Our planet, our responsibility

Earth is a beautiful living planet in the Universe and the common habitat of more than 7 billion human population and millions of species of biodiversity. Our Earth provides us with food, shelter and most of our requirements.

Despite unavoidable free services provided by the earth to humans, we are not able to pay off her kindness to us. Rather we humans are being cruel to our Earth with our selfish activities. Mahatma Gandhi said, “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed.”

Every day we produce tons of degradable and non-degradable waste, and throw it anywhere recklessly. Smoke and harmful gases from our homes, vehicles and industries are suffocating her. We are disposing of dirty sewage, drainage and even chemicals recklessly, although we know that more than 7 billion humans, along with all plants and animals in this world, rely on water for their lives. If we aren’t concentrating on saving those water resources, then in near future water may be as expensive as PETROL or one-day people may die due to thirst.

Despite huge noise by our jumbo population itself, we use loudspeakers for our entertainment & industries, airplanes or other noisy vehicles for our luxury. We destroy forests for agriculture & settlement. We build huge buildings, roads & factories beyond her carrying capacity. The establishment of nuclear reactors vastly affects the environment & human lives.

Harmful gases emitted by ACs, refrigerators, industries & vehicles are depleting ozone layer & increasing our exposure to very harmful UV rays of sun leading us towards various skin diseases, eye cataract & even cancer. Wastes like plastics & other non-degradable wastes like insecticides, pesticides, chemical fertilizers etc. highly degrade soil quality & decrease agricultural products & kills soil microorganisms & decomposers. Water pollution increases the risk of water-borne diseases like cholera, dysentery etc. and lead & arsenic highly degrade our mental ability & causes the extinction of many aquatic animals.

Air pollution causes airborne diseases like asthma in humans & animals and disturbs whole metabolism process in plants. Noise pollution causes insomnia & heart diseases in humans. Deforestation is leading to natural calamities like floods, soil erosion etc, temperature increase and changed rainfall distribution, drought, loss of valuable biodiversity, decreased oxygen density etc. The burning issues in the world at present are “Climate Change & Greenhouse Effect”.

Solutions to environmental problems are not impossible for superior creatures like humans, if they are committed. As global citizens, we have the responsibilities to our mother earth.

Our first role in nature is to reduce our own carbon footprint via eco-friendly activities, raise awareness in our peer circle, neighbourhood & the community about environment sanitation by changing degradable wastes into compost manure & by 3R principle (reduce, reuse & recycle) of non-degradable wastes.

We can create workshops with local people that air pollution can be controlled by replacing household energy sources like coal, firewood etc. by biogas, electricity or solar energy & we can negotiate with factory owners & vehicle owners to use dust & smoke purification systems in industries & vehicles & we can encourage them to use solar-energy based industries & vehicles.

We can organize environment sanitation programs & afforestation programs in barren lands. We youths can appeal the government to bring eco-friendly development policies & proper planning of cities.

We can organize orientation programs about climate change, its causes, and effects & mitigation measures in schools & colleges to induce other youths towards conservation of nature.  

Thus, for the sustainability of our planet, we must all promise to fulfil our responsibilities towards Mother Nature so as to protect our living planet from deterioration & to handover clean & green planet to our future generations.

Maybe our single efforts may seem small but if thousands of youths can unite together towards nature conservation then one day our efforts will be a drastic step to protect our motherland Earth from destruction.