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Go Green!
The Green Movement, which started in New Zealand in 1972, was very effective and changed people’s whole mindset from a mechanist to a holistic and ecological view. The Green movement can be compared with information that Copernicus gave to humankind about planets.
For the first time, people have developed feelings that Earth itself is an organism with its own metabolic needs. It is in declining health.
The World Commission on Environment popularized the concept of sustainable development in 1987. It defined sustainable development as a development that met the need of the present without stripping the Earth of its resources that the future generations would need.
A zoo in Lusaka, Zambia, described humans as the world’s most dangerous animals. Experts have categorised 1.4 million species living, with another hundred million still undiscovered.
Brandt Commission released a Brandt report which raised the question, “Are we to leave our successors a scorched planet of advancing deserts, impoverished landscapes and ailing environment?”
The Power House
Mr. Lester R. Brown, in his book The Global Economic Prospect, had named four pillars of the global economic system. Fisheries, forests, grasslands, and cropland.
According to him, humans are alarmingly using resources beyond the boundaries of sustainability. He called the forest “the powerhouse of evolution.”
World Bank estimated that we must plant five times more forest than our present plantation rate to survive the oncoming desertification. The Indian constitution, in its Article 48A, provides that the state must protect and safeguard its forest and other natural resources, but nobody respects the law.
A recent report states that Indian is losing forests at the rate of 3.7 million acres a year; however, the actual loss is eight times more. Environment degradation has reached critical levels in eighty-eight countries.
Population control is a necessary step but not if enforced with coercive measures; rather, the people should be educated to sense the danger of having too many children.
Chief Environment Officer
We humans have now acquired the world’s holistic and ecological view rather than dividing it into multiple parts. The sustainability of today is our passport to the future. It is an Era of Responsibility.
All the businessmen should get inspired by Mr. Edgar S. Woolard, who became the “Chief Environment Officer” of his company. According to Mr. Lester Brown, “We have not inherited this earth from our forefathers; we have borrowed It from our children.”
