The Earth Is Suffering, Here Is Why You Should Care

The environment tends to pay the price for our celebration. It’s time we think about leaving a livable earth.

- Dushyant Parasher

It’s good to know

According to the widely accepted estimates, there are 8.7 million species on Earth; with 6.5 million having chosen land and sky as their living space and 2.2 million with oceans as their home. We humans are only one of them. And yet, God knows by what logic, we have assumed the ownership of this planet. We have seized the ship, but apparently have no navigation charts.

The present age of our Earth is an estimated 4.6 billion years and our ancestors appeared here about six million years ago. Our species established rather recently around 2,00,000 years back. What we call civilisation is barely a 6,000-year-old phenomenon and industrialisation does not even go as far back as a quarter of a millennium. Yet, the negative impact of man on Earth’s environment has been far greater than that of any other form of life on this planet. A look at the world forest cover is enough to show how fast we are eating away our own lungs. From 5.9 billion hectares at the time of the pre-industrial era, the forest cover of the world is now down to less than four billion hectares.

On a global scale humans are probably the only species whose numbers have consistently increased in the last hundred years. Available data shows that from about three billion in 1960 we’ve exploded to 7.4 billion today. Humans are also perhaps the most widely distributed species on Earth. We’re just about everywhere. But that does not mean we have the numbers and the weight to claim any supremacy on this planet. And just one statistic is enough to prove that. The combined weight of ants on Earth is equal to that of humans! And we know, on an average, a human weighs a million times more than an average ant.