Heartbeatgoa.memories -The Green Green Grass of Home - by Fish_curry_rice

What is happening around us these days? Take a look around and nature stares back at you with utter disbelief. You see the kind of accusing eyes that makes a man look at his feet and draw circles with his toes in guilt. There are loads of stuff written about how we need to conserve nature and how we need to preserve our flora and fauna so that the generations to come would be glad that we left them a legacy that has been passed onto us by the creator himself. Why is it then that for a profitability of a few money minded people, do we involve ourselves in the worst form of incest ever? When will we sit up and realize that we are infact raping mother earth. Ive read about global warming, conservation and afforestation. And im sure a lot of my fellow earthmen read about it too. The question I ask is- How many people actually read into it? How many people actually feel for the person writing the article? Disregarding all fears I would say, I do. I have grown up on what could best be described as paradise on earth. I grew up on the tiny coastal state of Goa. And what a place it was. When as kids we cycled down the narrow, winding village roads enroute to our football grounds, the palms swayed, as if to welcome us to witness nature at its grandest. Every blade of grass reeked of purity and the essence of mother earth never failed to fill our nostrils. Those were the days, when games of hide and seek were played around huge banyan trees, when hollows in an old tamarind tree were our safest havens from the rains. When the fury of the rains continued uninterrupted for days at a stretch. But when the sun came out, in all its resplendent glory, the birds would chirp in the trees again, the trees and plants showed off their proudest greens and squirrels ran about salvaging their horde of nuts.They say change is the only thing that is constant. Nothing else remains the same. Sadly, I agree. For my kids will never know the joys that filled my heart every time I stepped out of my house. The sweet aroma of the coastal winds will somehow be replaced with the stink of tar and oil that kills our sea life as I speak. By the time the next generation is old enough to understand what I write today a few million of them will be crippled. The fumes for a few million cars will make sure that a large majority of them will be born with abnormalities that were caused because their mothers inhaled the air that is our environment today. Globally this is a tragedy because; a healthy working population would mean higher GDP. Flip the coin- a crippled population would mean lesser hands to work. More mouths for the government to feed and additional tax burden on the working class. Is this what you would gift your child on his / her 21st birthday? Think about it.We have all, at some point, wondered about dinosaurs and other extinct animals. I pity myself for having missed an opportunity to see the dodo and the saber tooth tiger and maybe a few million species. If I was born today, by the time I was 21, 760,200 species would be extinct. Its startling but true everyday a hundred species cease to live. Why and how?? That seems to be the most basic sort of curiosity that these facts invoke. The plain and simple answer is - deforestation. Every time a tree is cut a bird loses its yearly nesting place, an ant loses all its eggs that it had laid in hope of creating a colony of the strongest workforce known to nature, a squirrel loses its storage space and a few million other species that somehow had made survival possible because that one tree existed.So the next time you put pen to paper, think hard before you ink a word. Think hard before you toss a crumpled bit of paper into the dust bin because a few million species will die so you could write on their dead and mutilated bodies.......