Protecting Earth a collective responsibility
‘Only One Earth’, the theme for this year’s celebration
Only One Earth’ — whose earth is it anyway? There is a certain poignancy in the way humankind can sit and watch wars being waged like evolutionary ducks; can stockpile nuclear weapons while swallowing national interest verbiage like veritable dodos, adding ‘slow to perceive disasters’ like climate change to the ever-present probability of a nuclear holocaust that could result in mass extinction and continue to just watch. Is it possible that Homo sapiens are losing the basic urge for selfpreservation? How else can it be explained that each day there is an addition to the nuclear stockpile, which can destroy the earth 100 times over and increase in greenhouse gas emissions that scorch the planet. Perhaps the goal is to destroy the galaxy and not a mere pale blue dot of a planet!
It is in utter mockery of the environmental crisis that even as environmental challenges and nationally determined contributions are trumpeted by every country, the threat to earth’s very existence has not reduced; rather it has increased by several notches.
The year 2022 marks the 50th anniversary of Word
Environment Day (WED) and it is being hosted by Sweden under the banner Stockholm 50+.
Each year WED highlights a theme to draw attention to the environmental issues as also create global awareness around emerging challenges or to offer solutions in terms of environmental action.
Incidentally, this year’s slogan revisits the first environment day’s ‘Only One Earth’.
Around 150 species are lost every day, 10 per cent of existing life forms are lost each decade, which is 100 to 1,000 times higher than natural extinction rates. Diverse biohabitats such as coral reefs and rainforests are depleting, global climate change is causing extreme natural hazards of greater intensity of higher frequency; and all the blame turns to human kind.
It’s not helping human conscience even though the UN Secretary-General bemoaned that “man is waging a war against nature.”
The temperature rise due to greenhouse gases accumulation causing acidification of oceans, melting of icecaps, loss of biodiversity, animal and plant life, submergence of coastal areas, increase in frequency and intensity of natural hazards, human predation of world-wide food webs, rapacious over-exploitation of natural resources and pollution are almost entirely a result of human actions and humankind cannot prop a single logical alibi under the ‘development umbrella’.
Hence, the World
Environment Day is a poetic redemption of humankind as it is an acceptance of the overwhelming responsibility to protect earth. Cultures around the world recognise life as a gift of the earth and call earth a mother, Gaia.
Fifty years later, the slogan ‘Only One Earth’ reverberates closer. It has brought individuals, youth, institutions and peoples together to demand ‘sustainable development’ and ‘responsible development’.
It is but a beginning. More than isolated steps, it needs the action of the entire world as one because there is only one earth and she is our common mother.