Ankur Dogra
Walt Whitman a American poet has rightly said : “The most human and humanizing thing, is the awareness of this we as atomized into millions of individual I’s who have lived and loved and lost and made art, music and mathematics through it all”. The ultimate ambition of this essay, in common with the thrust of humanistic enterprise: to increase the burden of awareness.
No talk these days rises above the Covid-19 outbreak. This Virus has put the entire globe into an obsessive fear, due to its rapid increase and transmission from one country to another in a way that almost looks like a uncontrollable disease. After the World Health Organization’s decision to consider Covid-19 as a global Pandemic, though there was long delay in its declaration, dealing with the virus has turned into an unprecedented international emergency, that needs critical concern and priority, severe precautions and preventive standards.
The pandemic Covid-19 has almost hit every part of the cosmopolitan Earth except few indigenous tribes who dwell in their own time and space.
In Geological time scale (Timeline of the Earth which describes the timing and relationship of the events which have occurred during the Earth’s history) after the Post-Pre-Cambrian Eon, different species at different Timelines on the earth have their pre-dominant role accompanied by harmony with mother Earth. Since the beginning of Holocene epoch, human civilization not only had its pre-dominant role but more recently, especially, from last two centuries slumped to “Anthropocene” as result of Unsustainable Human activities. Consequently, today humans have inhabited 90% of world’s land leaving only 10% for the Wild Spaces. Hitherto we have made Earth less habitable with two World Wars and subtly discovered potential chemical weapons and killing machines beyond the limit.
Human beings, like other species, feel at home on earth. However, the power to see people and places in their complex is highly developed in humans. It is a sign of our super intelligence, yet we have rather applied most of the this magical power in unsustainable practices.
On the Contrary, the Nature has always showered the freedom (frontal space) to the Humans. Frontal space is primarily visual. It is vivid and “illuminated” because it can be seen, frontal space has future, openness and freedom. In these crucial times, the organisation of frontal space worldwide needs to be united across the imaginary demarcated National boundaries to completely eradicate this deadly Covid-19.
Routine activity does not require analytical thought. When we wish to do something new, then we need to pause, envision and think. Never before so many opportunities existed for pathogens to transmit from wild and domestic animals to peoples. Thanks to widespread habitat destruction through heavy deforestation, mining, exploitation of animals for profit and the climate crisis.
At present our immediate priority should be to prevent the spread of Covid-19. In the long process, we need to cope with the habitat and biodiversity loss. The continuous eradication of the “Wild spaces” has shrunk their spaces and has brought homo sapiens close to animals and plants that can easily jump to humans. We should be taking this unprecedented Covid-19 a clear warning, it is only human behaviour which cause it and there will be more in future unless we change. In these unprecedented crucial times, let’s reinvent the Earth which was used to be a dwelling place of both Humans and the rest of the “wild spaces”.
The author teaches Geography in Government Degree College, Gool (Ramban)
feedbackexcelsior@gmail.com
Follow our WhatsApp channel