FAITH WITH SUSTAINABILITY

Stewardship towards God given resources

Over the past decade, there has been an ever-increasing demand from environmentalists to push leaders of countries towards acknowledging the Ecological Footprint that is being left by them owing to the improper and excessive use of natural resources. The Ecological Footprint is simply a measure of the demand made by people on natural resources. As a metric, it is used to determine the impact that the people are having on the environment in any given country.

Ecological Footprint, or EF, helps governments make policies by providing estimates on the biologically productive land and sea area that is needed to provide renewable resources a population consumes and to absorb the waste it generates. EF covers the demand side of the equation, but in order to know the real impact of a country’s Ecological Footprint, we need to compare it to Biocapacity, a parallel metric that deals with the supply side of the equation. While EF tells us how much is needed, Biocapacity tells us how much of it is available for use. If a country’s Ecological Footprint exceeds its Biocapacity, it means that it has an Ecological Deficit. These metrics are measured in ‘global hectares’, or ‘gha’, and as per a recent report on the Ecological Footprint of countries, India has a per capita Ecological Footprint of 1.19 gha while its per capita Biocapacity is only 0.43 gha. This means that we are running on a massive Ecological Deficit as a country!

Sustainability is the need of the hour. There is no denying that we have been wasteful in utilizing the resources that have been entrusted to us. When God created the earth and all that is in it, He created it in abundance; so much so that despite our extremely excessive use of natural resources over the past 200 years or so, and even with a population explosion that has seen a 7-fold increase in the same time, we have still not run dry. There is no denying that we are inching towards it. Yes, it is true that God has set mankind to have dominion over the earth, but He has also blessed us with the wisdom to be judicious and enjoy the abundance but not be wasteful. There has to be a stewardship towards the resources that God has given to us. Major corrective steps have to be taken by governments and large industries to adopt more sustainable methods of production, to utilize natural resources more judiciously and switch to adopting renewable sources of energy.

However, the onus does not simply lie with them. You and I can and need to do our bit to aid this process. Think about simple things that we can do to help preserve the environment like carpooling when possible, using public transport, practicing waste segregation and recycling at home, avoiding single use plastic, conserving water and so many other small initiatives that we can take as a community. One such initiative is Auto Angels, a startup by Chef Amey Marathe in Hyderabad, that provides affordable waterless car cleaning services. They use a method to leave your car shining everyday without using a single drop of water. A simple yet effective step to save water considering how much water is wasted each day in washing cars in our cities.

Our aim must be to collectively work towards restoring nature. May we find simple yet effective solutions that help make the world a better place for future generations so they too can enjoy what we enjoy, and much more.