PRESIDENT Roosevelt of the US once called the forests “the lungs of the Earth”, whilst renowned poet Robert Frost got inspiration from trees as in his poems ‘The Road Not Taken’, ‘The Oak Tree’ and ‘Stopping By The Woods On a Snowy Evening’.
Yes, there must be millions of artists and poets who can’t help but get inspiration from them too. Homegrown poet, Maya Green, also finds inspiration for many of his poems from the rainforests and the pristineness of nature in general. There are many rich, powerful people and celebrities who are fighting to save them. Yes, we are talking about the enchanting draw and power of forests.
Technically, the term “the lungs of the earth” should refer to more than the forests of the world because the world’s forests, together with the oceans and seas, are responsible for absorbing enormous amounts of the carbon dioxide that circulates in the atmosphere. Together they are, effectively, the Earth’s true lungs, and protecting those lungs is crucial if we are to defend the planet’s biodiversity and fight global warming.
Now we know the reason why the Earth is made up mainly of the oceans and seas that together make up the body of saltwater that covers approximately 70.8% of the surface of Earth and contains 97% of the Earth’s water. Protecting the health of our oceans is paramount because without them the Earth will lose a major part of its lungs.
I read a report recently which says that between 1990 and 2015, the world lost 129 million hectares of forests – destroyed by chainsaws, fire and cement. By ‘cement’ I take it to mean development urbanisation, infrastructure and artificial constructions, and so on undertaken by man. It goes on to say that deforestation is advancing at an alarming pace: about 10 hectares of forest disappear every minute due to agriculture, extraction of raw materials and urbanisation.
Forests are an integral part of our ecosystem. We are nothing without them. The International Day of Forests was established on the 21st of March 2012 after the efforts of the United Nationals General Assembly. The International Day of Forests reminds the current and future generations to preserve the forests. Through the UN, member nations collaborate to preserve forests to manage climate change.
This brings us to the term ‘Paru-Paru Kota’, literally meaning ‘City Lungs’ or creating green lungs in towns and cities. It refers to the creation of parks, public gardens, or other open spaces and greenery. Any city worth its name must have plenty of green lungs, just like the great cities where the standard of living is very high. Preserving the green landscape and natural environment is paramount to our wellbeing and the planting of trees and other plants is one of the best ideas.
A good example of how this has been done is Singapore that its people call the “Red Dot”. It has a total population of 5.45 million (2021 population) — citizens number 3.50 million and the balance is made up of PRs and non-residents. With its land size, the population looks like a lot of people packed into an area smaller than the size of the Bakun Dam Lake. However, having lived there from 2013 to 2016 it does not feel overcrowded or there is no sense of being claustrophobic at all. This is because the whole island is like a huge park or garden, with lots of greenery.
The greening of the island republic started with the founder President Lee Kuan Yew himself. The story has it that in the very early days, Mr Lee Kuan Yew once took a helicopter ride to survey his domain and he noticed that the island was shaped like a tortoise or a turtle and it was mainly brown. After that, he decided that from a brown turtle he would change Singapore into a green turtle – a better colour and I suspect well for ‘feng shui’ too.
As a country develops and more and more buildings are constructed, and major infrastructure projects have been implemented the pressure on the environment and the natural living space gets heightened and amplified. If this is not managed well, the country will cause irreversible damage to the living environment. This prompts the question as to what the best model for development is; one that is balanced and causes minimal damage to the environment and minimises adverse impact on humans and other living creatures.
There is a lot of literature and research on what it means to have development. The idea seems to have progressed along the path of different perceptions of what the term means. There have been many different theories, and many tend to conflict with each other. Each idea has some elements of truth in it but as in the parable of the blind men and an elephant, a story which originated in the ancient Indian subcontinent, a person’s description is influenced by his own limited experience or only from the dominant stimuli in his life. For those not aware, it is a story of a group of blind men who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and imagine what the elephant is like by touching it.
The latest version of the evolution of the theory about development is as encapsulated in The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), also known as the Global Goals, which were adopted by the United Nations in 2015 as a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that by 2030 all people enjoy peace and prosperity. So, we are now living in the era of SDGs and we hope that the good intentions behind all the efforts will be realised fully by 2030.
Good intentions are a good and very important starting point. However, when not followed by actions they are never enough. As an old saying or proverb says – “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”. There is also a hadith that says, “Paradise is surrounded by hardships, and the Fire [of hell] is surrounded by desires.” The second statement goes to the root cause of the matter. Paraphrased, it goes: To get to paradise you would have to work at it and it’s through hardships that you will get there. The flip side is you’ll end up in the cauldron of fire aka hell if all you do is take the easy way out and follow your base desires. Very appropriate too for how we should treat our environment. At the rate we are going when global warming is no longer a theoretical concept but a reality, the cauldron of fire is becoming more real each passing day. And a future paradise is truly just a mirage.
But then some people can’t see the forest for the trees. They are either blind to the consequences of their actions or they just do not care and are hoping to escape the backlash.
To recap, some pertinent facts you need to know about forests:
• Forests are home to about 80% of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity, with more than 60,000 tree species.
• Around 1.6 billion people depend directly on forests for food, shelter, energy, medicines and income.
• The world is losing 10 million hectares of forest each year – about the size of Iceland.
So what are we to do? There is a lot of talk about transitioning to a so-called green or renewable energy future. However, but the current approaches are not perfect nor are they executed with zero carbon emission or footprint.
The term “going green” may sound like the utopian ideal but when you look realistically at the hidden and embedded costs, you can see that going green is far more destructive to the Earth’s environment than meets the eye.
See, for example, below. It is an excellent illustration of the misperception, of misplaced beliefs and half-baked solutions that have unintended consequences. The analysis gives a convincing picture of the processes of producing green products.
I quote:
“Batteries do not make electricity – they store electricity produced elsewhere, primarily using coal, uranium, natural gas-powered plants, or diesel-fuelled generators. So, to say an EV is a zero-emission vehicle is not at all valid.
Also, since forty per cent of the electricity generated in the US is from coal-fired plants, it follows that forty per cent of the EVs on the road are coal-powered. Do you see?
But that is not half of it. For those of you excited about electric cars and a green revolution, I want you to take a closer look at batteries and also windmills and solar panels.
A typical EV battery weighs one thousand pounds, about the size of a travel trunk. It contains twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminium, steel, and plastic. Inside are over 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells.
To manufacture each EV auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of the ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of the ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of the ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth’s crust for one battery.”
The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed to process silicate into silicon panels. To make pure enough silicon requires hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. They also need gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium-diselenide, and cadmium-telluride, which also are highly toxic. Silicon dust is a hazard to workers and the panels cannot be recycled.
Windmills are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental destruction. Each weighs 1,688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and contains 1,300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fibreglass, and the hard-to-extract rare earth neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and lasts 15 to 20 years only, by which time it must be replaced. It cannot be recycled.
There may be a place for these technologies, but you must look beyond the myth of zero emissions.
“Going green” may sound like a utopian ideal but when you look at the hidden and embedded costs realistically with an open mind, you can see that it is more destructive to the Earth’s environment than meets the eye, for sure.
I’m not opposed to mining, electric vehicles, wind or solar, but showing the reality of the situation.” – Unquote
The passage above was forwarded to me by a friend which he copy-pasted or forwarded in toto. It’s an eye-opener and helps prompt some reflection; at least for me. Hence, this article is on the subject. I also can’t take off the lingering thought in mind which says something like this: Maybe, someone is making tons of money from promoting the so-called Green Energy agenda? The solutions that they are championing are not exactly green and along the value chain of the manufacturing, transportation, delivery and installation of such solutions the carbon footprint is forgotten or conveniently ignored?
“Keeping Green” is a better solution, a paradigm shift as it implies embracing nature in its pristine and God-given form, minimising the destruction of the natural environment and replacing depleted forests, planting more trees and reinforcing the natural environment as a fail proofed strategy to keep the Earth green. The only real and natural Green Agenda is to stop the cutting of trees, and the planting of more. Just a single tree releases 14 Lbs of oxygen (O2) a year and soaks up CO2 at the same time. The call to plant more trees is the right call, and everyone must do his or her part to at least plant one tree each. For me, I have started planting trees since I was a kid, albeit at the time it was planting fruit trees around the village.
The trees and the seas were nature’s mechanism to make the Earth a liveable home, the lonely Blue Bubble in an immense known universe. Yet paradoxically we, the homo sapiens, are despoiling our planet and polluting the atmosphere in our spaceship. Strange species we are, what the locals call “paloi” or foolish.
