Tree plantation drive: Some truths

This is my response to the mockery of tree plantation drives:

One needs to understand that nobody is planting 'trees' - they are only trying to grow 'plants'.

How many plants do you think survive in each tree plantation drive? The maximum percentage reached is about 70%. So, if you grow 100 plants, maximum of 70 would only survive and that too only if great care is taken.

Just take a look at this article:

http://indianexpress.com/…/2-cr-trees-plantation-drive-buo…/

To reach merely 33% forest cover, we need "400 crore" trees. So, all these tree plantation drives are actually not sufficient enough to cover that. We are not even talking about 50% forest cover, just 33%.

Everybody can plant tree saplings. One very important factor most of us conveniently forget is the rate of deforestation:

http://time.com/4019277/trees-humans-deforestation/

We have 400 billion trees of which 15 billion trees are cut every year. This means, if nobody plants anything, we will be out of trees in the world in just a few years - within our lifetime! The plants that you grow today will not become trees by tomorrow - they take their own time.

So, my request to such people who mock is that if you don't plant trees, it is fine. Please stop making fun of people who do! This is not just for our generation but for our children as well that such tree plantation drives happen and flourish successfully.

Smoke Smoke all over

I had been thinking about blogging this for a very long time now.

I don't like smoking and cigarette smoke in fact but not necessarily smokers. Of late though, I have begun to hate some of these smokers, the ones who do it irresponsibly. I give a damn for people who want to smoke their lives away but those who do it in front of non-smokers blatantly especially in front of children, get onto my nerves and that is what I mean by smoking irresponsibly.

Those people seem to obviously not care smoking right onto the faces of their own children! I have seen it scores of times during my daily drive to office and back home. They might say 'who the hell are you to ask about this?' ... I don't have a proper answer but I do care!

Children are the future generation and nipping those buds with smoke is the most horrible thing I can imagine being done to them. These same people would crib tomorrow if their son or daughter takes money from their own purses to smoke right in front of them. At that time, they will cry that the youth is all spoilt not realizing the seeds have been theirs!

If anybody might be doing such things themselves inadvertently, I request such people to stop and look at what they are doing to themselves and to our future generation. If even 2 people change themselves for the better and cascade that among people they know, we can leave the world a much better place to live.

Precious!

I have been meaning to write this for at least a week now. It is about the power of 'a single drop' and is with respect to pollution. It is difficult to explain but some analogies could help.

What is common between 'A thousand drops of water', 'A hundred ants', 'A colony of bees' and 'Waves rolling together'? Of course, the commonality is that these are multiple entities of same type. But if you look at these examples a little more carefully, it becomes clear that though a single entity in these groups is not very significant, when they get into these groups, their effectiveness increases multifold!

All that is fine but what has that got to do with pollution - you ask? Think of yourself (an individual man / woman) as that single entity, an ant or a bee or a single wave, and the analogy becomes apparent now. If not now, it will be once you reach the end - so read on.

I have been traveling almost constantly this week, to various places in Chennai on my 2-wheeler or in my car. At every opportunity where I had a little over 30 seconds stop at a traffic signal, I switched off my vehicle engine thereby saving some precious time & money. One might laugh now reading about the 'precious' phrase ... but I really mean it.

From my home to office, there are at least 3 traffic signals where I stop for over 30 seconds each. So, that is approximately 1.5 minutes one way and a total of 3 minutes during a regular working day. Added to that, I was out visiting the dentist and to my bank this week, going via Anna Salai (anybody in Chennai knows how crazy that drive would be), giving me an extra whopping 15 minutes during the total 4 hour driving time!!

So, my total savings on petrol usage last week alone has been 30 full minutes!

Now imagine about 1 million vehicle users in Chennai city [let's talk small numbers now :)] and if even 1/3rd of them stop their vehicle engines like I did, we have about 1 million minutes per day & 5 million minutes for a regular 5-day working week!! Now do you see how tiny drops add up?

We humans have been burdening Mother Earth too much with so much of our own non-sense. Let's at least save some burden for the trees we are chopping off so non-chalantly. If not for the green cover on Earth, we would have wiped ourselves out much earlier I think.

For people really who want to do something about eco-friendly stuff, the start has to be with themselves. Some guidelines are in these sites:

http://motorinsurancesingapore.com/articles/129/7-ways-to-reduce-petrol-consumption/
http://ezinearticles.com/?Saving-Money-by-Eco-Friendly-Driving-Techniques:-Not-Such-a-Bad-Idea!&id=215122

Hope to see you join the drive soon :-)