Let us enforce and realize human trusteeship of the planet

Let us enforce and realize human trusteeship of the planet

An all-original poem by Sujay Rao Mandavilli

 

The natural environment refers to the environment we live in,

It refers to the natural resources we use and to the air we must breathe in,

It may refer to the lifeless and the non-living that constitutes the abiotic,

Or to the rich, variegated and teeming life that is represented by the biotic,

Humans have long damaged the environment anthropogenically and catastrophically,

With heterogeneous and sundry activities such as agriculture, livestock and industry,

Sustainability has been seldom adequately or sufficiently understood and cruelly and unheedingly brushed under the carpet,

And with short-sighted inattention which we will eventually regret,

We have also often failed to channelize, optmize and foundationally and comprehensively reset,

Our self-serving, self-seeking and purblind ways alter, and our reckless profligacy reexamine and correct, 

Right from early path-breaking and trail-blazing civilizations,

Indeed, right from the pioneering Neolithic revolutions,

To the dawn of the magnificent and munificent industrial revolution,

Humans have had a large and a catastrophic environmental footprint with all their chequered and polychromatic luggage and baggages,

And man may in a sense even be an apex predator as he clumsily and dodgily trudges,

And stalks and walks the earth in random and fumbling incohesion,

Using up earth’s resources greedily without a care,

Consuming earth’s multisplenderous assets and riches hastily without giving a tinker’s damn regarding posterity’s material and spiritual welfare,

Our overtures in the realms of sustainable development are skimpy and recent,

In many ways they are skill half-cooked, half-baked and nascent,

Let us therefore stop to think and introspect about future generations,

While making esteemed sacrifices in the current and present generations, 

We still pollute disastrously and precariously through plastics, e-waste and power generation,

Transportation, chemical industries, building and construction,  

Metal ores, paper and fool-headed deforestation,

Agriculture, meat, livestock, poultry, and fossil fuel consumption,

Therefore let us endorse the human trusteeship of the planet principle uprightly,  

That first stemmed from the ideals and ideas of the legendary Mahatma Gandhi,

Who spoke about the need for human restraint and caring responsibility,

As we are endowed with an intellect let us envision and see,

What man can do not only for himself but for other species that live on land and sea,

And take care of their just and unconditional welfare truly and completely,

This will be a just manifestation of man’s claimed intellect,

As he claims to invigorate and resurrect,

Earth’s lost bounties from man’s marauding army,

Anything else would be a devastating catastrophe,

And a twisted and warped misalignment of man’s claimed and misplaced intellect,

As we seek to duly guard and to duly protect,

Life’s multitudinous forms from man’s encroaching greed, 

Let us therefore self-energize and plant the seed,

Of multitudinous and multifaceted environmental activities,

We may even choose to begin from some scholarly and well-erudite theory,

We must even refine and rein in environmental anthropology with some semblance of orderly sanity,

Even as we seek to protect life’s myriad forms and biodiversity,

Comprehensively and holistically,

Directly and indirectly,

With a long-sweeping goals and not just fleetingly and impermanently,

Through vectors spread out as far and wide as population management and technology,

There is no denying the fact that humans have long outsurpassed their means,

And that humans have long outstripped their naturally endowed resources,

Not just marginally and peripherally but to a considerable degree,

With a stubbornly high resource wastage rate and a high resource depletion rate indeed,

The future course of mankind is rootless and unsettled and remains to be seen,

Humans have lived recklessly, unreasonably and nonchalantly,

Negligently, sloppily and carelessly,

Let us pause for a moment and think about it,

And put it into our pipe and leisurely smoke it,

This is no false flag, but the hard and fast reality and must be ingested fully,  

This is the bitter and naked truth veritably,

Therefore, let us not prevaricate and pussyfoot,

To deny this would be a rib-cracking excuse,

Let us move away from our staid and worn out playbook,

As we can no longer smilingly whistle away in the woods,

Let us throw out outdated and outmoded clichés,

And sidestep all bogeys,

Let us not hear only one side of the story,

And languish irrecoverably in a stony tower cast in ivory,

Nor get the wrong end of the stick,

But let us instead proceed with the right ethos and in true bounteous spirit,

Let us also go full throttle,

Let us also go full steam ahead,  

And grandly surge and power ahead,

And let us march in grand unison,

We must launch the right kind of missions,

And take the right decisions,

Let us create the right kind of awareness amongst our restless and teeming millions,

Among the rank and file and minions,

Let us therefore summon and marshal our latent and inborn spirits,

And thunder aft and fore with thunderous spirit,

We are in many crucial metrics trailing,

And are in complex and multitudinous ways comprehensively ailing,

Therefore, let us move forward with all guns blazing,

That we must axe and castigate whatever to the just and fair cause of environmental sustainability is irrelevant and malevolent,

If not outright and vilely repugnant,

There is no need to throw out the caboodle,

Or carelessly and negligently kick out the kit and boodle,

However, we must not ourselves fleetingly or illusionarily mollycoddle,

Human trusteeship of the planet is possible and is not a distant pipedream,

Along with sustainable development it is not a hallucination of an unfulfillable dream,

Mankind’s intellectual and economic goals are possible and one need not make any sacrifice supreme,

Wholly sustainable development may take time but it must surefootedly come,

If we don’t realize this soon enough we will all be littered with civilizational debris,

And many a tragic litany,

Let us therefore achieve our environmental aims, and let us achieve our environmental goals in sum,

This is the point that we must against all odds and with even prowess drive home.