P. A. Chacko
After destroying my forest abode, why do you ask me why I stray into your area?
That is the million dollar question a forest dwelling animal asks us human beings.
There is ample reason for this anxiety-filled query . Our passion for riotous living, our greed for accumulation, and our urge for over-exploitation of nature’s resources, in the name of development and progress, have turned us into predatory animals.
Our watchword is: instant pleasure. It blindfolds us before the fact that we are co-travellers with our environment and with all that the creator God has provided from his bounty.
We mistakenly believe that all the created realities are our private property. Our arrogant thinking makes us take for granted that we are the Lords of all that we survey. This mistaken notion urges us to act as proprietors and not guardians of creation.
In the context of the environment, it is evident from the crucial issues staring us in the face that we human beings are guilty of not doing our homework. Instead of accompanying our environment, we exploit it, do harm to it and even destroy it. Greed has overpowered us and we have relegated our needs to our backyards in favour of greed.
Mahatma Gandhi’s words of wisdom are a stringent warning to us about our greed. Earth has enough for our needs, but not enough for our greed. How true!
We clear natural forests and build forests of skyscrapers. Then we buy crotons and nursery plants and decorate them as hanging gardens on our sky high mansions in order to give a green touch. We encroach forests for poaching, felling, mining and commercial farming. Our loot goes on unabated. We displace or evict forest animals.
Today, not just human migration, but animal migration has become a common phenomenon. Forest based animals become homeless and hungry. They stray into villages, towns and cities for food, water and even shelter. You complain that wild animals are encroaching upon your property or plantation. You conveniently sweep under the carpet the crucial issue by not asking yourself, ‘who is responsible for this calamity?’ If an elephant were to ask you, ‘why did you destroy our secure abode and built plantations and residential complexes?’, will you give any cogent answer?
Time has come to ask ourselves, what and why are we on this planet earth? Are animals and birds, forests and valleys, oceans and cliffs alien invaders from other planets?
This year’s UN proposed theme is: ‘Rid the planet of plastic pollution’. Indeed, plastic pollution has become a human-made calamity. It is important to tackle this menace. However, our attention should go beyond mere plastics. The focus of attention should be our lifestyle, our value system, our vision of development and progress.
Climate change has to do primarily with our consumption pattern, our living style, our use of soil, oceans, forests, and all other resources. We wage war on biodiversity. Our inter-boarder wars and bombs contaminate, pollute and destroy earth’s ecosystem and eliminate human beings and habitations. These mindless operations don’t bother us. Nor do we question their wisdom.
Some concerned people speak of environment degradation. Its advocates tell us that environment degradation has to be seen in the context of depletion of resources such as air, water, soil, destruction of habitat, extinction of wildlife, over-exploitation of nature and nature’s resources, etc.
Protection and preservation of the environment have to be seen not just in the context of the safety and security of human beings alone. Creation itself has a destiny, a purpose. Its role is not just to cater to the needs of human beings. It is not the plaything of human beings.
Two thousand years ago St. Paul stated the truth that “the creation has been groaning.” It is still groaning, even more so! And, French Jesuit priest, scientist, palaentologist and theologian, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin spoke of the cosmic evolution. It is an ongoing evolution. We humans are only a part of this cosmic structure. Gifted with intellect and senses, our role should be to facilitate this evolutionary movement towards a better and nobler form, and not arrest or stonewall it. That facilitating process is to be our noble vocation.
Come, let us join all people of good will, and all forces of nature and this cosmos to let our environment and our universe survive, prosper and reach its destiny.