Nature for me is most relevantly defined as the “undomesticated condition of plants or animals.” How we nurture today’s population so that they take more care of the flora and fauna of our natural world, thereby maintaining their existence for the future is a question that has become a preoccupation for many people in the world.
Our society must ensure that it will always be possible for animals to roam freely in their natural habitat. Until 2007, the nearest I had come to experiencing this was in the wildlife parks of Great Britain but in the August of 2007 I travelled to Bolivia where I visited the amazing Salt Flats and Lake Titicaca, seeing the breeding grounds of many species of Flamingo. I also visited the jungle, encountering perhaps more wildlife than I really wished to! It was so much more interesting and educational to see these animals in their natural habitat.
In recent years, we have witnessed the destruction of vast acreage of rainforest, the melting of ice caps, pollution of seas and air plus over-fishing and hunting- all of which have greatly contributed to a vast decline in numbers of many species, predominant amongst them are the Tiger and the Polar bear. We are hearing more and more about carbon emissions and how much damage they have made to the ozone layer. Climate change has been starkly evident when even the United Kingdom has seen hurricanes, tornados, droughts and this year, the worst flooding in over 100 years. Hardly a day passes when we do not hear that some country is experiencing a natural disaster caused by climate change.
We have become a “throw-away” society. My grandmother lived through the Second World War when the rationing of food was in place. Due to a shortage of food my granny learnt never to waste anything. Her family made do with what they had, cooking meals form scratch and were probably a lot healthier for it. They used baskets to collect their shopping not plastic bags, walked to school and the shops and ate fresh food on a daily basis. We have become a spoilt society and are not better off because of it. Caring for the environment should be taught from a young age in school. Schoolchildren must also be taught more about dietary matters and cooking as the problem of obesity in England today is not just down to a lack of income. In the future, we could learn some lessons from our past.
The answer therefore lies in our own hands. In order to have a future we must learn to take much more care of the natural world and hope that the problems we have created for ourselves are not insurmountable.
If everyone took some responsibility for change I am sure that a huge transformation could be achieved. A problem exists; now let us find the answer.
All the pictures are from my trip to Bolivia. GO THERE IT'S FRIGGIN AWESOME
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