A child woke up, gasping for air... he quickly put on his gas mask that provided him with pure and unadulterated shots of oxygen, instead of the nauseous and toxic air in the atmosphere. “Teacher had been lying” he thought, as he recalled his master talking of the Earth as though it used to be green in colour. He had also spoken about colourful “flowers” that once existed and had a fragrance.
Will this be how children wake up in the future? Can you imagine this future where a child fails to realise what a tree or a flower was? Tomorrow could hold pain and suffering, with heat so extreme that the powerful homosapiens may become tomorrow’s dinosaurs - animals that once ruled the planet. This is the threat our planet is facing. Consider the length of your own index finder as three times longer. Well, that is how much the sea levels have risen by in the last two centuries. Moreover, there are people who hold the belief: “Even if the Arctic melts, what difference does it make?” Well, we shall get a lot more water than we need right now. So much more, that the very same water that keeps us alive, will perish us. But, we aim to counter the planet’s evil villain - global warming. Our first weapon in this war is a sustainable city - the true idea of a perfect utopia where humans give back what is taken from Nature. And that is why we may proudly proclaim the wonders of our very own, a home-grown sustainable city - Masdar, in the UAE. Boasting of nearly 90,000 solar panels. And it shall be heartening for us to know that Australia also has plans for a future with sustainable cities, which, improves the chances of human survival. Other than Australia, we also have a variety of projects back in India, like Auroville that could project India as a world leader in these concepts.
Humans have two paths - we could either choose the path to the apocalyptic future or the latter idea of a future that holds purity and a sense of unity with Nature.
Let’s have a future where children find it hard to believe that there had once been noxious gases spewing out of a car’s exhaust or a fear of the all life forms ending.
That is the future. The tomorrow that we want, need, and shall achieve, whatever the cost might be.
British science fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke, once said: “It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.” Let’s prove him wrong by outliving the insentient beings, to bask in the glory of our own intellect as homosapiens. - The reader is a student based in Abu Dhabi
