EARTH DAY - A DIARY FROM PURANIKOTI

AS you know, we are the nation's first politico-legal, independent weekly, focussing on controversial issues of national and international importance.

- Inderjit Badhwar

The focus in this editorial is on Mother Earth and the damage we Homo Sapiens are inflicting on her bosom. As the iconic magazine, The New Yorker writes in its latest issue dated April 2022: “This week, as we commemorate Earth Day, we're underlining the urgency of the situation with a series of pieces from some of our finest writers. Reports of our inadequate response to the climate emergency roll in as regularly as the tides. The latest came from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, telling us that the crisis is getting worse even faster than we'd imagined. It's hard to envision a louder alarm, and yet we seem able to sleep through it. For example, Elizabeth Kolbert profiles James Hansen, the NASA scientist who offered an early warning about the ramifications of global warming. (Forty-three years ago, Hansen "created one of the world's first climate models, nicknamed Model Zero, which he used to predict most of what has happened to the climate since. Sometimes he is referred to as the 'father of global warming, and sometimes as the grandfather.”) In “How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet,” science writer Bill McKibben explores some of the ways that radical environmental changes are making parts of the earth uninhabitable.”

The felling of trees in the Kasauli hills pollutes the silence with a deafening buzzing of saws much alike the havoc being perpetuated on the Amazon and Congo forests.