Our destiny is our choice, sustainability is a necessity

What’s the use of a fine house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?

“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed,” Mahatma Gandhi had said.

The United Nations defines sustainability as inextricably linked to basic questions of equity – that is, fairness, social justice and greater access to a better quality of life.(Shutterstock)

Nature for us has become just a natural capital now. What does the humankind do when one source of fuel seems threateningly low in quantity, never mind quality? Shift to another.

What’s the use of a fine house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on? We as children feel really cheated when we see how much time our previous generations have wasted by getting our planet at this precarious position.

A human-engineered habitat of concrete and glass reinforces our belief that we lie outside of and above nature; the notion that we can use science and technology to escape the restrictions of the natural world is only a dangerous fantasy.

“Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money,” goes an Indian proverb.

Man cannot destroy this planet. Earth has survived everything and lived through all. It will certainly survive us and we would not. If one day all animals and all plants die, the evolutionary processes will begin again. If we are gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.

It will only be through our collective sustainable efforts that we will succeed. Let us work together to make this necessity a reality. So that our children, if not us, can proudly and graciously look back and say, “We won.”

(The author is a Class 10- I student at Delhi Public School, RK Puram)