Healing The Blue Planet : An Informed Consent

What ails Mother Earth? The answer can be found in the propensities of Man, her most gifted, but alas, also her most prodigal son. The world today may look to be the oyster to modern Man, with his faculties of creativity, inventiveness and enterprise. But looks are deceptive. Man has harnessed science and technology and also the new science of economics to bring about unprecedented prosperity, growth and amenities of life. All this, however, has come at a grievous cost to nature in the anthropogenic maladies that we, in our reckless quest for progress and comfort, have inflicted on the mother planet. Climate change and global warming; rampant exploitation of non-renewable fossil fuels belching out greenhouse gases; retreating glaciers; growing water, air and noise pollution; ocean acidification; ozone depletion; dwindling forests; imperilled biodiversity; and the growing menace of e-waste all are stark symptoms of the seemingly inexorable degradation that human activities have wrought on the once-pristine environment of this living planet. We do not seem to learn from the fearsome records of myriad disasters and the five great extinctions that had stricken the earth in the past; what is worse, we seem to be heading mindlessly toward our collective doom of a sixth extinction, this time threatening to be caused by human-induced climate change. Time is running out, but all is still not lost. Initiatives have already been launched by conscientious world bodies, conferences and protocols to fight the hydra-headed monster of environmental pollution. What is needed is a broad-based general will an informed consent by us the conscious earthlings to heal our beloved blue planet. The symptoms, the diagnostics and the line of cure, are all presented in this volume of highly readable and comprehensive analysis by an ecologist who has embraced Save the Earth as his mission in life.

BANE SINGH is a Civil Engineer and Ecologist by professional training and an environmentalist by leaning. A scholar and thinker, he began his career with the Water Resources Department(WRD). Thereafter he developed an abiding passion for the environment and since 1992, has significantly consolidated his knowledge of the subject. He has been associated with numerous environmental /technical reports/volumes during his professional career, holding multi-chromatic assignments. Bane s innovative yet viable ideas on environmental enhancement have won him widespread acclaim as have his articles in the Time of India, written to galvanize environmental rethinking. He has travelled globally to research numerous environmental parameters and gained an incisive understanding of national and international environmental/ecological issues. He frequently lectures on Environmental Awareness, Water Conservation and Sustainable Development. His green ideas, thoughts and messages can be found on 24 different green pages which he contributes to, in addition to his own page that also offers an interactive platform for the environmental aficionados across the globe.