Saving the earth

The world was agog last Sunday for the Earth Day. The message is that we must save the earth. The question is, from and for whom?

The earth does not need saving but man needs to be saved. The earth has its way of replenishing and recovering itself. The rains and floods clean the earth, reinvigorate the soil and provide water for vegetation, to make plants grow and prosper.

The sun rises and sets in the natural order of time to warm the earth at day time and cool it in the evening. The leaves fall to the ground, decompose and become food by returning to the roots and nurturing the mother plant that it might perpetuate its species. The bees suck nectar from one flower to another to feed more bees and pollinate another so the plant may multiply.

I need not point out or narrate how nature continues to recover and replenish itself in the way that the Creator has mandated since the beginning of creation. The natural order is clear enough for us to see, that inexorable cycle of life and death that man, no matter his brilliance can ever alter.

Nature will always have the last say as the Creator has made it so. God has made this world perfect because He is perfect, even the rats and flies have their purpose no matter how we detest them and question why the Creator had made them to live with us.

Would it have been better had Noah left them behind instead or have swatted the two flies and drowned the rats?

If there is anything to be saved, to reiterate, it is not the earth, it is man from the way he violates the law of nature to feed his greed, his lifestyle and his wantonness, his refusal to accept that he is a creature given the privilege to enjoy the bounties and beauties of nature. This joy is not in squandering the earth but preserving and enhancing it because by doing so man truly preserves himself and his kind.

Our tragedy is that man wants to be a creator, to be a god who makes choices as he pleases without regard for the orderliness set by the true Creator. Man does this be rejecting God in the way he does things on earth, despoiling it and squandering it as if he can replenish it by his own act of creation. Like the fallen spirits or angels, man wanted to be like God, forgetting his true nature.

The thrust must be to make man realize that it is he, not earth that must be saved by respecting and preserving God's gift and thereby provide for all.

We had the Earth Hour earlier to save a few millions of watts of electricity and yet dozens of 1,000 watts lights on electric posts are on 24 hours a day. Who is tasked to switch off them off early in the morning? The Bácolod City government pays for this wasted electricity.

There are many ironies in commemorating Earth Hour and Earth Day, something hypocritical, just feeling good but without inertia. If Earth Hour and Earth Day has to succeed they must be daily, the habit formed as part of our way of life. They should be a continuing and sustaining effort, not just for a day or an hour. Switching off unnecessary lights each moment is worth several Earth Hours and admitting our responsibility towards the preservation of nature is saving our specie.

There are plenty of tree planting activities but there are more cutting of trees during the year so that the effort at reforestation is like Sisyphus pushing that rock to the top of the hill only for the rock to roll back down and Sisyphus is back to the same curse.

Indeed the tree planting and mangrove replenishing are all for naught unless the guardians of these forest of the mountains and the shorelines are sincere and incorrupt.

How many people participated in the Earth Hour and Earth Day? Sadly those who really do a lot of damage, to the despoiling of the earth did not. They run across social and economic spectrum. The poor as the rich ravage the land to feed their insatiable desire for more goods, comfort and convenience.

The poor scavenge while the rich have their classy restaurants and hotels. How many megawatts do they consume compared to the single bulb of a hovel? How much garbage and chemical wastes are dumped into rivers and sewage systems or trash in dumpsites?

With determination and sense of responsibility we can find many ways to save man from destroying the source of his life's sustenance. The earth will still be around when we are no longer here. We must save ourselves from the rage of nature.*

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