Today is Earth Day! 🌿🌿🌿
This planet is home for an immense variety of life forms. It has witnessed the appearance, evolution and the extinction of many, many species over an estimated 4.543 billion years.
Over the course of our evolution as a species, it has sustained us even through the hardest times. As we learned how to control certain aspects of nature, we made our survival easier and more accessible.
As our survival became more accessible, we became ambitious and started designing our future, and today, we live beyond the wildest dreams of previous generations before us. We have changed more the face of the earth in the last 200 years than in the roughly 200.000 that we existed as a species. And like everything else, it came with a price tag.
As of now, the human footprint on the planet is on the verge of making the natural sustainability of human life practically impossible. Pollution of air and water are compromising the some of basic requirements of human physiology, oxygen and water.
We are compulsively destroying nature on a daily basis, the same nature that gave us life, that sustained us for hundreds of thousands of years. I'm sure technological advancements will figure out a way to keep us living on the planet, but it will definitely be an artificial kind of living.
We are a very materialistic society, and it is indeed hard to break the shackles of consumerism, specially if you live in a "western developed country with a stable economy". We have much more than we need, we have much more than we'll ever use, and for that, we are indeed responsible for perpetuating a loop in which we encourage more production and therefore waste, and then we attribute responsibility to someone else.
For me, the study and practice of Ayurveda and Yoga has helped me a lot to reconnect with Nature and look at it in different ways. And although it's hard-work to actively try to break years of compulsions created by a consumerist society, there is also a sense of freedom on realizing that we don't actually need everything that is sold to us and that we can live a somewhat simpler life... and that one day, hopefully, our little daily choices end up making a difference in the big picture.
Let's be honest, there is always something, a little more that we can do. The challenge is and always will be living with awareness.
“What have they done to the earth?
What have they done to our fair sister?
Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her
Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn
And tied her with fences and dragged her down”
Jim Morrison
Photo by Samir Belhamra @Grafixart_photo from Pexels
