Wednesday 2 May 2012

From greens to grays

Once we were green.
Land, when viewed from the window of a plane gave you a green experience. The human species then used to have gardens with trees and not just few flower pots and grass. People didn't have to watch discovery channel to see what a forest looked like, they just drove off a few miles with their children, who could differentiate between a pet dog and a wild dog with ease. Public gatherings, a source of actual social bonding (unlike Facebook) took place under a huge banyan tree. You could easily spot a tree with the sacred red thread or 'dhaaga' wound on it. Sunlight filtering through the canopy of trees wasn't just a desktop wallpaper then.

Now, we have gone gray.

My younger cousin hasn't seen any snake outside a zoo (it’s not healthy to have a snake in your garden, but still!), or a sparrow sitting on a gulmohar tree, tweeting as the sun pulls up the horizon. He was almost ecstatic when he came to my house, seeing the trees in my garden. He climbed up and down a guava tree innumerous time and kept on saying that I had a superb garden. Next day, he called me saying he told his school friends about his 'adventure', and they were fascinated by it! Imagine a child fascinated just by imagining what climbing a tree would feel like!

 Deforestation has taken a toll on our environment, and, if the current changes appear to be too small to the thick skinned, we will soon feel the heat.

Ok, if there's a need to broaden a road for an ambitious corporate corridor project, or we have to clear an area for mining the most wanted mineral, or have to build a dam to power the dreams of thousands of people, go for cutting trees. But rarely, as it’s quite evident, has there been re-plantation against such massive deforestation.

We cut trees so that we can properly utilize the space for development works. If so, I would like to ask: is there anything that can purify so much air? Give out so much life supporting oxygen? Hold on to the soil so hard? Support life of such variety of animals and birds? Bring about rain so frequently? Cool the environment so effectively? Give out such wide area of restful shadow? And do all of this for so long without the need of any maintenance? If at all there exists a machine than can do all of this in a space even comparable to the little space a tree takes, will it be able to work without any external energy source? If so, then I’ll myself assist, as much possible, to eliminate trees from the surface of earth and replace them by these wonder machines!

Had man been given the power that Mother Nature enjoys, we would not have been alive, or better say, we would never had even evolved from the organisms that walked the earth long ago. Trees (or better say solar power plants) would have been all black, like the color of present age solar panels. What a pathetic view it would be, when one fine morning, you look out of your window to find all your garden trees black, with wires coming out of each leaf and you have a battery instead of the stem!

 Let’s get factual and logical. It isn’t that humans are the best species ever created by nature, nor are we those who have developed the most- we have only developed in a way we consider as development. As I read in one of my science books once, humans aren’t at the pinnacle of the all life forms, they are just one among millions of teeming species on earth.

So if we continue to torture our master, the nature, it won’t be sitting quite for long. It’s like abusing someone who has a gun pointed at you! It won’t take long to wipe out humans from the face of earth, just like we eradicated polio. After all, even the dinosaurs had ruled the earth before they got extinct.

Better, beware!

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