The Climate is Changing. The Globe is warming. South America is being hit by larger storms and hurricanes. Iceland is experiencing unprecedented rain resulting in mudslides. Some parts of Australia are being drained by a third successive year of drought. An iceberg the size of several hundred thousand football fields has broken off Antarctica and is adrift. Tropical forest fires are springing up routinely in Asia, South America, and Africa burning away thousands of hectares of pristine jungle.
Ozone depletion, greenhouse gases, Paris Agreement, carbon sequestration, renewable energy, and several other terms feature in the news and reports on a daily basis like some celebrities.
I realized how little I know about all this and even less about a lot more related to our beautiful planet, dressed in her turquoise oceans and emerald forests and adorned with her scintillating species of animals. She and the layers of the environment surrounding her bring us rain and snow and sunshine. She nourishes us, feeds us, protects us and we are speeding on, on our mission to strip her bare, expose her, and bring down hell on all life on earth.
Individuals, communities, industries, and governments are waking up each day and protesting, pleading, garnering support, being inventive, acting consciously, making changes to their life and lifestyle, meeting, deliberating, writing and re-writing policy, and a lot more. All of this in their attempts to slow down, alter and pause the impending but unknown doom we are heading towards, but yet striving undeterred and carrying the hope of seven billion people.
But of course, not all individuals, communities, industries, and governments share the same perspective. They believe very fervently that all of this happening around us is all normal and just blimps on the giant scale of things and definitely not indicative of systematic faults. Even though they are isolated in these beliefs, they stand strong on their stance. And they are steadfast in their pursuit of a greater good for mankind and higher economic growth boosted by raging furnaces of industry, the depletion of fish stock, the tearing down of ancient trees, drilling of holes in new and untainted territories all in the inexhaustible search of more.
Then perhaps there is also that sliver of a population, whose perspective itself aligns with the majority but who believe life is theirs to live and they shall live that life in all of its potential glory, even at the cost of future generations.
Luckily, I belong to the majority population knowing very well that we are on the downhill road but unfortunately at the same time either doing very little or knowing not how and what to do either in most cases. And I daresay that I am not alone in this position of being enlightened and yet inactive.
So, I thought I would read, learn, and educate myself. And follow that up with present solutions, the truth, and efficacy of these and potentially provide alternatives when required. Thus, I hope to prepare the tools for my own contribution, and hopefully, in the process of my own self-education and creating a role for myself in this universal struggle I can perhaps also take along others on this path.
There are other things besides Climate Change and Global Warming, matters of equally urgent importance that are causing the slow and painful death of our planet. Our growing battle with mountains of waste and plastic that has overrun landfills leached into the soil, and created floating islands of trash. The increasing demands of the growing population on our collective finite resources are resulting in practices that are far from sustainable. I have an illustration for these subjects, not complete or final yet though.
So, I intend to look at a lot of these subjects in the course of my learning and shall share all of them here.
