In One Breath

“The world is so big that we cannot cause any harm to it at all.”

How true is this? Look at the world around you. Is this evident? Is the world really a big place that not even billions of people can cause harm to it? Is this statement still applicable to what we see around us?

The answer: no. If only all of us are careful observers, we can see that the earth is turning to a big ball of frustration and despair ▬ far from what is used to be, a place of felicity and amorousness. What had happened? What did we do? We ruined everything and instead of thinking for others, we just thought of our own selfish selves. The evidence of our wrongdoings is undeniable. Slowly, Mother Nature gives back to us what we do to her.

Global warming is only one of the many challenges that the humanity faces today. But first, what is Global Warming? It is the increase in the average measured temperature of the Earth’s surface due to excessive trapping of heat in the atmosphere. In other words, the place we live in gets warmer and warmer everyday which we don’t notice at first but feel as time passes by.

Because of this, many phenomena occur like extreme weather, floods and typhoons, and droughts and famine which will eventually lead to the destruction of some places and quite a few illnesses. These can lead to the loss of property, source of living, place to live in, or worse ▬ lives. We are already seeing changes around us. Glaciers are melting at a faster pace, plants and animals are deprived of their habitats, and there is a rapid increase of storms and hurricanes that destroy lives.

If this would go on, in the near 40 years, we could be experiencing many catastrophic consequences that are harder to tolerate than what we are experiencing now. There would be more cases of people dying. Global sea levels would rise due to the profuse melting of Antarctica and Greenland’s ice which could submerge some places like Beijing and Shanghai in China and Calcutta, India. Droughts and wildfires would occur more often, thus affecting a multitude of inhabitants in a particular place. Heat waves would be more frequent and would be more intense and because of this, many people will suffer. Lastly, more than a million species of plants and animals would be extinct by 2050.

Each one of us is a cause of Global Warming. Each one of us contributes to the destruction of the place we live in. Each one of us deprives the next generations of better futures and brighter tomorrows. But, let us always keep in mind that there’s still time. We can still solve this global environmental problem if we act together, as one. Let us learn to forget about ourselves even for just a moment. May this serve as a lesson to all of us that we should be responsible towards nature. We should take care of it so that the future generations could still see the beauty of the world and benefit from it. It is but right if we do small things everyday because someday, these will all add up and make big differences. Let us not be blind and let us not have “frog mentality” in which like frogs, we only see the danger of destroying Mother Nature if it comes all at once and not appears gradually. Hand in hand, we can do this.