This year’s theme for the World Environment Day is “Time for Nature”. When you read this phrase, it is pretty self-explanatory. If I were a storyteller looking at it, I would draw different meanings from this particular phrase. For me, it means that now it’s time for nature to reclaim the lost territory, to take back what belongs to it because nature knows that we humans have had our fair share of the resources and we clearly don’t know how to use it.
In one of the episodes, Steve Carell points out that even though it is a well-known fact that Earth is probably the only planet that can sustain life, we have casually exploited and destroyed the resources available to us and now we are in a race of trying to colonize other planets and make them habitable instead of trying to fix things here.
I remember a conversation with a very senior executive who works in the Sustainable Development sector where he said that in 10 or 20 years we will have to shift to another planet and unfortunately many of us will not be able to afford that. It’s true, you and I cannot even afford a one-way ticket to Mars. For a moment, forget about you and me, what about people living in Kiribati.
You probably haven’t even heard of this country in Oceania because of the rising sea levels which are facing a threat of being completely submerged by 2100.
We’ll probably not live long enough to see that, but do we really want our future generations to see an entire country and not just one country but many island nations like Kiribati be wiped off the world map? The youth all across the world is raising its voice against the climate crisis which was passed down to us by our elders and we surely don’t want to pass it down to our future generations.
It’s true that the lockdowns had a little effect on the pollutants’ levels and it did help a little, but all of this will be temporary if we resort to our old ways once things go back to normal. So let’s work towards permanent solutions and ways we can follow to keep this precious planet alive.