Urban delights planet sorrows
Second wave of COVID-19 are writings on the wall of urbanization and its perils for humankind. Beginning of the century marks a great milestone in the human saga when majority of people will be living in vast urban areas. Millions of people huddled together and stacked on top of each other in gigantic urban centres is becoming a new phenomemon inviting pandemic. Some 200 years ago, most of the people could not meet people other than his family members or close relatives through out his life. Today, a man in mega cities can live and work amongst thousands of people within radius of his home or office.
At present, more than 450 cities boast populations of a million or more people and there does not seem no end in sight to the urbanization process because human species is growing at an alarming rate. Thousands of children are born every day on the earth and human population is expected to increase to nine billion by 2042, majority of them living in most dense and dangerous urban mega cities.
Dr Ritesh Arya, renowned geologist who is against mindless urbanization at the cost of human lives said that as long as the human race had to rely on solar flow, the winds and currents, animal and human power to sustain life, human population remained relatively low to accommodate nature’s carrying capacity. “We are exhuming of large amounts of stored sun, coal deposits, oil and natural gas beneath the surface of the earth. The unprecedented increase in productivity led to the runaway growth of population and the urbanization that has now acquired a dangerous trend.
Our burgeoning population and urbanization way of life has been purchased at the cost of the demise of the earth’s vast ecosystems and habitats. If we think for awhile on the number of creatures and earth’s resources we have consumed in our lifetime, we would be aghast at the carnage and depletion that has caused to secure our existence. Human species now consumes nearly 40 per cent of the net primary production on earth but in turn gives one half of one per cent of animal biomass of the planet.
As we are celebrating the urbanization on daily basis, we are quickly approaching another historic watershed, the disappearance of the wild and scientists are opined that within the lifetime of today’s children, the wild will disappear from the earth after millions of its existence. Thus, an invitation to pandemics. Most of wild areas are fast diminishing with each passing day. By 2100 two-thirds of the earth’s remaining species are likely to banish.
It boggles the mind to see 1000 cities of nearly one million or more inhabitants in 35 years from now. The commemoration of the urbanization of human race in 2007 might be a lesson for us to learn to rethink the way we live on this planet.
Urban delights planet sorrows
In the race of urbanization we have shut off the human race from the rest of the natural world in the belief that human has the power to conquer, colonize and utilize the rich largesse of the planet to ensure our complete autonomy but this thinking is a roadmap to our destruction. Need of the hour is to find a way to reintegrate ourselves back with the living earth if we really hope for preserve human species and conserve the planet for our fellow creatures. Otherwise, more pandemics are waiting to strike human species in future.
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