This Time Technology May not be Enough for us to Survive
Everything that makes life possible on this piece of rock that we call earth is known as the environment of this planet. The environment of earth is made of everything that is around us and this includes air, land, water, forests and all the life that is there on this planet. All these components of the environment exist in a symbiotic relationship with one another and all these relations are important and essential for the sustainability of life on this planet.
This balance between the components of the environment is very delicate and too important to be disturbed. But we humans are conscious beings and our consciousness has helped us to use these resources to create and produce new things. And this process of creating new concepts and things using our consciousness and intelligence is known as development.
But this development does not come without any cost. We use resources to create new things and services or we can say that resources are the building blocks of development. But the main concern about this is that these resources are not unlimited. They are finite. And if we will not use them sustainably we all are going to create some problems that can not be solved.
Environment conservation is the process of protecting and limiting the use of natural resources so that the resources can be sustainable and our next generations can also use them. But issues like population burden, hunger for more, technologies and our fascination with development has degraded the environment uncontrollably.
India, being a country the size of a subcontinent and falling under the unique phenomenon of monsoon, can be defined as an environmental hotspot. But there are many issues which are making it difficult for India to be able to conserve its environmental diversity successfully. Some of the important issues that are being faced by India in environment conservation are following;
Population : Population has always been a problem for India. The population of India is around 1.4 billion. A population of this size will need resources also, and they are limited. This big population by default will use up more services and will add a significant amount of pollution in the environment. And this can be said about the whole planet that humans are too many in numbers for the earth to provide resources for all of them and be sustainable also.
Development : Human intelligence has made humans the sovereign authority over the resources of this planet and these resources. These resources are the only thing that are helping humans to become more evolved beings. All the human beings are running in a race to be the most developed country and no nation wants to wait and be behind other countries. This blind race of development and luxury is making us less sensitive to our environment. It is preventing us from understanding that the environment is not dependent on political boundaries, it is a shared resource. This race is overpowering our ability to reach a consensus and act to our best interests.
Developed vs developing : The debate of developed vs developing and underdeveloped debate is also creating a serious p problem in achieving the environment conservation goals. It is well known that we all need to work together to find a solution for this problem and we all need to work together but this debate of developed countries using up the resources earlier on and expecting developing countries to curtail their development aspirations is the main cause of contention. No country wants to compromise with their development prospects.
Believe in technology : We humans are intelligent beings and this intelligence gave birth to technology. Over the generations technology has helped humans overpower every difficulty that posed a challenge to the existence of life be it diseases or natural disasters. Technology has helped humans dictate the terms of survival on this planet. Technology has solved nearly every question that was put before humanity and this has generated an unbreakable trust on technology among humans. Because of this technology we believe that we will get through all this. We will find one way or another to circumvent this environmental problem.
Increasing knowledge of the universe : Increasing the knowledge base of humanity about the universe is also making humans complacent about the depleting resources of this planet. The new facts and knowledge about the universe has revealed that life on a planet is just a coincidence. It is not planned. And looking at the fact that the size of the universe is incomprehensible for human consciousness and the number of planets is truly infinite we can say that the possibility of life is not that rare on planets.
Humanity is on the verge of breaching the planetary boundaries and after doing that we will become interplanetary species and concerns of the environment will be less important.
But, despite all the possibilities of finding new planets and despite all that belief in technology we humans must be cautious about things. Our environment is too important for our survival to ignore it.
Seeing the size of the universe it is quite possible that there are other life forms out there. And the number of planets that are out there suggest that there should be other planets with similar environmental conditions where life can thrive.
But along with the possibilities we must remember the actual facts. The size of the universe is too large and our technologies are so underdeveloped that even if we are certain that there is a potential place for us to reside, we can not reach there in time. Our means of travel are too slow to bridge the vastness of the universe.
We are too underprepared to go out there and survive. We don’t know anything and have not even a vague idea of what is out there. So it is necessary for us to question our methods of how we are treating the things that are keeping us alive.
We may find a technological solution to circumvent our environmental crisis but it is quite possible that we may not. Environmental relations are too complicated to be understood by humanity to provide a perfect technological solution. Technology has its own limitations and we must consider that fact.
And there is one more important thing to be considered about. We must understand that right now we are nowhere near solving this problem using man- made technology but the situation is escalating out of our control day by day. So it will be better that we follow Buddha’s teachings this time and try to find a middle path out of this crisis. We must understand that keeping the environment depletion in check while searching for other solutions is the only way out.
