Skip to main content

S.O.S: Save Our Selves


We (my wife and I) went to Carrefour yesterday. It seems that all my effort to teach people to say the name correctly, has proven to be futile. Carrefour is pronounced like this: Car (kereta) Foo. That's how the french said it and it means junction... simpang. Maybe, the first Carrefour was built near a junction.... Anyway, here in Malaysia, we all call it Care For and the Carrefour management just use this and add the slogan, we Care For you...

But, what I want to talk about is that yesterday was "no plastic bag" day, and I see quite a few people carrying green colored bags, given away free by Carrefour. These bags are made of bio-degradable material (I presume), and surprisingly strong, since it could hold 6 of those 1 liter milk cartons, 4 tins of condensed milk and 4 tins of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup (my young son loves them).

As I push the trolley, doggedly following my wife up and down the aisles, I suddenly remembered a quote by somebody, that we do not need to save the earth, what we need to do is save ourselves.

That's the most inconvenient truth of all. The earth do not need us, we need the earth. We need the environment, the environment do not need us. If we are too much of a bother to the earth, well, earth will just adjust itself here and there and a few thousand of us will perish. Earth has been kind to us, considering. With a few quakes of the tectonic plates, we will all go the way of the dinosaurs.

Then, a new species will arise, and take dominance of earth, until this new species, too, becomes forgetful and greedy and start consuming more that their basic requirement.

Our earth has been around for billions of years and it will probably be around for another billion more. So, the question that we must ask ourselves is, how long we want to live on this earth. Polluting our environment only decreases the source of our consumption. Maybe we can rear fish and chicken and cows for us to eat, but we need to source for the food for our source of food. We need to plant more grains so that we can have enough for us and these animals.

So, the requirement grows. To make it worst, we keep on multiplying, more babies are born and more people live longer.

That's what we are. We are consumers, and we consume. We cut down trees, to make our houses, and our houses need electricity and so we dig deep into our earth to suck out oil and dig out coal to power our generators. We buy cars and drive them everywhere and we complain about traffic jams, spewing out all sorts of gases into the atmosphere, creating a green house effect and global warming.

Then, the ice caps melt, creating havoc to our weather, then the glaciers start to melt, too, raising sea levels, flooding coastlines and drowning islands.

Whatever we do to "save the environment" is really an effort to save our own existence.

But, whatever it is, our time on earth is coming to an end. There's just too many of us, and there are just not enough resources to sustain everybody.....

So, what the point of using these new green bags? We'll it look good, and it does have a "I'm doing something about it" feeling. Not a bad feeling at all... :-)




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pak Mat Beca

I started school in 1971. I went to Sekolah Ismail (Dua), as far as I am concerned the only primary school in the whole universe and every kid must go there or the government will put their parents away forever. The "Dua" or Two (2), does not mean there were two Sekolah Ismails. There was only one, except that there were two sessions, morning and afternoon. When I started in standard one, I was in the morning session. Apparently, somehow, the two Ismails alternate, and I really can't recall ever having to go to school in the afternoon. Every morning, my cousin, the late Hashimah Hashim (Allah bless her soul), and I would wait for Pak Mat to pick us up in his beca, his trishaw. And, until I changed school in 1976 (that's another story to tell), Pak Mat and his beca would take me to school every school day. I know of no other way to go to school and I did not really appreciate the distance that Pak Mat had to cycle to pick us up and send us to our respective s...
Post a Comment
Read more

For the Love of God

Someone told me a joke about a man who had just bought a car. It was his first car and, not wanting to have even a scratch on it, he took it to a hindu temple, a buddhist temple, a church and a mosque. At the hindu temple, the hindu priest chanted mantras over the car and tied a red string around the car's right wing mirror. The buddhist monk sprinkled the car with water after chanting traditional mantras and then a white string was tied to the left wing mirror. The christian priest blessed the car with holy water and gave the driver a cross to hang from the rear view mirror. At the mosque, the imam was astounded since nobody ever asked to bless a car before. So after a recitation of selected verses from the Qur'an, he took a hacksaw and promptly cut the tip off the car's exhaust pipe..... to circumcise it. When I first heard this story, I thought the new car owner was an atheist, albeit a superstitious one. This man, I had deduced, did not really believe in the existence o...
Post a Comment
Read more

The road to hell is paved with good intents....

Once there was a man who all his life have nothing but good intentions. But, everybody in his village said that he was the devil. He robbed and maimed. He killed and destroyed. When he was caught and brought to justice, his defense was that he was only trying to feed his family. When he was growing up, he was not good at school. The teachers all say he was hopeless, his father thought he was an embarrassment, his siblings thought he was a burden, society keep reminding him that the world would be a better place if he wasn't in it. Only his mother saw him differently. Only his mother loved him because he was her son.... and for no other reason. And later, he met the woman of his dreams and married her and had beautiful children and he vowed that they will never ever go through life as he did. He swore on his life, that he will do anything to ensure his children go the best schools, eat the best foods, wear the best clothes, grow up to have the best jobs, to be whatever they as...
Post a Comment
Read more