It’s hot and stinky, but why?
Too long, don’t want to read? Look at the pretty pictures and skip to the bottom.
This year was hotter than the last year and the last year was hotter than the one before it. Everytime we talk about how hot it is, we bring up Global Warming so matter-of-factly that it should be scaring us. While there are people out there who still don’t want to publicly admit that they believe in the concept of it, even if we feel that it’s a usual climate change which is not in our hands and could not be possibly caused by human actions merely because of how colossal it is, I think we should still give ourselves some credit because when trees are cut down, the air in that area becomes warmer.
We have been procrastinating our role in reacting to the changes in our environment. Our population has skyrocketed within just the last century and we seek to erect more and more artificial structures on the ground by destroying the natural ones.
Most of us have plans for our lives ahead — how much we expect to earn, qualitative growth expectations from a career, a fallback plan if things ever go wrong with the job, maybe even a retirement plan, but if we keep thinking about ourselves, and meanwhile nature takes a toll — we would wake up one day to a very different world, shocked and regretful for ignoring something that has been in the making for so long. We’ve been getting glimpses of waking up like this for so many years now, but we stop caring when seasons change.
We notice when summer is warmer and winter is late in one part of the world. We also notice when winter becomes deadly in the other part, and we can’t stop ourselves from cracking jokes about how global warming is a fluke because, oh, it’s never been this cold. Well, that’s nature’s way of being satirical.
Shouldn’t this be our wake up call or are we hoping for it to stay bearable until we die so that the next generation can worry about it from there? It’s not only about how unusually hot or cold it is, it’s also about us running out of places to connect with the nature. We have lived among the elements of nature so much that we take them for granted and tend to ignore their role in balancing our emotions.
When they dwindle, it will not only be about the intolerable weather or scarcity of water, it will also be about how that loss fiddles with our capabilities of feeling empathetic and thinking rationally in an ordeal. If we lose empathy, nothing would be able to save us from what’s coming. We’ve already lost most of it on the pretext of individuality and self-serving ambitions. It’s time to get back to each other again. After all, even in saving the environment, we would have our own good in mind.
Let’s save the nature so that it can save us. At first, any measures that we would want to take in this direction will make it sound like our lives are going to be inconvenient (maybe even impossible) but we work so hard anyway in the hope of a bright career, so why can’t we go through a little change in our lives to make them better tomorrow. It’s hard to imagine living somewhere else, isn’t it?
I’m not an environmentalist and I probably contribute to global warming and pollution more than you do. I’m also lazy to dig up anything of importance that can logically make sense for me to stop doing something a particular way to save my surroundings. But I need to appreciate if you do something in that direction and not make a joke about it. And I also need to take one small step in our collective efforts towards the same.
So, I’m asking you something so that I can shamelessly copy you but at least be able to contribute less towards this degradation — what do you do to save the environment?
