Pollution biggest threat to man’s existence

About a hundred years ago, the Russian playwright Anton Chekov wrote, "Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what what he’s been given. But up to now he hasn’t been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wildlife’s become extinct, the climate’s ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier everyday."

More recently, American anthropologist Margaret Mead commented on "Why Our World Will Never Again Be The Same." She said, "We are living beyond our means. As a people we have developed a lifestyle that is draining the earth of its priceless and irreplaceable resources without regard for the future of our children and people all around the world."

No creature on earth pollutes its environment the way man does. So much so US journalist Clifford D. Simak observed that it is man’s intelligence that has unbalanced the ecology.

Now, according to a United Nations-sponsored study, a thick cloud of pollution is shrouding southern Asia and is not only threatening the lives of millions of people in the area, but could even have an impact in distant places because the three-kilometer-high cloud can drift halfway round the world in a week! The pollution cloud was a product of forest fires, the burning of agricultural wastes, dramatic increases in the burning of fossil fuels in vehicles, factories power stations and millions of inadequate cookers. The cloud of pollution was reducing the amount of solar energy on the earth’s surface by 15 percent! This would result in a sharp decrease of rainfall in some areas and a corresponding increase of rainfall in others. In short, drought and floods! Areas that may be affected are Afghanistan, Pakistan, Western China and Western Central Asia. The cloud was also causing the rain to be acidic and would cause damage to crops and an epidemic of respiratory diseases on the hundreds and thousands of people who live in the area.

Involved in the UN report is Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, the very first scientist who determined the causes of the hole in the ozone layer. He claimed that up to two million people in India alone die each year from the effects of the atmospheric pollution.

If all these reports are true, then it is very clear that pollution is even a graver threat than the atomic bomb. A British chemist once said that if sunbeams were weapons of war, we would have had solar energy long ago. Now it is very clear that we do not need any war weapons to destroy our planet. All we have to do is to keep on polluting our environment. That would ensure that we would leave our children and all future generations a world unfit for man to survive. The ultimate reality of our day and age is the vulnerability of planet earth. As the Stockholm Conference concluded way back in 1972, "We have forgotten how to be good guests, how to walk lightly on the earth as to other creatures do."