Restoring Balance to the World

Last year, I worked on a little project to figure out what we needed to do as a society to prevent us from making our planet unliveable.

I took an inevitable deep dive into the climate crisis only to realise that fossil fuel consumption and the resulting runaway warming of our planet is a mere symptom. That trying to address global warming without taking biodiversity loss meant we were destroying savannahs and releasing more carbon to plant trees to 'capture carbon'.

Not only are we slow to switch to renewables, we are destroying ecosystems through unsustainable logging, overfishing, ever expanding building, making the problem much worse. It became clear that the problem lies in a socioeconomic system that prioritises unregulated growth and consumption.

Over the course of those months, I meandered through solutions and ideas. Small ones like making friends with birds and insects in my yard and massive ones like the end of capitalism and patriarchy. Some philosophical, like tackling placelessness and some political, like the adoption of ecocide into law.

I learned that we need all of these solutions. Ultimately, my exploration helped me get a real world understanding of the interconnectedness of things. And I was drawn to one climate solution in particular - forest restoration.

Successful restoration is very specific to a local ecology and entails the recovery of the natural processes like interaction of water with soil. Besides, a forest cannot be sustainably restored if the efforts don’t take into account the people who depend on it. If local human needs are not addressed, human activity is bound to disrupt ecosystems. A systems approach must be adopted, interspecies relationships must be repaired.

Perhaps in putting energy into patch by ailing patch of land (and sea) we can begin to restore balance to the world.