Sinkhole in Florida; Land Fragility in Kerala

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When will humanity realize they are about to crush their own home, the earth into ruin. Their elaborate plans of development are causing the earth’s environment to deteriorate and erode away. Wait a minute before saying yes or hitting the red ‘X’ on the right-hand side of your screen to close this page.

I do not intend to bombard you with the kitsch of environmentalism. However, one cannot ignore how mother earth suffers, as her guests ruin her charm and health. Oops, did I say guests? Well, let us assume that we, humans are not exactly the sons and daughters of mother earth. Suppose we are guests living on this planet, came and settled here from some other world.

How wonderful that would be, in the sense that the guilt in damaging the balance of ‘mother’ nature can easily be reversed as a sort of pitiless conquest. In every culture, there are creation myths, and in all these myths, there are events that lead to the creation and spreading of human race through a being or energy source that is not of this earth.

 

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The point I am raising here is; why should we resort to extreme forms of self-flagellation in the premises of environmental concerns? Why do we always say ‘we’, humans destroyed our habitat when it is in human nature to destroy and demolish everything that comes in our way of conquest. We are never good at co-existing, as a Hollywood movie script puts it.

One of the recent issues regarding a misbehaving nature, is down here in Kerala is the fragility in land mass surrounding hilly areas. This was a grave issue in the southern parts of Kerala in recent months. Landslides killed many people in Idukki district, a few weeks back, in the month of June. Today the news came from Florida, US that a thirty meters wide sinkhole devoured a part of a resort. The parallels are interesting and shocking.

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Many of the politicians, news media, and researchers interpreted the cause for landslides as man’s intervention into nature. [Note the masculine noun.]Heavy rain is one reason for landslides, and so is with sinkholes, a destitute child of nature on imbalance.

Inhabiting a planet with such a volatile environment seems a less workable idea. Either human beings can take their spaceships out and search for another planet to live in, leaving behind mother earth, or they can try resolving this problem by channeling creative energies in harmonious ways.

The choice is with us.