to ameliorate the situation where to keep the further warming checked and keep it below 1.5 degree Celsius.
Making it a day for observation to create awareness as how to protect the earth, the United Nation’s initiative for World Environment Day, in 1973, was, in fact, a delayed slogan because, by then, the earth had lost many thing precious and irreplaceable.
Merely by customary holding an annual event in the name of environment cannot help checking the dangerous greenhouse gas emission even by half by another 30 years to come.
There may be billions of galaxies and planets but we have only one earth, which today faces a planetary emergency. An emergency which had been signaled by the nature more than fifty years back. Many species have been extinct already and a million more face the threat of extinction as environmental pollution continues to poison the air we breathe and the water we drink.
Why on the planes, the acts of the pollution has reached at the highest point of the earth i.e Mount Everest, which today suffers from an overload of trash. So toxic has become the situation there that, it has threatened watersheds and life of people and the polar species.
It now appears a distant reality that the existing structure of economic and social structures are moving far away from being an inclusive and further connected with the nature.
Without the required symbiosis and shift in the social and economic approach, we have been harming the planet.
Oceanic disasters in the past have proved that, there was a serious lacking in the foresight to protect the green cover and it was systematically being ravaged in the altar of progress and development.
Pollution kills even the healthy and steps at checking the pollution has somehow halted. The nations being addressed as the developed ones, like US, UK and many European nations are today being branded as the historically most polluting countries.
For whom economic and social advancement is more a priority than being in synch with the nature.
Without precautions, continuous exposure to air pollution beyond safe guidelines may increase by 50 per cent within another one decade and, importantly, the plastic waste directly flowing into the aquatic ecosystem may increase by 50 per cent by 2040s, studies made by #OnlyOneEarth reveal.
