There won't be a World Environment Day if we won't have an Environment.

I recently read in an article that had plastic been invented when the pilgrims sailed from Plymouth, England to North America and the Mayflower had been stocked with bottled water and plastic wrapped snacks – their plastic trash would likely still be around four centuries later. If the pilgrims had been like many people today and simply tossed their empty bottles and wrappers over the side, Atlantic waves and sunlight would have worn all that plastic into tiny bits. And those bits might still be floating around the world’s oceans today, sponging up toxins to add to the ones already in them, waiting to be eaten by some hapless fish or oyster and ultimately perhaps by one of us. So this begs the question, are we still living on Planet Earth or have we converted into some alien, lifeless, morose and moribund Planet Plastic?

Cause Earth has been bearing the brunt of this nonstop continuous ‘happy go consume and dispose everything, use and throw lifestyle’ of this modern industrialized civilization now for the past seventy years and initially it were only a handful of nations that lived the ‘American lifestyle’ now everyone wants to enjoy and implement the standard of living these G7 nations have and with so much technological innovations everywhere, people are finally able to have their eager hands on every physical gadget and device that once lustily ogled at from the comfort of their home or theatre onto the screen and in the hands of those westerners, not any more.

Hence this challenge for the whole human race, are we going to gobble up and consume completely all the resources of Mother Nature without even paying an iota of attention of how to ‘Reuse, Recycle and Remake’ them into something helpful so that these disposables don’t impair or injure our fragile pale blue dot in space? Well, time will tell. But this is exactly what is at stake too. With all this extraneous human intervention in every habitat, ecology, natural cycle of our planet we have really started to upset the course of the natural functioning of our environment hence the threats and dangers called ‘Climate Change’ and ‘Global Warming’ and the newest addition ‘Ocean Armageddon’ aren’t just fancy terms anymore. They have become a truth to reckon with.

Sadly, there are many regimes and governments even today in this 21st century and even more so tragically even in the western hemisphere now a days who out rightly absolutely reject this notion, this fact of humans harming the planet. Some still call it a hoax and others say that it’s the human body that’s going through changes and not the planet. Now with all this lousy and inane ideology and belief that we’ve got surrounded with, the scientific community and the scientific thinking citizens have got to take on the onus of pushing the facts in the stream of lies that such irresponsible governments are peddling as part of their propaganda to weaken the belief that anyone might have or cultivate in what the world of science has to say to them.

Such short-sighted people can’t see that not if but when the tipping point is passed up, Mother Nature is going to unleash her full fury without holding anything back as nature means only one thing: ‘balance’. And to get that balance, nature goes to any length and will implement any process and when that apocalypse is upon us, nature won’t differentiate between who believed in global warming and who didn’t. Everyone will get what they deserved for bringing in this dawn of ‘throwaway living’ without thinking the consequences of doing so.

For example just take the 71% part of our Planet Earth which is water, our Oceans. What we have slowly, steadily but surely done to our once pristine, peerless, blue waters is that we have incessantly and unceasingly dumped all our waste, particularly the never forgiving plastic in it unremittingly turning the crystal clear azure cerulean waters into a gooey lump of thick poisonous soup, filled with all the imaginable noxious and toxic pile of excess and leftover discarded by the human population. And this is what has given birth to the floating garbage island in the middle of the pacific termed as the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ which only God knows, I think when will it reach some shore of some country or island one day as a ‘Plastic Tsunami’.

In the meanwhile ocean plastic is estimated to kill millions of marine animals every year. Nearly 700 species, including endangered ones are known to have been affected by it. Some are harmed visibly - strangled by abandoned fishing nets or discarded six pack rings. Many more are probably harmed invisibly. Marine species of all sizes from zooplankton to whales, now eat ‘micro-plastics’, the bits smaller than one fifth of an inch across. Just a few days back a pilot whale was found dead on the coast of Thailand with nearly 70 pounds (lbs) of polythene plastic bags within its belly. And who could ever forget that video of a plastic straw that had got nastily stuck in the nose of a sea Turtle how long, difficult and painful it was to get it removed. Plastic, once described as every housewife’s best friend has now slowly turned into every human being’s worst nightmare.

Thankfully, there are some people who are trying to do everything within their human limits as everything humanly possible to turn the tide as you may say and overcome this deadening and sickening effects of human civilization on our natural resources. These good souls have created documentaries to bring awareness of the imminent and inevitable violent climate changes some of which are already upon us and some which will be pretty soon in the coming future.

The first documentary is called ‘Anote’s Ark’ and it’s about this tiny pacific island called Kiribati and how it has started to immerse under water with all the sea level rise due to the faster and faster pace of melting ice both in the Arctic and Antarctic. Like who can forget the breaking away of that massive Delaware-sized ice sheet Larsen C last summer. Now this is what you call our Mother Earth breaking bad. Well, jokes apart the next documentary is James Balog’s ‘Chasing Ice and the Human Element’. This documentary is about the slowly drowning of Tangier Island off the coast of Virginia. Then there is this wonderful documentary called ‘Silas Siakor’ about Liberia with its 25 year Civil War and how rampant corruption and constant environmental degradation mostly by international companies have demolished 1/3 of its timber for palm oil plantation as well as for simply grabbing land all this happening by being in cahoots with the government of the country. A land rich and fecund with forests reduced to emptiness and barren ground. The next documentary is ‘Blue Heart’, a film about Balkan battles over hydropower and about a dam being built on the Kruscica river in Albania, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Such actions by people ordinary can bring in results extraordinary and we need to get off our asses and take charge of the situation or all this our house, our home, our hearth, our kith and kin will be laid underground since things are taking a turn for the worse. A new analysis of global hurricane data since 1980 shows the number of storms with winds over 124 mph has doubled and those with winds over 155 mph has tripled. And now as the 2018 Atlantic hurricane season begins, scientists are worried that U.S. coastal communities could face more super storms with winds, storm surge and rainfall so intense that current warning categories won’t be able to fully comprehend the destruction they’ll cause. Hence the call for a new Category 6 in describing the impact of hurricane has been recently suggested.

With all this gloom and doom forecast, one might naturally feel pessimism about the approaching future but we shouldn’t simply because we, the human species are supplied with intelligence and dexterity to survive and overcome any global extinction event. And that should be our endeavor, to endure and overcome this threat and danger of losing our planet to pollution forever and being helpless in the face of it. Now, what we need is not Captain America but Captain Planet!!!