As people in Oman celebrated Eid holidays by travelling through the length and breadth of the country, it is not only the awe-inspiring beauty of nature that strikes us but also the trail of plastic bottles and containers, half eaten food, even bottles and cans.
The enormity of this garbage that goes into landfill is impossible to understand. One plastic packet takes a thousand years to break down – yes, that’s just one bag. We know that plastics have now gone deep inside the ecosystem and can be seen even in the fish we eat – because they have eaten plastic in the oceans.
Protecting the environment is never easy because the project does not have immediate impact. It is difficult to make a large social statement about it. But if there is one thing that we all equally share, it is the results of pollution of all kinds – air, water and land.
Earth Day, celebrated on April 22, cannot just be seen as another token day to plant a tree and hope that others do the rest.
It has to be a day to make some changes in individual habits and routines.
The United Nations has stated that the “impacts of a 1.1-degree increase are here today in the increased frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events from heatwaves, droughts, flooding, winter storms, hurricanes and wildfires”. These changes are already happening and we are witnessing them every year.
To give responsibility to protect the earth to some agencies and institutions is possibly the easiest thing to do – it doesn’t require much on our part. But the earth is ours, and the impact of any destruction is on us, so protecting the earth is not something we are doing for someone else, it is for us and our children.
In that sense, Earth Day is more than trying to do something to protect the earth – it is what we must do to protect ourselves, a debt we pay so our children can live in a safe world. It is also about taking responsibility for the earth on which we live.
In a moving letter to the American President Franklin Pierce in 1855, Chief Seattle of the Suquamish tribe said, “The President in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy or sell the sky? The land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you sell them?”
That question should haunt us even today – whose earth is it? Who owns it? What does it mean to own land? Is it not clear that the earth belongs to us, and if it does, it is also our collective responsibility to protect it?
We seem to have moved too far from Chief Seattle’s idea of shared belonging, but this Earth Day should be a reminder of the fragility of our world and our duty towards it.
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