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“We are living on the planet as if we have another one to go to”
- Terry Swearingen.
Are we moving too fast for our time? This question is an unusual one but in today's world, it's an important one. We are moving quickly with technology and industrialization. We have even extended our reach to Mars but as these things are progressing at a rapid speed.
As humanity we are forgetting important things, there are some places in the world where things are not right but yet they keep on advancing one such place in Jakarta, where the land is sinking.
You might get a glimpse of what I want to talk about yes in other words we can name this topic as:
As we advance technologically are we leaving our environment behind?
Humanity is at its peak of development. The development of humanity had begun in the early 3000 BCE for a context that was the stone age period but at certain times when humanity stepped over the stone of development something had to be sacrificed. And in the case of the stone age the thing that had to pay the prize for the development was the wildlife. As the neanderthals (human species in that era) had access to a vast variety of weapons and tools they made spears and arrows with sharp edges which they used for hunting which ultimately led to a huge decrease in wildlife but the environment took revenge by actually bringing an end to the race of Neanderthals as during the cold they had no meat (This race wasn't adjusted to eating veggies like we are ) so that ultimately led to their extinction. Anyway the conversation is driving us off the topic.
Currently, we are at our peak. We have everything that is almost needed for a possibly comfortable life on this planet. We have proper clothing, food, water, and of course artificial intelligence.
But as I had mentioned at the beginning of this article we are forgetting important things such as our environment.
We use natural resources in our daily life almost every second but when it comes to contributing back we can’t even keep up it is estimated that humans daily extract tonnes of natural but without one of us knowing we use up to 8 tonnes of natural resources per year and 22 kg per day. If we were to calculate the minerals that were used to extract these resources then we use up to 40 kg per day the number of resources used is split unequally through the globe.
All of us might have learned or read this somewhere in our school years if you don’t know let me tell it takes millions of years for these resources to form and per day we extract them without a limit and use it for our personal purposes. Such as a fuel for machinery the amount of carbon that is released into the atmosphere when extracting them goes unnoticed. For an instance let me give you examples so that you can understand better where Co2 has hit worse and the people over there are suffering:
● China: 10.8 million metric tons
● United States : 5.1 million metric tons
● European Union : 3.5 Million metric tons
● India: 2.5 million metric tons
● Russia: 1.8 million metric tons
● Japan : 1.3 million metric tons
● South Korea: 0.67 metric tons
● Iran: 0.67 million metric tons
● Saudi Arabia : 0.64 million metric tons
● Canada: 0.61 million metric tons
Although it may appear that these countries are enveloped in a layer of Carbon dioxide that’s not the case. There are certain places in these countries where pollution is at its highest. For example Delhi the capital city of India is considered as world’s most polluted capital. This is because of the number of thermal plants and the intense presence of transportation in these areas. Almost every person has some sort of transport in this city and the burning of biomass by the farmers from the neighbouring states increases the problem. If we take a look at the list of cities which produce the maximum amount of carbon, the top 5 spots are taken by:
● Mumbai
● Delhi
● Bangalore
● Hyderabad
● Ahmedabad
These cities have one thing in common they are mainstream urban trade areas so from the observation we can come to a conclusion that the amount of Carbon emission increases as we move to a much more urbanised settlement but altogether we produced a mind-wobbling 36.44 billion tons in 2019 add that up with every rocket launch for our explorations to Mars each rocket releases is a huge amount Carbon beyond our imagination approximately every launch 336,552 kg of Carbon dioxide.
Next, let's move to water pollution.
According to a study done by Pacific Institute, around 2 million tons of sewage is released into water bodies. This is combined with industrial waste from a population of 6.8 billion people. This was an investigation done in 2013.
The population in the world now is 7,856,143,955 and counting every second and the amount of waste dumped in these water bodies increases severely.
For decades India is considered as the country with worst water pollution nearly 80% of the water bodies in India are polluted just because the people dump raw sewage into the water. Because of this, people in certain regions don't have proper water for drinking this takes the population to rely completely on expensive sources. It is estimated that 1.5 million Indian children die from diarrhea one of the main cause is sewage released from the industries and homes which without treatment just goes into the water.
An example of this is:
1. Citarum River is the most polluted river in the world like the Ganga it also has to meet the needs of the large population. Its home country is Indonesia but unlike China and India, it's not very populous but it's still in the race for keeping its title of “The most polluted river” one of the many causes is the presence of factories through where it flows and as usual, the untreated sewage makes its way into the water.
2. The Ganga river also known as the Ganges is a sacred river for the majority of the people in India. It is said that over 2 billion people depend on the river for their daily needs. The problem of sewage is still existing over here and one of the main reasons is that it passes through cities that develop industrially very fast and usually textile factories tend to drop their sewage into the water which often left untreated.
This again comes to show us how much this planet is taking for granted. Which again brings us to our question: Are we moving too fast for our time? We have access to amazing technologies and the future looks bright with the introduction of electric cars and solar panels. I am certain we can enter a new age where we can improve technologically as well as take care of our planet and rectify the mistakes made in the past.
- Mizhab.p.shaji, The New Era
