The Health of Planet Earth

What on earth does the planet have to do with personal health? Actually, plenty. Remember the song with the lyrics ‘the leg bone’s connected to the ankle bone’? Well, the argument can be made that ‘the finger bone’s connected to the toe bone’, just not directly—there are a lot of other bones in between. The same thing applies to you and the planet—we’re just not used to thinking in those terms. You are as connected to the planet as the finger bone is to the toe bone. How long do you think you could live without oxygen, and where do you think it comes from? And if we really do mess up this planet to the point it can’t sustain life anymore, just where do you plan to go?

More and more people are (finally) coming to the conclusion that we need to keep the planet happy so it can keep on keeping us alive. For all of our existence on this little earth, it has been able to recover and clean up after us—until now. Scars of our stupidity and ignorance are all around us, from poisoned earth to eroded seashores to damaged atmosphere. Even the oceans are beginning to suffer damage that may be irretrievable. We have been disrespectful to our Mother Earth, and you know what happens to children who are disrespectful to their parents. I just hope we haven’t left it too late to mitigate disaster.

Very few people are now pooh-poohing the concept of global warming. Yes, our weather has been getting extreme. It’s probably a trend, not just a cycle. So, what do we do about the health of the planet? In the first place, stop doing the harmful things we’ve been doing. We can personally cut our use of petroleum products down to the barest minimum. Humans got along without plastic for millennia; surely we can minimize our dependence—at least we can think about it consciously rather than automatically reaching for the plastic wrap/zip bag/etc. We can compost all our biodegradable waste instead of sending it to a landfill or worse, into the ocean, where it doesn’t belong. We can harvest methane for fuel instead of sending it into the atmosphere where it is not only wasted, but becomes a pollutant. We can recycle everything possible. And we can demand manufacturers use only the most necessary packaging. While we’re shopping, we can use net bags, canvas bags, shopping carts, anything re-useable. One person’s efforts, multiplied by hundreds of millions, can make a very real change. Shipping our trash to third world countries is idiotic. We need to learn from the earth itself—everything is a cycle of life, death, decomposition, then life again. We need to fit ourselves into that reality instead of trying to force the planet to conform to our artificiality for the sake of mere convenience.

Just as smoking one cigarette won’t kill you, recycling one soda bottle isn’t going to save the planet. Consciousness about living on a vulnerable planet must become part of each of us. We need to pay as much attention to the health of our Mother Earth as we pay to ourselves. Because the finger bone is connected to the toe bone; just not directly.

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