"The greatest danger to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it" | Teen Ink

"The greatest danger to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it"

October 8, 2017
By CrimsonQuill BRONZE, Kolkata, Other
CrimsonQuill BRONZE, Kolkata, Other
4 articles 0 photos 0 comments

Magnanimous chunks of ice paint obituaries in the Arctic sky, epitaphs of mountains that once rose proud into the skies. Perhaps a reflection of this very sight led environmentalist Robert Swan to reach his epiphany.

"The greatest danger to our planet,"he said," is the belief that someone else will save it."

For a species born and nurtured on Earth, human beings tend to be the planet's worst foe. This world made of a million molecular lives, each spinning in its own axis. In this constant contest of self-involvement, responsibility takes a comfortable backseat.

As Friedrich Nietzsche had stated:"The Earth has skin,a and that skin has diseases:one of those diseases is called Man."


The human mind is astonishingly malleable;that is one of the reasons why we have adapted so quickly to the poisonous atmosphere in today’s world. We can be persuaded that our exhaustion, our emotional,spiritual or intellectual poverty, the titanic debt we owe the rapidly ebbing quality of our environment, and the slow death of harmonious livelihood can somehow be repaired.

That is not how the world works. Man is a peculiar species, he worships an invisible God and mutilates the visible Nature.Our human civilization is a complex system of existence;it takes years, sometimes millennials to evolve. The realisation of our duties towards our planet has long since found its headstone in the slowly expanding cemetery of time. It is far too difficult to condemn ourselves for a certain benevolent cause than to scan over the consequences of Nature’s wrath over the daily mail.

Glaciers withering into colossal waves ,woodlands cloaked in cinder and smoke, wheels of black and white rotating the world of men.

The present sky is suppressed by worldly tension , the atmosphere saturated with thoughts belittled by negativity. As humans, we create invisible veils of indifference, ensuring innocence and camouflaging what we actually see into what we want to see. Social disturbances do not restrict themselves to geographical boundaries, but wander over manmade demarcations separating countries. Often, we question the world,shake our fists at the Universe and demand an explanation.We look up to the a police force, a government, a leader for answers, seeking solace to these imperial afflictions, our backs comfortably rested on well decorated couches.


Cries of outrage are not unpopular in today's word, a sudden urge declaring how it is absolutely vital for the world to be saved. A world, however,that is riddled with unseen prejudices is way more lethal than the adder's poison. People walk around,their pockets heavy with various allotropes of hatred-be it a word, a thought or a bullet.

J.K Rowling had once said,’Human beings have a knack for choosing precisely the things that are worst for them.’

It is fundamentally the human kind that poisons itself and them demands an antidote which must arrive magically.
The need to blame a society is inexorable, it is a practice dating back generations. A society is nothing but a few thousand lives serving as threads for a gigantic embroidery of culture ; an accumulation of poisonous human minds growing into something further harmful.

One wonders what the world might have looked like before the first human footprints had left their mark on it. Without the darkness in the light, a world bereft of malevolent progress .

Sometimes, it is the plainest truths,the simplest ideas that might change the world.Perhaps it's time we took off our veils of nonchalance to step out and look out at the world . Until we recognise our planet for what it is today- a colosseum built of polluted thoughts and tainted breaths. Until we fully grasp the brunt of our actions. Until we finally realise what Robert Swan had tried to say. That cataclysm is inevitable. That the soil beneath our feet is worth a million stars. That we have but one planet, and it is time we offered it the respect it deserves.


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