Saving The Earth

Saving The Earth


Our next-door neighbor sold his house to a builder. The market being ripe for apartment sale, the builder planned a huge structure, housing at least twenty-five families, a flat to each. Then he started demolishing the house, built solidly a few years back. At the end of it, the rubble-covered earth looked like a specter. At least for a few months, till the new construction was over, we, the neighbors were to breathe in dust-filled air, and suffer various allergies ranging from those of skin to lungs.

Why do they do this? First, build a house to make a cozy home, and then break it when greed overtakes considerations such as ownership rights, freedom of movement and the wide space for gardening. In one avaricious deal, earth is sold at an exorbitant rate, and then rough handled by filling every inch of her, with concrete and steel. It is saddening to see her enslaved, once treated as Supreme Mother and a Goddess by the people of this land, India.

Even our countryside is taken over by big business houses to build factories and money-spinning industries. Pity is that India, where I come from, is an agricultural country. We are no longer able to produce large reserves of grain and wheat we used to, thanks mainly to the replacement of fertile land by smoke-emitting industrial plants. Powerful fertilizers and insecticides have also caused irreparable damage to the crops. Gradually, our herbal wealth is being eroded, our health and economy suffered.

This earth, our green planet, that has sheltered an amazing variety of flora and fauna is today to a great extent, an ugly place sprouting as many structures as man’s genius has been planning. She has started caving in if earthquakes are any evidence due to extraneous nuclear explosions being conducted by power-hungry nations.

Deforestation and cutting down trees for infrastructure purposes, is leading to poor rainfall. And this is causing water scarcity. People are thrown into a fit of panic, and have started digging and deepening bore wells. Boring the earth at too many places would deplete the supply of our ground water. Darkness and danger await us.

The whole fiasco is solely due to the scant attention we have been paying to Mother Earth. For too long, we have taken her for granted. We desecrated her and burdened her in more ways than one. Can we pay the penalty?

Only with strict legislation to protect the earth from further damage, and a huge amount of will and awareness on the part of the society, we can still hope for a future without calamities.

On this momentous Earth Day-
Here's my pledge to plant as much as the space around my house allows, and create awareness to keep the surrounds clean.


Word Count:492


Honorable Mention in Ikiayasama's  Earth Day Challenge Contest.