Is This Our Future?
Polluted air, global warming, poor environmental awareness. Just what will our actions lead to in the very end?
Imagine standing on a cliff overlooking a towering city, such an amazing sight, a breath-taking scene. However, such sight, such tranquility is broken by a cacophony of honking cars, a huge cloud of rising smog. The sun, blazing and blinding, is scorching all the city-dwellers to the edge of thirst. This city, magnificent it may be, is slowly collapsing…
If we don’t change our lifestyle from this moment on, this will be what our future looks like – a world that is slowly fading away due to our irresponsible human activities. Air pollution, global warming……all of our uncaring actions towards Mother Nature is slowly pushing us towards our doom.
Everyday in Hong Kong, we release more than 70 billion liters of pollutants into the air. Yet, an average person inhales about 20 thousand liters of air daily. If you count the numbers, you’ll find that in HK, you have a 50% risk of inhaling poisonous gas each day! And the numbers are still increasing – the risk is getting higher and higher. Imagine in just a few years time, you have no choice but to breathe in polluted air!
Global warming is spreading worldwide at an extremely dangerous pace – just 20 years, and our polar caps are already at the edge of total meltdown! When ice caps melt, sea levels rise – this in turn leads to the flooding of coastal cities. Imagine a future world in which places like Hong Kong become the new sunken city of Atlantis – a sight I believe no one wishes to see!
Have you ever heard of “The Boiling Frog” story? It is said that if a frog is put in boiling water, it will jump out; but, if it is put in cold water that is slowly heated, it will never jump out, even if it reaches a boiling temperature. Has anyone here heard about the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”, produced by Al Gore, once the Vice President of the US? He once commented on the story – “This experiment has lessons for another animal—ourselves. If drastic change takes place abruptly, we notice and react to it. If it takes place gradually, over a few generations, we are hardly aware of it, and by the time that we are ready to react, it can be too late.” We, human-sized frogs, are slowly destroying our own world. Yet, we ignore the consequences of our actions – after all, even till this moment, never had a disaster been recorded so extreme that could wipe out the entire human race in a single day!
Environmental problems is no longer a topic to joke at, like we did a few years ago when the whole world believed that global warming was a bad joke altogether, or ice caps melting only to be found in children’s stories. We must face these problems bravely and seriously.
So just what can be done about this? There is surely no way to reverse the actions we have done; yet what we must do now is to help prevent the problem from getting worse. Simple actions, such as using less electricity, saving water, avoiding oneself from using excess materials….. There is an old saying, “teamwork is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results” – if we join hands to save our beloved Earth, then there will be hope.
The future is in our hands. Do you want to see your children grow up in a terrible environment? Do you wish to see the beauty of Mother Nature slowly dying away? Do you want to see our race vanish into oblivion? Do you wish to join us in reshaping the future?
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