#WorldEnvironmentDay

Growing Green Hearts

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World Environment Day has been observed every year since 1974. Which means we’ve known for at least 45 years that the environment needed to be taken seriously rather than taken for granted. This year, China is acting as host country with the theme of #BeatAirPollution, an appropriate choice for a country that faces some of the most extreme air pollution in the world.

Air pollution is implicated in the deaths of 1.1 million people annually in China and over 7 million around the world. Although China has announced tough measures to fight air pollution, it’s hard to reconcile those actions with continued economic growth – which is what contributed to the pollution in the first place.

World Environment Day focuses on what we, as individuals, can do. Every little bit helps. But with 9 out of 10 people in the world breathing polluted air, maybe the best thing we, as individuals, can do is grow hearts of green and demand the same of our policymakers.

Real change has to be as diverse as the environment itself. It has to break through the hard concrete of old habits, at all levels of society and across borders. And it’s something we can do, but we can’t wait for another 45 years.

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Growing a Green Heart on my village road in France. Photo: PKR

 

A Part of It

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So many of us live in cities these days that when we think of The Environment, we think of it as something separate, elsewhere, an entity apart from our daily lives. 

Design & Nature shop window, Paris. Photo: PKR

We see slogans like Save The (Insert habitat or animal name here) and it’s not a place or creature we know like we know our own piece of green, or our family pet. 

We can say we are all part of a whole, but we go to a park and don’t take off our shoes to really feel that. 

We see a new construction project go up and like it or don’t like it, but don’t apprehend that this, too, is our own creature environment changing, and changing us. 

Design & Nature shop window, Paris. Photo: PKR

What does the loss of a glacier, a forest, a species of songbird have to do with your daily life? Go out and find the nearest patch of dirt or green or tree. Take off your shoes. Look around and be there, a part of it just for a moment. You are there as much as any of the creatures and habitats – no more, no less. 

It’s World Environment Day. Protecting parts of life doesn’t mean putting them in a museum or under glass any more for them than it would for you. It means protecting ourselves. 

World Environment Day 2013

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Infographic: Oxfam

Some geologists and archeologists are ready to label modern times as the Anthropocene Epoch, the Era of Man, for the tremendous impact mankind has had on the planet.

The question is, if mankind merits its own epoch, when did it start? Some argue for the Industrial Revolution, which led to the revolutionary release of trapped carbon, gases and other materials into the atmosphere and environment we are now experiencing. Others argue that the epoch might have begun over 11,000 years ago – when mankind began radically altering landscapes and environments through farming.

One of our defining characteristics as humans, what makes us ‘modern’, is our attempt to control our food supply through agriculture, as opposed to hunting and gathering what is available at a given time and place.

We have become extremely skilled at producing food. What we haven’t mastered is distribution, food production that doesn’t cause more environmental damage than the hunger it should prevent, and good management.

The theme of the 2013 World Environment Day is Think.Eat.Save. The focus is on food waste.

It seems that another defining human characteristic is that when we are blessed with excess, we quickly forget how not to be wasteful.

Infographic: FERN International

More:

World Environment Day 2013 (WED) – United Nations Environment Programme