WHY WRITE FOR EARTH?

 I volunteer for Aranya (Sanskrit- forest)- the Nature and Environment society of my college as a content writer. Consequentially, I was expected to write something for our annual magazine too. I looked up the internet for the pressing environmental issues and ended up with strained eyes and nothing significant to research about. These vain attempts continued for four nights straight. Dim lights, disinterested eyes, and a white screen drenching my eyes with hopelessness. Had it been an academic assignment, I would have approached it with a more determined mindset. Since it was something very voluntary for me, I kept it aside. 

I heaved a sigh at my failed attempts and pulled my laptop out again, hoping to find something to write about. I questioned my hollow approach towards this particular assignment. It was a pretty institutionalized conditioning of my brain that it made me delay an assignment on environment and give more importance to my English and History theses.

I think this negligence is a result of different generations giving responsibilities in each other's hands. The adults relying on our efforts and us waiting for the future generations to cure everything  that went wrong. Ever since my childhood, I have left decisions in the hands of my elders quite often and I believe many of us hold a similar kind of approach too. When we think about our planet, or climate change, or global warming ( things that do not pose an immediate threat to us), we tend to sit back and watch the mess, waiting for someone to get up and clean it.

With this raging blood of youth that flows through my bloodstream, I have so many unorganised reflections about my planet and its socio-political adversities. Back in October 2022, when Just Stop Oil activists threw canned tomato soup at Van Gogh's Sunflowers at London's National Gallery of Art, I was enraged to the very core of my heart. I have been an ardent Van Gogh follower ever since I started painting and I found it so difficult to understand how can someone try to make a statement by vandalizing an art piece of a person who was dejected in his own community and succumbed to his mental illness.

After the incident, I noticed my friends look up the art history of Sunflowers and the brutal oil drilling operations on the internet. People were now talking about two unrelated forgotten things. I sit here and wonder that however wrong the throwing of soup at the painting was, it surely did make us talk about the exhaustion of fossil fuels. It is a disgrace on the human race that it took us bruising of an art piece just to think about our planet, let alone work for it.  

With every contemporary environmental issue knocking at our doorstep, environmental awareness is a crucial need. 

My answer to why I continue to learn, write, and act for my planet would be quite similar to my answer if you asked me why I should know about the world at all; understanding the global environment and adapting to it and along the way shaping it to better accommodate the human species.

The knot of all tensions, environmental and political; whether local, national or international can be unraveled by hands that have been firmed by the knowledge of the environment and climate change.