Start young. Stay young.

It is a known fact that children are the best students; they learn way faster than adults. Where a child can take only few months to master speaking a language, the same person as an adult can take months even years. The same is also true for the language of sustainability and environment.

As a child we love animals, trees, birds, flowers, lakes and seas and all sorts of elements of nature. As adults, this affinity is reduced by the societal pressure of being someone or something, as respectable element of the society, the society that humans built for themselves. As a result, the environment takes a backdrop, and eventually suffers. What we fail to understand is that it only comes back to us.

A simple example is the industrial revolution, which has led to the extinction of various butterfly species starting from London. In the developing nations, the situation is even worse, the elephant species are under constant under threat for the ivory, the sandal wood forests are fast depleting and the musk is said to no longer be available due to the extinction of deer. Moreover, there is a threat that the cocoa production: by the year 2020, it will simply not be sufficient to the demand of the large amount of population, and the depleting resources. These are only the few news that makes it to the media.

The reason that our resources are depleting is ourselves. We as adults live in a world where profit is everything. No company wants to be left behind in the market. As a result, our resources are depleting. . The one who sells more crude oil is wealthy and hence, more respected.We are forgetting the basic values we learnt as a child, of loving the nature and living in harmony with them. The responsibility is now on us, we need to consciously make our children aware of the natural resources, our mistake of the past and the scarcity of it we learnt the hard way. We have to start young with this education and keep it that way. Or the coming generations will learn ‘a’ for ‘airplane’ and ‘z’ for ‘zombie’ and never ‘antelopes’ and ‘zebras’.