Nature Conservation

You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity

The more the population increase, the more we need land for settlement and for agricultural activities, more forest resources for food, furniture and our industries; consequently, more pressure is placed on our forests.The increasing world population goes together with the need for food, water and other goods. The sustainable management of resources cannot be achieved successfully under uncontrolled population growth. Green Cameroon believes that the above statement is truthful but it’s just a minor problem because there lays a major problem which need to be taken care of.

Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us if only we are careful. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not if we don’t protect the earth’s resources.

You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. We would only poison and destroy our selves but the earth would still be there. Nevertheless, life on earth takes care of itself. In the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time. A hundred years ago we didn’t have cars, airplanes, computers or vaccines. It was a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can’t imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven’t got the humility to try. We’ve been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we’re gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us. But this may not be the case if only we make a positive change now for our children’s children to remember us.

Mahatma Gandhi said that;“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed.”  Which one are you? Is it to satisfy your needs or your greed? Something will certainly be wrong with us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness we have left be destroyed … “We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in” (Wallace Stegner).

We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children. No wonder John Paul II sited in one of His massages that; “The earth will not continue to offer its harvest, except with faithful stewardship (expected from us humans). We cannot say we love the land and then take steps to destroy it for use by future generations.”

Or are we to imagine like Aldo Leopoldwho quoted; “I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness”. In Green Cameroon, we believe that to waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.
Vandana Shiva mentioned our main problem which has a great connection to greed when he wrote Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis where he quoted thus;“Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.” It is clear, our problem is greed not population increase or any other thing. The earth has all it takes to satisfy the increased population’s need.

To before warned is to before armed if not we are doomed. Our world, our Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.