TRY TO analyze why the environment’s health is slowly going down the slope.
God only gave us natural calamities and it is a fool’s fault if the natural world is destroyed by man’s greed, gluttony, and pride, said John Muir, a famous naturalist and nature writer.
Those “three deadly sins” led us to a world wracked with problems of pollution of all forms, greenhouse gases, improper waste management, and abuse of natural resources such as quarrying. These problems all lead to the environmentalist’s nightmare: hastened climate change.
But why do we still subscribe to this abusive lifestyle?
An answer to that is convenience. Convenience because we all want simple everyday tasks to be simplified; we want to use shortcuts and easy way-outs to solve our problems.
Here, I would like to point out several things mankind can do to slow down climate change.
When urinating in the toilet, it is “environmentally better” to use the tabo, instead of using the flush because the latter uses almost a liter of water. But when defecating, it is a different matter altogether.
Another point is recycling—through washing—excess plastic utensils that fastfood chains usually give to take-out orders. But a better solution would be not to eat beef at all because one cow can burp about 220 tons of methane per day.
In addition to that, public transportation will become a global issue for the next 50 years because of the world’s depleting fossil fuel supply. Instead of taking the car to school or work, why not use the bicycle? Did you know that if one million people rode the bike once a week they could reduce the world’s carbon dioxideemissions by 100, 000 tons per year?
On the other hand, the belief that appliances do not consume energy whilethey’re turned off is false as there is such a thing as phantom electricity, which means that energy is still being consumed if your appliance is plugged in and turned off.
Then there is this obvious fact of science that many people choose to ignore: throwing trash. The mindset that throwing away a piece of candy wrapper will not harm the planet is absurd. What if one million people throw away a piece each? Why not put that candy wrapper inside your pocket and dispose it in the proper area? In case you don’t know, it takes more than one thousand years to decompose plastics in landfills.
Lastly, if we can’t beat them, join them. Convince your friends that climate change is a fact of life. We should all be aware of the actions we take to harm the environment.
In the end, all of these methods are practical if we put our heart and mind to it. After all, we are not the only living beings that inhabit the Earth; we share this planet we call home with flora and fauna. We all breathe the same oxygen. We all need the environment to survive.
In the end, no matter how much world governments, skeptics, and corporate bigwigs discredit the apparent fact of global warming, we all have a responsibility to take care of this Earth.
As Muir put it, we are fools after all.
