Why It Matters
We are all in this together. Whichever nation or state we belong to, wherever we might live, climate change impacts us all. Our world is heavily divided and polarized into left or right, rich or poor, educated or uneducated, believers or non-believers, however climate change caused by human activities is a common thread that runs through the entire world and impacts every one of us.
Our planet is gradually warming and is currently in the middle of a simmering climate crisis, which exhibits itself in the form of droughts, intense heat waves, wildfires, hurricanes, flooding, and rising sea levels. This poses an existential threat to the very life on this planet, including to humans. Parts of the world are already uninhabitable and unsuitable for agriculture. Within this crisis lies, however, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us all to put aside our divisions and unite under one cause.
Enough scientific evidence is now available to show convincingly that climate change is due to a build-up of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, which has resulted from burning of fossil fuels over the last 200 years. Increased greenhouse gases in our atmosphere retain extra heat reflected from the earth’s surface, resulting in what is known as global warming. Continuing use of fossil fuels is therefore causing a dangerous interference with the earth’s natural climate. This in nutshell is climate change.
Fossil fuels have literally fueled our global economy for the last two centuries. But now it’s time for us to wean ourselves away from them.
Today, we have the cost-effective renewable energy solutions (solar, wind, hydrogen) available to us, but not yet the political or individual will. Scientists serving on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tell us that we have less than a decade to rein in global warming and limit the irrevocable damage to our climate to levels that we and nature might still be able to adapt to.
Therefore, it is critical that we use the climate crisis to pivot to inclusive and just green economy instead of continuing to react to natural disasters, in the process causing untold misery and costing our economy billions of dollars. There is also an urgent need to restore degraded wildlife habitats, stop overharvesting, and give our forests and oceans a chance to recover. We know that Nature is resilient and will recover quickly if we just give it a chance.
Finally, this question: why is man’s relationship with Nature so antagonistic? Why do we feel that we can control, manipulate, and destroy nature, yet remain insulated from the effects? Why is it that we feel no regret in cutting down forests that sustain our lives to set up cattle farms, put up self-storage units, parking lots and shopping malls? It may be that we do not understand our own origins and relationship to nature. Perhaps because of how we live in urban settings, it is easy to feel disconnected and forget that first and foremost we exist inside the natural ecosystems not outside of them. Since we are at the top of the ecological food chain, if we destroy nature, we destroy ourselves.
Only a living earth can sustain our lives and those of the future generations.
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