Environmental Awareness

Environmental Awareness and Responsibility
By Tel Asiado

To live harmoniously with our surroundings, be it our immediate neighbours or our fellow citizens of the world, we should not only be aware of the consequences of our actions. We should also be responsible for them.

Our world has become a very small place - in social, political and environmental terms - with incidents and developments in one sector of the world rapidly affecting the entire planet. The amazing Internet has transformed our communications into seconds. A decision taken by our world leaders can cause turbulence in the world and affect the lives of ordinary citizens like us. A generous donation from wealthy countries can help improve the conditions of natural calamity victims or starving children somewhere in Africa or third world countries.

This century is a trying time of unprecedented challenges and changes. Not only for our world leaders but for us ordinary people. We have seen and experienced vast changes in the global economic system. Yet some who live in wealthy countries are only vaguely aware of these changes. How many of us realize, for example, that the economic crisis in some countries has more than doubled the number of people in those countries living in poverty? As a result, we hear of children who are malnourished and will grow up with health problems, with pathetic conditions.

The primary responsibility for these developments lies with our world leaders, in particular, the governments of the world’s wealthy nations. It is these governments that set the rules and laws for global trade through institutions, among other things.