Nature's Call

Hi friends! Thank you very much for tolerating my attempts of blogging! And so here I am again. After the last post, I was wondering if the grossness of the Haitian catastrophy beamed over the news networks around the world somehow enveloped the bigger picture of the crisis facing the world today !!! Why? Well because 6 months from now another disaster would have happened and the world will react in shock and sympathy, with relief measures from rich countries, UN making the headlines, candle-light prayers across the world and few making small gestures through blogs such as this.......this is the way the human world reacts to natural disaster.....but after a while the rubble gets cleared, charity is done, relief camps are set up and we get back to our usual business.......everyday business involving urbanizing forests and lakes, looting nature with drills and dynamites, wasting water and electricity, jamming up sanitation pipes with plastic, transforming the troposphere into a smoke chamber, keeping poachers in business with our exotic desires and refusing to face up to a grim future awaiting us!

Hmm, and what might that future be? Well, how about a time when drinking water would be costlier than jewelery? Or fuels rationed weekly, green parks as luxury hang-outs, simulated forest safaris and cage-less zoos with fossil enclosures? Better still, how about taxes on the oxygen we breathe in, patentable cloud-making technology, artillery for breaking waves or cars lining up at solar power stations? I know it sounds straight out of a "Day after tomorrow" kind of flick.......but let us think a bit harder on the following facts....They say that the third world war, if fought, would be .....no, not for land or oil...it will be for sweet water sources! Oil will almost run out of stock in the next 50 years, and natural gas a little later. Already chartered parks (with entry fees), much like oases, are staring to crop up in the concrete desert of metro cities. The entire forest cover of a big country like India is likely to vanish in the next 30 years. 50 animal species have become extinct in the last 100 years, with many more about to. Oxygen might be the fastest depleting(%) component of the air we breathe, and solar power looks like the only realistic hope for clean energy. Yes, my friends, these are some reasonably accurate facts.....and we need to know them....not as hi-tech environment scientists or policy-makers or business tycoons....but maybe as just responsible world citizens, who would like their kids and grandkids to inherit a planet worth living on !!!

"Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished." -Lao Tzu

p.s: It's now 7 am, and the street-lights haven't yet been turned off.......