Earth, air, and ocean, glorious three – Robert Montgomery.
We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.
– Native American saying
Our Earth is a speck in the vast stretch of the cosmos, infinitesimal in material content compared to the mind-boggling mass of the universe. Our awesome abode hurtles through space, carried around the galactic center by our central star at 220 km a second. During its four plus billion years of existence, planet Earth has seen countless transformations: continents have shifted, rocks have been compressed and metamorphosed, hills and mountains have risen and fallen, streams and rivers have been forged and dried up, ice ages have come and gone. Through processes not fully clear, the miracle of life emerged.
After our distant ancestors became self-aware and questioning, conquered fire and invented the wheel, they learned to manipulate matter and energy. Other life forms came under their sway. In a couple of million years, humans became cleverer and more creative. Land and water, birds and beasts, elements and compounds, savannah and tundra, the heat of the deserts and the cold of the poles, fruits and flowers and minerals deep down, coal and oil and gas, even the mighty bonds that bind atoms and nuclei, all came under human control. In an orgy of exploitation and consumption for creature-comforts and monetary gains we unwittingly began to ruin the beauty of nature and the safety of our environment.
In the nineteenth century some perceptive thinkers like John Ruskin and Mohandas K. Gandhi were warning that rampant technology might not be the healthiest path to prosperity that it seemed to be. Yet, for many decades the world wallowed in the gadget-greed of technology, reveled in gas-guzzling vehicles, and destroyed pests with massive doses of DDT. In the process water and land are polluted, industrial smokestacks belch out toxic gases in the air, radioactive wastes are lurking around, rain forests are depleted, some species are made extinct, the ozone layer is cracked, coral reefs are smashed, seas become dumping grounds for wastes, acid is injected into rain-bearing clouds Oh, the sad list goes on and on!
Then, in 1962, came Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring: a modern Book of Revelation. It alerted us of the multiple ways in which Homo industrialis is committing slow suicide by poisoning the very air, water and land that are sustaining us in our only home in the boundless Void. Just as the wisdom-traditions of humanity had revered the forces of nature for making life possible, a new awareness emerged: environmental consciousness.
Thanks to the initiative of Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin and his co-workers, April 22, 1970 was declared Earth Day. The idea led to the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency. Like anti-racism, the movement spread beyond the borders of the U.S. Today more than 150 nations observe Earth Day in various ways.
It is sometimes said that we are destroying the earth. This is an ego-centric appraisal of what we are doing, for we can never destroy the earth. A billion years from now, long after we are dead and gone, the earth will be dancing merrily along its elliptical orbit to the music of Keplerian symphony. All we can do is to destroy ourselves, not the earth.
One may wonder, why don’t we stop this suicidal behavior? Our economic and international networks have evolved in such a way that even with much goodwill and determination it is not easy to halt the harm we are wreaking. Efforts to control pollution often adversely affect jobs and profits: livelihood and prosperity. Moreover, the doom implicit in reckless technology will hit hard only generations yet unborn.
We must act in sure and quick ways to dampen the damage and reverse the trends. We must transcend national and communal conditionings and think in planetary terms. What is at stake is not the well-being of this nation or that religious group, this political party or that place of pilgrimage, but the fate of the human family. Racism, religious bigotry, ideological intolerance, and economic self-aggrandizement are major threats to our existence. In our inability to perceive Earth as a habitat for humanity to be shared and nurtured by one and all, including other creatures of the planet, we are upsetting the ecological balance.
Enlightened governments, sensible industrialists and realistic ecologists are dedicated to resolving the problems that we all face together. Through education, understanding, and enlightened values, through legislation and reasoning, and with the resources of science and technology, many are striving to increase awareness of the assault on nature that humans have been perpetrating. Yet, many also seem to be unmoved.
Our beautiful and life-sustaining Earth with its greens and browns and the grand old sea, yielding fruits and flowers, grains and ground-nuts, with majestic mountains and abundant forests, holds us dearly to itself with the right amount of gravitation: strong enough to enable crocodiles to crawn , centipedes to creep, fish to swim, birds to fly, grasshoppers to hop, frogs to leap, kangaroos to jump and humans to walk and run. Our Earth seems to have been marvelously designed by God or Nature. It certainly deserves our love and veneration.
One day is devoted every week to the Sun, one to the Moon, and one to each of five non-telescopically visible planets, plus one to the Sun and one to the Moon. But only once a year do we have Earth Day. We must observe and celebrate every day as Earth Day by treating our planet less harshly and more gently.
Spurts of Thought 