Chandrachur Chatterjee: Freedom for Environment

On the eve of our 78^th Independence Day, we are standing at a crossroads, where we need to reimagine independence. Especially when it comes to understanding it in the backdrop of Mother Earth and its environment.

What is an environment? Every resource provided by Mother Nature to support its habitat is the environment. Sky, Air, Hills, Mountains, water, forest, rivers, ocean, land, soil, plants, bacteria and other millions of microorganisms is the environment.

This very support system is on the verge of collapsing today because of overuse, abuse and misuse of every natural resource. We need to ask ourselves why this has happened. There can be many reasons for this. An irresponsible lifestyle of waste and misuse at the grassroots level, the greed of industry and corporations (public, private, national and multinational corporations) to control humanity, silence from most of us have pushed environmental stability to the brink.

On the eve of Independence Day, all of us need to find ways to stop this destruction. we need to stop always blaming others, stop expecting someone else will do something, be responsible for stopping the wastage of resources, and be brave to speak up when we see misuse or abuse of the environment. We should change the mindset that individually we cannot change anything. If our freedom fighters thought that way, we wouldn’t be independent today.

Environment pollution is at all all-time high today. Be it air pollution, water pollution, or Soil pollution. Overuse of toxic and other chemical material have destroyed the ecosystem and biodiversity.

In the process we have subjugated each other, not only human beings, but birds, beasts, animals, the environment, the world. This attempt to control everyone and everything is subjugation.

Freedom does not mean that I do what I please, take what I want at any cost for my own convenience. From the perspective of the environment, freedom means moderation and respect for the environment, freedom means protesting waste and abuse, freedom means protecting the environment through our own actions.

The environmental work undertaken by Mukti in the past years is just the beginning. Building on the success, experience and know-how from our past initiatives, we are strengthening our environment team and program.

However, to address the environment challenge the world is facing today, there is a need for environment revolution. There is so much to be done but not much time left to ensure the next generations can live. It is our responsibility to leave the world environment in the condition we found it if not make it better.

Lastly, we must remember, no matter how much we exploit the environment, Mother nature will protect itself – whether we, our next generation will be part of that world or not depends on how we celebrate today’s freedom.