Let the Climate champions of Bangladesh to Lead
Edward Roger Gwynn is a legendary figure for the British Bangladeshi community. He was former Long Term Volunteer (LTV) of International Voluntary Service, UK (IVS). Roger is advocating for Climate Justice and committed to boycott air-plane travel to reduce carbon emission.

We live on a ball of rock floating in a void more vast and cold and inhospitable than we can imagine. We forget how lucky we are that our planet happens to have the right amount of water and sunshine to sustain plant life. And we forget that without plant life there could be no animals and no humans. It is because of our ignorance that we are rapidly destroying the earth’s cloak of vegetation which till now has been regulating our climate and providing our sustenance.
For millions of years planet Earth was an ugly, barren place alternately scorched by the sun and battered by horrendous storms. No creature could possibly live there. Only after many eons were the first plants able to grow. And then, by the greatest of all miracles, the surface of the earth became covered with vegetation of every kind, the seas were filled with algae, and as a result of all that plant growth much of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was absorbed and replaced by oxygen. The world’s climate was tamed and regular weather patterns were established. And so the stage was set for animals and humans to inhabit the earth and flourish — their food, their shelter, their weather, everything they needed was provided for them by plants.
Animals live and die without causing a huge amount of damage to their natural environment. But humans are so clever, skilled and industrious that they can totally transform their surroundings in ways which suit their immediate needs. Throughout history they have been changing forests into farmland, altering watercourses, combing land and sea for all the things they want.
While the human population of the world was small the consequences of cutting down forests and exploiting natural resources were not serious enough to threaten the survival of our entire species — though from time to time regional civilizations collapsed after exhausting their available supplies of water and timber. Now, however, the population is much bigger than ever and it is growing rapidly. The demand for resources of every kind is increasing so much that it is already beginning to outstrip the supply.
Right now there are about seven billion people on earth. Every one of us is taking up space and using precious materials; every item each of us needs in our life has to come from somewhere in the world. The list of our demands is long. Like all other creatures each of us needs, as an absolute minimum, a constant supply of water, oxygen and food, but as humans we also require numerous other materials for our clothes, houses, furniture, tools, vehicles, roads, workplaces and so on. All these materials are derived from the earth, and the more of us there are the greater the damage done: more and more minerals are dug out of the ground, more and more forests are cut down for timber, more and more fish are taken from the sea, more and more land is cultivated to produce various crops, more and more fresh water is used up.
The cumulative effect on the earth of all this harvesting of resources began to be significant when the world’s population was about three billion; by now it has become critical. In many parts of the world there are shortages of firewood and water. But more fundamentally, the burning of fossil fuels together with a huge reduction in the amount of vegetation covering the land has caused an increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which in turn is leading to global warming and general climate change.
If present trends continue many fertile crop-producing areas will become barren for lack of water, sea levels will rise — inundating low-lying regions like the Maldive Islands and southern Bangladesh — and extreme weather events such as hurricanes will become more and more common. The stabilizing influence which ancient forests had on the world’s climate will no longer be there, and our planet will once more fall prey to the furious mega-storms and baking solar radiation of prehistoric times.
Although over-population is a basic problem, excess pressure on resources is chiefly the fault of the so-called developed nations. The environmental footprint of an individual (the area of land and water theoretically required to supply all his needs) varies enormously. A whole tribe of hunter-gatherers in the Amazon needs only a few acres of forest, whereas a single rich Westerner draws on the resources of considerably larger scattered areas of land and sea.
It has been calculated that for everyone to lead the lifestyle of a wealthy American, with all his wasteful consumption of choice items, all his food and clothes and possessions, all his moving around by car and plane, at least three planets like ours would be needed to provide all the materials everyone would want. The richer nations are taking far more than their share of the world’s resources, and contributing disproportionately to climate change.
How can we avoid disaster? Every individual should try to make his or her environmental footprint as small as possible — consume less, waste less, recycle more, avoid unnecessary movements by fuel-powered vehicles. At the same time the young people of the world, whose future is so gravely threatened by current trends, should raise their voices in protest, demanding moderation in lifestyles and a big reduction in the profligacy and watefulness of the “developed” nations.
Let the climate champions of Bangladesh lead the way!
