Article by – Shishir Tripathi

Intern at Hariyali Foundation
In collaboration with
Educational News

Day after day, the planet is proceeding to fall into the ocean of destruction. Each day factories are releasing poisonous smoke and harmful effluents in the nature. As it is said there is pre defined limit of everything, nature too has a limit to accept destruction and degradation of the environment. The day is coming nearer and nearer when the nature will revert back with the same intensity in the form of natural disasters and human beings will not be in a state to do anything.

Each day a new factory opens up. Each day, each firm tries to increase its production as compared to the previous day. Each day millions of litres of water in the rivers and other water bodies gets polluted by industrial and domestic waste. But everyone is so engrossed into earning money and increasing GDP and profit that human beings have assumed that they’re owners of the natural resources or environment. Human beings should realize that they are part of nature, they’ve to live their lives being just a responsible organism and go away. But in the mean process of making money and wealth people forgot that nature is suffering and natural resources being limited in amount will end up one day.

Almost 80.6 million cars are sold each year all across the world. Cars and automobiles use fuel (which is again limited in amount in nature) and release harmful gases into the air like Carbon Monoxide (CO), nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons and many more. Each year the number of automobiles on roads is increasing, and due to which more harmful gases are released in nature, hence more pollution.

Between 1990 and 2016, the world lost 502,000 square miles (1.3 million square kilometers) of forest, according to the World Bank—an area larger than South Africa. Since humans started cutting down forests, 46 percent of trees have been felled, according to a 2015 study in the journal Nature. Millions of hectares of forests are clearing up each year by things like deforestation, forest fires, etc. But readers, when it comes to plantation, people turn back and are with no answers. Each year in India, government employees have to plant a sapling and take care of it, but the sapling is given water and care only till the plantation is captured in the camera. After that, nobody cares about the plant, the tree whether it gets dried because of shortage of water or gets eaten upon by cattle. Forest cover is reducing resulting in excess heating of the atmosphere, climate change and lesser oxygen which is the lifeline of every living organism.

Another aspect is population growth. The 2016 average of 18.6 births per 1,000 total populations equates to approximately 4.3 births per second or about 256 births per minute for the world. Births are taking place at an increased rate and resources are limited for the survival of the upcoming generations. The uncurbed and heavy usage of natural resources is going to leave the reserves of natural resources to be empty. The future generations have to face excessive climate change and have to starve even for getting water and food grains. Each day, the load on natural resources is increasing. The goal of sustainable development is just achieved maybe in figures or news. But in reality people are exploiting the nature at an aggregate level altogether just in the name of growth but actually satisfying their greed.

Greed to earn more, to own more.

But yes everyone wants more and more from nature, but never want to give anything to the nature. Some great people came, started successful campaigns for nature and went away. But now a generation is left which wants all the credit and all the popularity even after doing just a small noble deed for nature and its organisms. People just want to extract everything from nature and want to get the attention by clicking a picture sitting beside a small sapling showing plantation or standing with plastic showing cleanliness campaign.

Each human being should realize their responsibility towards nature. Economists say that inflow or the imports must be equal to the outflow or the exports, and then only equilibrium can be established. Similarly, whatever is taken from nature, it must be returned back to the nature in the same or even greater amounts. Mentioning all the environment saving techniques is not worthy as till the time people will not realize their participation in saving nature and building a good planet, no list of techniques and no piece of writing will be able to move them and get concerned for the nature.

Attempts to save nature at an individual level will soon turn out to be major attempts at aggregate level that will be helping to save the earth and the leaving a much better planet for survival of the future generations.

The author expects that all the readers of this article, being a sensible and responsible human being, should realize the need for saving the nature, for saving the Earth.