Why Thinking Sustainable Should Be The New Normal
The planet is changing more rapidly than ever. My life, in the last decade, has been able to see rains — during months when they should not happen, floods — dislocating thousands of people, sand storms in cities — far far away from deserts, wildfires — ashing down precious rainforests. People have seen their dream homes being washed away or burnt down right in front of their very eyes, homes that have been crafted with life’s savings and built at places where nature seemed to be at its best.
Climate change is at our doorstep and when I see raised eyebrows, curious expressions and silent whispers when I shop with my own grocery bags, pull out my steel straw, refuse single-use plastics, it makes me think out loud.
Recently, I heard Greta Thunberg’s famous speech “blah, blah, blah” at the Youth4ClimateSummit. It’s not hard to derive the sharp contrast between sustainability concerns being talked about by politicians, big companies, big individuals and its on-the-ground impacts.
With microplastics now being revealed in the fetus, and the alarms being raised for coal shortages, this has again put us on the spot to reconsider our actions at a granular level. Thinking and pursuing a sustainable lifestyle is really the need of the hour. Not mixing wet and dry waste, throwing waste in the correct colour bins in public places, understanding your carbon footprint, handcuff free from blind consumerism, trying to reduce your dependency on single-use plastics, adopting reduce-reuse-recycle to boost the circular economy should be our priority.
Knowing the fact that you put x-amount of work for that toned body, but eventually eating plastics of the size of a credit card every week, doesn’t really sync along. A sustainable lifestyle can at least reduce the progression of damage that has already been made and is about to be made. And it begins with us. Think sustainable when you travel or when you make a purchase of your dream car. Think about building a sustainable new home with rain-water harvesting, sewage management, utilizing solar energy to power your home.
All we need to remember is, sustainability is an intrinsic thread, that is weaved in our lives, the more we try to pull it out, the more painful it will be, not only for us but our future generations too. “We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.”
