COVID-19 and the importance of nature. This would be an expected introduction. Most of us would have felt a dire necessity to wake up and adopt a harmonious lifestyle that would not hurt nature, thereby protecting our lives.
We are from nature. Thus we should stand for nature, to stand up for ourselves. It’s as simple as that. So, don’t you think it’s high time that we take at least some small, yet powerful eco-friendly steps? After all, drop drop makes an ocean!
So what can we do about it?
You guessed it!
Plant more saplings, and let them grow up to be trees and forests.
It is undoubtedly the number-one reach-to idea if you are really up to take this laudable step. But we could have a lot of concerns — as follows — due to which we may not personally be able to make our hands muddy:
- A busy lifestyle where you hardly find time to eat/drink
- No place for gardening at homes
- Lack of time to take care of already grown plants
and the list expands…
But wait, what about working online and strive for a reduced negative effect on nature? Some of the modern problems do require modern solutions, at least to some extent.
In this post, let us discuss some ideas that would not only be eco-friendly, but also improve our quality of life parallelly. Sounds interesting, right! Let’s see how:
Let’s delete unnecessary emails as soon as they jump into our inbox:
- The total population of the world is around 7.8 billion(ie 7,800,000,000) and the number of email users around the world is around 4 billion. That means, more than half of the world’s population is using emails. If we assume at least 1 newly incoming email into each user’s inbox every day, then there would be at least 4 billion emails a day. The average size of an email is around 75kb. So, there is around 300,000,000,000KB (4,000,000,000kb*75), or 300,000GB of data being stored every day. Further, to make the data rapidly accessible to users all over the world, this data would be replicated on multiple machines under the hood. The number of these machines is surging due to heavy resource consumption by the users.
- But for our own analytical purposes, even if we assume only one email s day for each user, there is a need for the very great support of multiple machines under the hood: some for storing the data, some as servers, some as infrastructure, etc. These are all housed in data centers, where the cooling systems try to cool all these power boxes. To construct and maintain these data centers, we are compelled to cut forests, eradicate species from their natural habitats, and perform many other anti-nature acts. Further, data centers contribute around 0.3% to overall carbon emissions.
- Now imagine, what if we
(1) delete all the unnecessary emails then and there itself?
(2) unsubscribe from all the very-less-frequently beneficial advertisements and websites?
This would ENORMOUSLY, believe me, ENORMOUSLY reduce resource consumption. This act of us hardly takes a second, by this collective effort — by all of us — yields very beneficial results.
This is an obvious win-win scene for both nature and users. After all, a happy inbox makes us happy, as we don’t need to take the pain of searching through an ocean of spam and non-spam emails.
Let’s clean up our online archives and repositories:
When pushing our data like photos, files, etc. onto online repositories, let us decide if they are really important. Just like the above idea, let’s spare a second to delete unnecessary files.
Let’s walk to nearer distances, to make our nature and body happy:
- The human body is designed to move. We — in the era of computers — are spending a lot of motionless hours with our digital personnel, and unable to foresee the damage to our organs(the nature within ourselves).
- Without movement:
(1) there is no active supply of oxygen to our body parts
(2) no utilization of glucose produced in the body
(3) accumulation of fat
(4) formation of hemorrhoids in the intestines
and maaaany mooooore….
These are the by-products of lack of active body movement, and they lead to various health problems like indigestion, piles, posture-related pains, deformed bones, and further, could lead to diabetes, and various kinds of cancers.
- Not only physical illness but also mental issues start lining up, due to
(1) legarthy
(2) tiredness
These cause disinterest to mingle with friends and family, which could damage relations. - Further, the ever-increasing usage of vehicles is demanding uncontrolled disruption of fossil fuels, which upon burning would release greenhouse gases and other harmful gases. These cause :
(1) various respiratory problems and lung issues, thus obstructing the free movement of oxygenated blood to tissues and thereby causing failure of our entire internal system.
(2)various skin problems like sin cancer due to the damaged ozone layer caused by these greenhouse gases.
- Here comes a Win-Win solution: let’s walk near distances, and make our body parts happy, by actually giving them what they want. They are designed to move, and thus it’s their nature to move and be active. On the other hand, we reduce the consumption of fuels and reduce the rapidly increasing effect of burning them. So, consider this as a beautiful excuse to make your body happy and healthy.
- If possible, get along with a friend, with whom you could spend some quality time while walking. Consider it as an opportunity to improve your relationship.
But how is it an online solution? Well, many of us do not tend to continue something which we start, and thus need the motivation to continue our resolutions. So for constant motivation to walk, we could use online apps like Step-Set-Go. This app counts the number of steps we took each day and enables us to win some rewards upon reaching some milestones of the count of our strides.
Give Green Gifts
- It feels peaceful and lively to see something green and growing.
- While it is very common for us to send gifts to our loved ones, what about green gifts? A growing green plant could make us start our day with positive hope and spirit.
- So, let’s make it a habit to present our beloved ones with green gifts like plants, and promote the idea — of a harmonious lifestyle with greens — as an integral part of life. This would inherently grow an affinity towards greenery and would have long-term effects subconsciously, thus allowing people to think in such a way that would reduce harm to nature. What are you waiting for? We could order these green gifts online!
Finally…
If you have read “The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy”, you would have been surely convinced (maybe practically too) that small consistent efforts could lead to a huge compounded result. Very similarly, if we spend very few seconds or minutes of our time every day and follow these steps, the compounded effect of collective efforts by all of us would make us cherish healthy harmonious lives with our happy nature. And for us to get this huge compounded effect, we need to share this post with our friends, with all love and responsibility towards nature!
I would love to know your views on how we could strive to save our nature in a click, and ways to be kind and cautious towards our future selves. So feel free to drop your green thoughts in the comment section below!
Stay Green!
