World environment day is a desperate effort to remind people of the collective fatal catastrophe that life and civilisation is fast approaching. The worst being it’s self created and preventable. Not that we are unaware or ignorant but greed and competition have got the better of us.
As a civilisation we have lost more than 90% of our old growth forests, we have hunted down and fished entire species to extinction, polluted our air, water and soil and now the greatest threat is climate change. Not a new knowledge, we have been measuring CO2 levels since 1958 and have targets since Kyoto in 1997. We have precociously reached 1.2 degree growth. Oil still remains the centre of global politics. USA has pulled out of Paris protocol. The lust for dominance ensures that no one is ready to share technology on renewable energy. National identities have obscured our collective nemesis. This year’s theme is to control plastic pollution. We had brought legislation in 2022 against single use plastics but we neither built capacity nor will to implement it. All this means June 5th is not even of any symbolic value and is a mere tokenism.
Civilization under existential threat
