“Mother Earth.”
We have been using these two words together since I remember. But it was only recently that I realized the meaning and the emotions associated with it. We call her mother because just like a mother, she nourishes us, provides us with the healthiest produce of food like our own mother breastfeeds us.
Our mothers keep us in their womb, we breathe through her and live in her for nine months. Isn’t that something? Just how miraculous that is, mother earth’s contribution is, for her children. It is a sacred oath to humanity, to thrive is no less than a sacrifice mothers make for her children. It has promised us a supply of food and oxygen until we breath our last and a warm place to rest, which is her arms after we die.
Isn’t that enough? Has she not done enough for us?
Now you must be wondering why I’m suddenly so emotional. For that, here’s a flashback for how I ended up writing this piece.
I left my job as a digital marketer in January. I was sure I would soon get a new job and be back to work in no time. But, our beautiful planet had different plans for me, it presented me with the pandemic. It gave me a pretty valuable lesson to not take anything for granted because we cannot predict what tomorrow has in store for us.
Most of these days, I lie on my bed, ignoring the world outside and diving into the digital world, scrolling through Instagram. “The world at your fingertips,” somebody predicted it rightly, I have the whole world navigating through this small screen in front of me.
But today, the thing that stopped me from scrolling ahead (which rarely happens, trust me) was a post with the heading– “Indian Scientists Make Space Bricks With Urea For Buildings On Moon.” A proud moment right? Science has advanced so much that we can now build houses on the moon. This is coming from a species which took its first step into outer space under half a century ago. The way science has progressed in the last three centuries has given us more than we could have imagined.
I couldn’t stop but ponder over all the things that science and technology have given us – It lit up our homes, made travel so easy, fast, convenient, it made our life so easy and luxurious. It gave us fast cars, made countries feel secure, gave us fast fashion, the internet (I am using it right now), social sites, machine, vaccines, medication, and whatnot.
But, the line in the article that caught my eyes was this: “With Earth’s resources dwindling rapidly, scientists have only intensified their efforts to inhabit the moon and possibly other planets.” After reading that, the thoughts that clouded my mind weren’t that pleasant.
Great ideas in the hand of stupid minds will work as weapons, and that’s what I managed to find over my research. Over the past few centuries, we also had the Ebola virus, two world-shaking world wars, nuclear weapons destroying the whole damn cities, terrorist attacks (made easy with high tech weapons), industrialization because of which the net forest loss in 2010–2020 was 7 million hectares per year (report by Global Forest Resources Assessment 2020).
To satisfy our hunger we have increased animal agriculture ( a technical term for breeding and grazing animals for meat & eggs ) to a level that now it’s generating 51% of greenhouse gas emissions and the irony is we still have most precious Climate Changes talk in an airconditioned hall where our prestigious guests eat the most refined version of ‘Wague’ because nothing but the best for them.
If that’s not alarming enough, then please know that scientists estimate that 150-200 species of plant, insect, bird, and mammal become extinct every 24 hours. This is nearly 1,000 times the natural or background rate. It is more significant than anything the world has experienced since the vanishing of the dinosaurs almost 65 million years ago.
The industrialization has been the core cause for increasing the Earth’s temperature since early 1900. As per the article published in the World Wildlife Organization, even if we significantly curb emissions in the coming decades, more than a third of the world’s remaining glaciers will melt before the year 2100. When it comes to sea ice, 95% of the oldest and thickest ice in the Arctic is already gone.
As per Nat Geo Article, If carbon emissions go unchecked, the average global temperature could rise 9 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. That could doom more than three-quarters of Antarctica’s emperor
I may be way out of my specialization here to comment but industrialization should have been used to make our lives easy & cut down on world hunger. As per a report by UN in 2018, 821 million people now hungry and over 150 million children stunted. Today we are most advanced than we have ever been. What is the point of the advancement if it’s making the condition of our planet worse and keeping people hungry?
The scientists know that our planet is on the verge of becoming uninhabitable, and the current pandemic is the most real example that our last 3 generations have ever seen. We have been violating the rules that mother nature has set for us and now when it all has been done with, we are leaving it all behind, looking for a new place to call our home.
Do you think abandoning your mother in the time of crisis is right? You tell me.