The Indian Society has been worshiping Mother Nature since at least ten thousand years of human history of our civilisation. Even today, not only do we care for our animals, but worship them too. Be it an elephant, crocodile, snake even a rat is considered as a divine incarnation.
Strangely, as much as we worship cows as deities, we rarely care for them in real life and sadly, many stray cattle are killed in road accidents or even electrocuted by electric wires on poles which are displaced by winds, or motorists. On the World Earth day, which we all celebrate on April 21, each year, focus on our sun and our solar system in particular.
It is amazing amongst the trillions of stars in the universe and many trillion times over, we have planets revolving around each of the stars. I am not including the billions of moons which revolve around each planet too, for we have not yet encountered life; let alone intelligent life in any of the millions of heavenly bodies spread across the galaxies like our very own ‘Milky-Way’. Even the nearest galaxy called the Andronema galaxy is known to have several black holes and fascinating features of the ‘Event Horizon’ where laws of Physics are defied and time stops.
We are lucky that the greatest discovery of the Universe in E-mc2 was postulated by the brilliance of Albert Eistein, thus making it easy for us to understand that we all are part of matter and energy, which keep ticking. Yes, religion and science may never ever meet as newer and novel discoveries come our way. For in science, it was never as it was in the beginning, is now and will remain for ever and ever. Look at our Sun, it is 5.45 billion years old and looks reddish yellow. Each second million of tonnes of hydrogen gas and helium which it contains is burnt and the mass of gas and the energy is transformed in light energy across the spectrum (right from the gamma rays, to ultra violet, further into infra red and finally into x-rays and further beyond.)
Astronomy is extremely fascinating and intricate. Let us forget discussing the blue, red, yellow, orange, purple stars but focus on Mother Earth million years ago. While most other animals survive and grow in the ambience of the environment with the prime focus on their safety it is we as human beings treat killing and hurting others as a form of pleasure or a sport too. I will not delve also into the sociological exploitation of one human being by the other and the history of slavery, exploitation and cannabalism, but are we in the 21st century willing to endure the ‘Dogma of Live and let live’. It is gratifying that scientists are planning to build colonies and develop agriculture on the moon. Colonising Mars is not a distant dream now. Not only governments across the globe, but also there are several private entrepreneurship extremely active to prepare and execute blue prints on the aspects of building up human civilisations on the moon and the Mars for the moment and also establish the human race on the distant habitable planets discovered in the Universe for the moment whilst Astronomers and Astrophysicists are busy in their endeavours to place human race in other planets in the outer space, the Ukraine war sadly has been dampening our high spirits that as intelligent life, the human race has been extremely irresponsible, selfish and exploitative in nature. Over the last 50 million years of evolutionary history of the earth, there have been lots of geological and astronomical catastrophic incidents. Can we ignore the fact that just 65 million years ago, a large asteroid hit our earth and made our giant dinosaurs extinct?
I surely do not want to deeply delve into the aspects that each year even today, our rash human behaviour is making several unique plants and animals extinct. Interestingly, we celebrate the Earth day on April 22 and the World Biodiversity day on May 22 year with many solemn pledges and assurances. We plant symbolically trees on each Environment day on June 5, every year, but distressingly our forest covers are steadily reducing and the alarming rate at which the sea water is rising is making many island nations lose their land mass as well as the existence of the humans.
In the world of today, although we have seen stupendous and marvellous scientific discoveries and inventions, we have sadly witnessed the decline in the overall health, nutrition, immunity and the overall human physiology. Paradoxically, even a single strand of a basic Covid-19 virus, has put the 3 million and more base pair of the intricate human genome. We sadly saw millions of human beings both incapacitated as well as dying due to fatal respiratory ailment with copious side effects on other organs of our bodies including our brains too.
On this World Earth day, let us all reflect and accept the fact that a tiny virus has all the instinctive and intuitive cell machinery that can defy and challenge the complex human response which may be in our cellular as well as serological system over the years of evolutionary history of mankind. We all now know ever since Charles Darwin explained to us the essence of human evolution, that humans are not adding on their own physiological responses to infections, diseases, pestilences and famines. Let us be prudent and self learn to live with nature. We cannot eliminate viruses. Vaccines are surely not the final answer. How many vaccination programmes do you expect me to endure and undertake? Yes, nothing for me so far to date for the scientist in me has accepted that I must cohabit along with all other creatures. Mother Nature would help me to coexist successfully.
(The writer is a retired University Professor and an Environmental Activist.)
