I cringe every time I see a big, fuel-guzzling, pollution-spewing monster of an SUV on the road driven by a single person. I don’t expect people to give up their cars and start riding bicycles but wouldn’t a smaller, more compact car do?
When Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and the like traveled across America in their cars in the 1950s, carbon footprint was the last thing on their minds. The Beat Generation wasn’t worried about depleting ozone layer, rapidly diminishing oil reserves, degrading quality of air, melting glaciers and greenhouse gas emissions. Fortunately or unfortunately, the generation I belong to is the green generation. The-forced-to-go-green generation, rather. Numbers and figures about how our evil deeds are destroying the planet and litanies on how our descendants will curse us for not paying heed to warning bells are hammered and drilled into our heads every single day.
Take for instance, these little bits of estimates: 2,400 kg of carbon is emitted per passenger in a round-trip flight between New York and Tokyo. There were 128.9 million births this year in contrast to 53.4 million deaths. Humanity has increased the atmospheric carbon dioxide content by over 40 percent since the start of the industrial revolution. The rate of warming of the planet in the last 50 years was double the rate observed over the last 100 years.
Alarming, much?
So what are we doing about it? Just how many of us do more than maybe turning off the light when no one’s in a room and not leaving the water running while brushing? How many of us would rather take a re-usable bag for shopping than pay a rupee for every plastic bag at Bhatbhateni?
I cringe every time I see a big, fuel-guzzling, pollution-spewing monster of an SUV on the road driven by a single person. I don’t expect people to give up their cars and start riding bicycles but wouldn’t a smaller, more compact car do? It’s ironic how the more sophisticated, the better educated and the more aware you are of what’s becoming of the planet, the bigger your car is. Talks, waffles and drivel about global warming is all good but when it comes to taking steps to curb it, even things that breach slightly on their comfort makes the enviro in them stop functioning. Maybe the megalomaniacs believe the planet can afford a few more tons of carbon dioxide to sustain their precious existence.
We know what to do. We’re overfed with tips on how we can go green. So we can either start making changes in little ways of our own or we can turn a blind eye to everything. Make ourselves believe that climate change, seasons going awry, quickly disappearing biodiversity, rising pollution, dwindling resources, an ecosystem growing slowly out-of-kilter, a planet filled to capacity are all big fat hoaxes. That the planet can recover itself just like it has been doing for billions of years.
When so many fears about the future are instilled upon our minds, am I the only crazy one who gets the idea that it would be incredibly imprudent to have children? I know it sounds silly now. I also know this is just a fleeting whimsical thought that I won’t stick to, but with conservationists going on and on about what will become of the planet in the next 100 years, who can help but think that perhaps what we have today is an apocalypse in the making? I know I can’t.
I’m not complaining. Well, maybe I am. But not because we’re no more in the dark and basking in the bliss of ignorance. Because we’re getting so many warnings and doing so little about it. We can’t wipe out cars from the roads or make people stop procreating, shut down airlines or make industries run on wind power, talk people into not destroying forests to build concrete monsters or convince the city not to dump sewage into the rivers. But that doesn’t mean we give up. If for nothing else but to avoid our own little pricks of conscience, we can start with small changes. Like not getting that one rupee plastic bag the next time we shop at Bhatbhateni.
samragyee@hotmail.com
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