Our Earth, Our Life

Hi! this would be my first blog ever. Thanks to the world wide web, allows me to share a few thoughts with the inhabitants of this blue planet. My motivation to set up this blogging habit is to make environmental concerns a household topic. Something which compels people to consider means of co-existence sans the abuse of bountiful resources of Our Earth. 

Genesis

I suppose we can appreciate the need for a more sustainable approach to leading our lives once we are aware of how it all begun. We have come a long way since the first unit of life, a cell originated. In those days the earth had an absolutely different environment from the one we are familiar with. For starters there were no oxygen available freely! How very surprising that the molecule which defines our existence today and devoid of which no life would survive was absent in early earth. Also life as a single cell originated in water, referred as the prebiotic soup. The substance which allowed life to reproduce was arguably not DNA but RNA! and since the origin of life it really took a very long time till primates arose, some 55 million years ago.

Figure 1. The Geological time scale of earth

From frying pan to fire

"How much land does a man require" - Leo Tolstoy 

I read this fantastic short story by Tolstoy as a kid. In the age of rapid urbanisation and globalisation this story perhaps bears a significance like never before. It tells you the extent of hardships a man willingly bears, simply to acquire more land. 

Since time immemorial mankind has 3 basic necessities - food, clothing and shelter. We call the development of ingenious means to satisfy such needs, a civilisation. Mankind learnt to make fire, cook, grow crops, make crude clothes to cover themselves and eventually move out of caves into a house. Finally, here we are at the 21st century, our intelligent species has overrun the earth. This has been possible because we are the only species in this planet capable of developing ingenious means to survive the manifold challenges posed by nature. But with great power comes great responsibilities

We comfortably tend to ignore that we are not the only species traversing the blue planet and there are others too. We pump in almost 33 gigatonnes of CO2 annually, we overfish, we are responsible for massive deforestations around the world - for timber, agricultural land etc, we poach endangered species to name a few. Our utter disregard of a harmonious coexistence with the wild has cost us heavily with rising global temperatures, poor air quality, melting polar ice caps, destruction of coral reefs, extinctions of several animal species and so on.

Figure 2. Annual carbon emission data of major economies of the world.

It seems now we are back to square one, we developed technologies to make our lives easier and now the very same, used with impunity are making it difficult to survive. Thus we moved from the frying pan to the fire.

Life finds a way...

Our planet has already witnessed almost 5 mass extinctions of life!

Ordovician-Silurian extinction - 444 million years ago (mya).

Late Devonian extinction - 383-359 mya.

Permian Triassic extinction - 252 mya.

Triassic Jurassic extinction - 201 mya.

Cretaceous Paleogene extinction - 66 mya.

Being mindful of the present sorrow state of affairs we are very well digging our own graves right now. The remarkable thing which I suppose everyone is thinking right now is "We shall overcome". This is indeed true that, life will find a way to repopulate our blue planet but at what cost? 

The Triassic Jurassic extinction wiped away the entire population of dinosaurs presumably because a meteorite hit earth and resulted in drastic environmental alterations not conducive to life. Life still found a way to continue and thus began the age of angiosperms and mammals dominating the earth. After the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 the neighbouring city of Pripyat, northern Ukraine was evacuated which was home to at least 45,000 people. The place is now a ghost city and with no inhabitants therein for over 4 decades, the city is now a forest. Such instances very well prove that without human interference Life finds a way to heal.

Figure 3. Pripyat, northern Ukraine. Once a city, now a forest.
 

So, what now?

Oh good question! for starters plant as many saplings as you can. The principle reason being trees take in CO2 when they perform photosynthesis and thus forests in general acts as carbon sinks. Next on the list is consume more plant products and veggies over meat, the planet can only sustain a limited number of top carnivores. "Say No to plastic", this is an issue requiring rigorous law enforcement by the governments as well as serious commitment of individuals. Moving onwards to oceans, CO2 dissolves in water and a healthy aquatic ecosystem ensures its sequestration. This requires governments to look into undesirable activities such as overfishing, oil spills and in general any activity that might disrupt it's wellbeing. It is imperative now that the agriculture sector must also be looked into, to make the most out of limited land and stop deforestation to acquire more. Technology has now made it possible to undertake a paradigm shift towards greener and cleaner means of energy from fossil fuels. And most importantly let us join hands to conserve our biodiversity. For the diverse species are akin to rivets in any steel structure, one can only remove so many of them before the structure collapses.