Let us pass on a healthy Planet

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Environment is one of the subjects closer to my heart. Ever since I read the silent spring by Rachel Carson I have been converted to crusades of environmental protection. I came across an intelligent article by Johann Hari in independent.co.uk. He cautions if the manmade warming rises beyond 2.4C irrecoverable damage would be done to planet Earth. We must act fast. He has fixed year 2015 as a dead line. He laments that the developed countries have not done anything. They refused to think beyond fossil fuels. They have not done anything to encourage tapping solar power for our energy needs.

“The entire energy needs of the US could be met by covering 200 square kilometers of its empty deserts with solar plants: it would cost about 10 years’ worth of oil purchases, with none of wars tyranny or blowback Islamism.”

It’s achievable. Instead of discouraging carbon based energy source World Bank lend millions of dollars to start a coal based energy generating plant in Gujarat, Western India. What a retro step in containing carbon emission.

Carl Zimmer in his science blog says it in a different way,

Apocalypse via Press Release

   ..Today a team of scientists offer a new way of thinking about the environmental fix we’re in. In the words of one of the scientists, we’re driving around on a mesa in the dark with the lights off and without a map. We may fall off the edge of the mesa before we realize where the edge was.

The scientists argue for a safe operating space for the planet, which they propose should be bounded by limits on the carbon dioxide in the air and other factors. That way, we’ll stay away from dangerous thresholds and be able to pass on a healthy planet to our children.

I stumbled upon this beautiful environmental poem from a blog by Jeff McMahon.

The polar ice-caps are melting, the mountain glaciers

Drip into rivers; all feed the ocean ;

Tides ebb and flow, but every year a little bit higher.

They will drown New York, they will drown London.

And this place, where I have planted tree and built a stone house,

Will be under sea. The poor trees will perish,

And little fish will flicker in and out the windows. I built it well,

Thick walls and Portland cement and gray granite,

The tower at least will hold against the sea’s buffeting ; it will become

Geological, fossil and permanent.

What a pleasure it is to mix one’s mind with geological

Time, or with astronomical relax it.

There is nothing like astronomy to pull the stuff out of man.

His stupid dreams and red-rooster importance: let him count the star-swirls.

—————–   Robinson Jeffers