Saving the Environment 🌴

 

Hello Guys! My sister, Hadeeqat, wrote an essay about our environment. I like it a lot and thought of sharing it with you. Happy reading :)

"Why do I need to read this 870 word long essay?" is the question you must be asking yourself right now. Well then, hold on and look at yourself. What are you doing except for reading this essay? You're probably just breathing! Have you ever imagined that you never stop breathing? The moment you stop breathing is actually the time you die. Now you must feel that it's foolish to read an essay about 'Why breathing is important'. But here is a fact: Humans are selfish and they would never do something which doesn't benefit them. When I was a kid, my sister would always say that Education is the key for an amazing future. It was due to the greed of this 'Amazing Future' that I would study. Well, you can say I was selfish. But it is my selfishness that motivated me to acquire knowledge, which is good for me as well as for my society. So selfishness isn't always bad. The reason I started this essay with the importance of breathing is to make you realize that you need to save the environment for your own survival.

It is truly terrifying to know that so much of the planet is being destroyed as we just sit down and do nothing. Meanwhile, I would like to take you to a journey of some wild haunting numbers, which might seem like an exaggeration but are actually very accurate. We are in the midst of the 6th mass extinction. 200 species go extinct every single day. More than 50% of birds are lost that we probably don't even know about. Since the last 47 years we have lost half of the world's wildlife, half it is! 90% of large fish in the world's oceans have disappeared, we have listed 21,000 species as critically endangered and more than 800 as extinct. Who did this all? Did Thanos accidentally jump from the Marvel Comics and snap his finger. Because, it's really hard to believe that any tiny human can do this to our gigantic Earth. These are the nuts and bolts of our ecosystem and we are ruthlessly degrading them. We are balanced on a downward slope of biodiversity loss and most of us don't even realize it. The accumulated amount of manmade global warming pollution that is up in the atmosphere is trapping the energy equivalent of 400,000 Hiroshima class atomic bombs exploding every 24 hours 365 days a year. All our activities lead to the collapsing of our vulnerable ecosystem. Jungles can become deserts and reefs can become lifeless rocks. Biodiversity makes our ecosystems strong and sustainable. If we remove even one species from the weave of an ecosystem, the whole system can disintegrate. Now ask yourself this question, "Am I not being reckless enough to unravel a whole weave of Biodiversity?" 

Climate change has consequences on our weather, food sources and our health. The ice sheets are melting which cause the sea levels to rise which intern leads to massive flooding. Climate change also causes extreme weather conditions as well as longer and frequent droughts. Growing crops will become more difficult in the coming years. Exposure to larger levels of greenhouse gasses and smog can lead to asthma, bronchitis and emphysema. Which means a lot of us are actually going to die because of lung cancer even without smoking 10 cigarettes each day in our entire lifetime. 

The real problem with the people, or most of them, is that they don't have a clue about the actual consequences of their actions and that is majorly because nobody talks about it. There are no restrictions, no one to stop them, no signs. We also think that solving the environmental crisis is very hard. But the thing is that when we try to solve environmental problems it's surprisingly easy. But we just don't try very hard. If we could destroy so much of this Earth, we can definitely make it better too. Before I end this I would like to share some simple and shockingly easy to implement steps to ensure the safety of our environment:

 • Drive less when you can. Take a bicycle ride to a comparatively nearer place rather than driving to reach there.

 • Implementing the three R's we read about in middle school.

 • You can limit usage of meat and replace it by other sources of proteins, like beans, when you can. It's not necessary to include meat in your diet every single day.

 • Turning of lights and electronic devices when not in use can also prove to be quite helpful.

 • Using a reusable cloth bag instead of plastic bags to make sure there are comparatively less non compostable bags lying in our surrounding land.

 • Turn off the tap when you brush your teeth. I know this is something that we all learnt in our 2nd grade but this practice actually saves 20 liters of water every time we brush our teeth. 

What the future brings is unpredictable, but even our small steps to safeguard the Earth gives us an insurance policy. What's happening is wrong and if something is wrong then we must stop them, there should be no excuse for that.