earth rant.

There were a few thoughts running in my mind about how humankind is ravaging this earth, so before I forget these wondrously negative and retributive thoughts out of my head, I think it will be a good idea for me to put them down here.

When we talk of global warming, resource crunch, loss of forest cover, change of weather patterns, what are we talking about? We talk of how we are shifting the way the planet is functioning. When we use such phrases such as destruction of the eco-system, or extinction of species, or simply how the planet is being destroyed, I think we all mean how we are changing earth the way we know it. This is not a new thought that I am articulating, but I just want to reiterate it again - we are afraid of changing the planet the way we know it. If I look at earth as just an emotionless planet in the vast universe, then what we do is inconsequential, because for all our knowledge, there could be millions of other systems like ours which are being built and destroyed as we speak. One reference that always fascinates me is that of a clock. If the clock was the life of the earth, the history of man is merely the last few seconds, or even the last second, so what happens next second could be any body's guess, and for the earth, it will be just another second! For humankind on the other hand, that next second could be the second when we all just get ahead of ourselves and just destroy our civilization.

I am a believer in the origin of species, so if you believe that we were put on this earth by a higher intelligence, you should probably stop reading this. While I firmly believe in God, I believe God exists in our minds and hearts as an entity that gives us hope when we realize that we have no control of anything around us.

Is the earth missing the pre-historic man? When I say pre-historic, I mean history as today's humankind perceives it. I doubt that the earth does. Does the earth miss the dinosaurs? I highly doubt it. In fact, for all we know, the evangelists could be right and may the dinosaur bones were put on this earth by the devil to misguide us! So perhaps in the future there will be another life form that may or may not be similar to us, may or may not have the same power of thought and abilities, that will be scraping through the rocks and mounds in the earth to look for bones of the current homo sapien. So we will be their dinosaurs!

Yesterday I was taking a few print outs at work and I noticed the pile of waste paper in a box next to the printer. Every day, kilos of paper is discarded the same way, and I wish whenever I look at it that our company is waste conscious enough to diligently recycle all this paper wasted every day. For a company with so many thousands of employees and dozens of locations, one can imagine that the amount of paper discarded daily will be in tonnes, and when you imagine that there are thousands of such organizations around the world with the same paper usage and wastage patterns, then you can well imagine that every day, many million tonnes of paper is simply wasted or discarded. Add to it news print, brochures, paper used in books, notebooks, paper cups, oh, and even toilet paper, the whole unimaginable volume of this paper makes we wonder how in the world are we able to procure the raw material to generate so much paper!

And what will happen when the earth just can't support the production of so much paper? Any company worth its PR harps on how it is trying to save paper, adding little signatures in their employees email id about refraining from printing the email and all that, but I know from my own company that there is absolutely no effort made to create any employee awareness on how to save paper and basically cut down on consumption while at work. A lot of paper and other resources at work is wasted simply because of ignorance. It is quite true that most people don't even realize their habit to litter and create unnecessary waste.

Well, I suppose I have nothing else to say except regurgitate my own belief, that I will wait for this kind of world that we are living in today to run its course and wait for some epochal life style changing events to happen. The sad part, once again is that while so many millions will have lived the entire life cycle of gratuitous consumption, billions will continue to live in poverty and without resources, as the world's food crisis and resources crunch keeps getting more inimical to human survival. But at the same time, I know that what we fear is that we (the modern people in developed countries and the haves in the developing nations) will lose the earth as we know it today, with our levels of consumption and production. That's fine with me, I think, but what I do believe in most certainly is that humankind is simply not capable of destroying the planet, because it is way more capable and smart to survive our onslaught.

We need to get back to the ways of living with the attitude of nature as a friend, and this freakin western philosophy that the earth is something to be tamed and mastered is absolute hogwash. Perhaps the people thousands of years ago worshipped the earth not because they were afraid or anything, but they lived as one with what surrounded them.