Let us imagine, there is one person, who lives alone in a cave, and hunts wild animals for living. Gradually that person starts a family, his needs grow, and this goes on for some time. But human mind is full of curiosity. He had the most basic things he needed. But his brain won’t accept. He starts to discover and invent new things. He develops his own language, and starts to spread it. There is growth and development everywhere, it was like a revolution. Slowly and gradually this person who lived in caves, had been able to shift his next generation from caves to villages, then to cities, and metropolitans. The hunger of his brain never stopped. Though he had achieved a lot, from making a needle to launching itself into space. But that mind has turned into a self- destructive evil. People start to live under stress, they have everything, but still there is always space for more.
Between the concept of our needs and desires, there is a very thin line; and in the cross border tussle between the two; the idea of sustainable development was long reduced to merely an illusion. This concept of sustainable development was not there in the first place, we took mother earth for granted, believing that the resources are far beyond than what we can consume, and in the beginning it was truth, earth gave us a lot. But then human population had grown at a rate beyond the capability to calculate it and realize it. Eventually the resources started to fade away, only then did some people started to talk about sustainable development. The damage has been done, though many people are doing their share, but the gap that was made by generations and generations, is not going to be filled by the effort of a few people, or even few thousand. But it still doesn’t mean that we don’t start. An ocean was never the way it is today, it is the collective effort of millions of drops, and probably one of them would have taken the initiative.
Further there is a question of morality as well, every individual thinks that there is enough for him; he can survive at least for his lifetime. So why do he need to control his desires for the sake of others; for people who have not even born yet. Let me have the privilege to acknowledge the very fact that we named our self ‘humans’ and defined the term ‘humane’ as ‘kind, reasonable, rational’ must not have been a coincidence. It is what is expected out of us, to be the ultimate. Further in the light of how we define our self, our responsibility is not just towards our next generation, but towards mother Earth as well, who has made this life possible, who has given us so much and never expected something in return.
If we look at the amount of waste we generate, it’s humongous but what is more horrifying is the way we dispose it off. And what concerns the environmentalists more is that a large quantity of this waste was not even required in the first place; blind exploitation of the resources. Every year 500 millions of ready-made clothes go into waste because they were beyond our consumption power, not just this, thousands of tons of
Food, water, paper, electronic waste is dumped because of no use of it. So, we can rephrase it as that our resources are less than our consumption, and our consumption is far less than our generation.
Have you ever wondered that why the deer are in less quantity than the grass, and why the lions or tigers are less than the number of deers. It is actually a simple law of nature, to control the amount of consumption, you need to keep the consumers less. But we have gone ahead of our-self, we are headed towards a complete collapse. We have started taking things for granted and lost our control over nature because of our over-dependence on it and now we are facing a dangerous situation where we don’t know what the results might be or the effects it will leave on us. It is high time that we start pondering about the repercussions we would face once the balance between the nature and human society will be completely blighted.
The economic world might be ruled by the MNCs, but it still depends highly on the consumer, the advertisement industry offers the shoulder from which these MNCs aim their gun from. And time and again it lures us to be extravagant and we continue to ravish our-self without a single thought of the environment. But if we wish we can stop it, the question is how? These companies cannot be stopped, they provide employment to thousands of people, who consume so less of the resources, and if these companies are shutdown altogether, these people might not even be able to consume the bit they do now. Global poverty and hunger continues to rip away humanity from more souls than we can count. It’s not like putting 2 and 2 together, the situation has become complex, the more we try to think and dis-entangle it the more we bury our-self into other concerns. We cannot just cut the root and not care about the branches and leaves.
We should all take a step forward and move a little back, slow a bit down, waste a little less, because this time the crisis are upon on mother earth, and let’s not forget that the first species who need to prove itself humane is humans itself , so
Let the rain pour little longer do we hold
Survive a little more, and die a little old.
Author(s) Name: Muskan (Panjab University Regional Centre, Ludhiana)
