“Our future depends on what we do in the present” said a wise man whom the world called “Mahatma”, we heard what he had to say, gave our applauses, and then proceeded to throw his advice in the wastebasket of quotes which school children now use to open up morning assembly speeches, this was a fact I realized when on my trip to Himachal Pradesh in May, I’d run away to escape the blistering hot summers which managed to touch 52°C in some parts and as if that was not enough in the plains the mountains too managed to touch 30+ °C in some parts, Manali, the go-to destination of most people was sweltering hot traffic struck mess.
These are clear effects of the environmental destruction that we have unleashed upon our beautiful planet and the fact that despite all of this, our desire for more is ceaseless while I was traveling up the Kinnaur Valley beside the river Satluj to reach my destination of Kaza, in the Spiti Valley
During this part of the journey it was very noticeable how unsustainably we had constructed the infrastructure in Himachal. There were remnants of landslides across the entire route with roads that sliced through mountains without any care for reforesting the land to the massive dam projects which aimed to control the river by flooding the ecosystem around it.
On the way back to Delhi around Shimla I saw 4 minor forest fires and the temperature en route to Shimla soared as high as 34°C , we take great pride in these projects but don’t realize the hidden price that we as a species pay, these roads and dams are a small part of the much bigger problem, that despite the writing on the wall none of us care, those who do are incapable of bringing about any significant institutional change
This apathy of ours is very evident if we look at the operation of our polity, that despite the fact temperatures soared so high or people died in dozens because of heatstroke and that the predictions by scientists only predict a worse and worse fate for mankind, NO major political party in the country even bothered to mention climate issues as part of their manifesto
We have a calamity in the making on our hands, and as a teenager who wishes for a better future all I can do is hope that those in power come to be affected in some way by climate change so that they may at last pay attention.
This article is written by Preyem Kumar Srivastava, a concerned teenager, DPS 2024 Topper doing social work with NGO ” Yuva Yoddha.”