Today
being the World Environment day – 100s of messages are being spread in social
media and I am sure 100s of announcements will be made to save the environment.
Quoting from the Nature Journal, 2019 –
“Humans — rather than a giant
meteor or a super-volcano — will be behind Earth’s next mass extinction. Future
population growth along with economic development will be humanity’s fatal
flaws, bringing about “unprecedented levels of extinction risk. Human population
growth has increased by 130 percent in the last 50 years, putting incredible
pressure on the natural world, according to the site.
“The
ever-increasing and unprecedented extent and impact of human activities on land
and in the oceans over the past few centuries has dramatically reduced global
biodiversity, There
is overwhelming evidence that habitat loss and fragmentation, over-exploitation
of biological resources, pollution, species invasions and climate change have
increased rates of global species extinctions to levels that are much higher
than those observed in the fossil record.”
The phenomenon called “development” by killing natural
resources is evident globally and no country is left-behind by that. However,
will my limited knowledge and discussions with few experts over the years; the
maximum harm is being done in India and few other countries like China.
The biggest failure for us in India is neither we have realized
that rapid population growth and pollution are biggest threat to survival in
the country nor we acknowledge that this needs to be tackled at war-footing. As the resources are limited and being depleted. Number of trees per person in India is among the lowest in the world.
The farms, agriculture land and trees are being totally wiped out
for so-called development of constructing buildings. The greed of everyone is
such in this whole mass-murder of natural resources that policy makers and
implementers, builders’ mafia and everyone involved is continuously and
alarmingly exploiting these resources for their own benefits.
Just one example to see is that Gurgaon the most polluted
city in the world in 2018 has a limited and small stretch of Aravali forest and
hills nearby – which may give them some breathing air at times – but the
Haryana government has the audacity and foolishness to pass an order in 2018 to allow
construction in that area (whereas Supreme Court of India marked it as a
reserve area). The people who are supposed to take care of the environment are
the one’s who are taking lead to destroy it. In past there have been 220% rise
in breathing related disease in this NCR region.
Anyone who travels by highways in India can vouch that
rapidly nature has been widely killed across the country for construction.
The disaster in Uttarakhand near Kedarnath few years back
was a result of this greed and uncontrolled constructions by removing essential
forest and mountains.
Its actually such an alarming situation in India that repeatedly
it is highlighted that world’s top most polluted cities are in India and the
resources like water will soon become scarce.
I am not sure what kind of disaster are we waiting for in
the country to happen. It will not happen over-night as the citizens of the
country are not even aware of the alarming situation and even if some of them
are – they hardly take individual or collective actions to save the nature from
being exploited daily and every minute.
It should start immediately at individual levels, local
communities – with government taking policy and implementation role. Otherwise
we do not need any rocket-science to prove that extinction of human race will
start from India soon – if not started already!
So rather than circulating the messages on World Environment
day and liking them – act now as an Individual ! Not from tomorrow – now and
immediate…
