A blog about home

Home.

What is home to you? The four walls that you live in? The city/town/village that you were born in maybe. Or is it the country you are from? All of these examples can be home. How about Earth? Have you ever considered Earth your home?

Today is Earth day. It is not as well-known as New Years Day, Christmas or Ramadan. It should be. In my view it should be the most celebrated day of the year for if we have no Earth we have no New Years Day, Christmas or Ramadan.

We should celebrate the fact that we are on the most hospitable planet in our solar system. Where would we be without mother earth? We need her to breathe (trees), we need her to protect us from harmful solar rays (the atmosphere) and of course we need her for food and water. Yet, on this Earth day, our planet is on the brink of catastrophic changes.

The threat of Climate Change is no longer a threat. It is here and it is happening now. How we handle these changes could determine the future of the human race. There are many campaigns out there that deserve our attention. From sexual equality to gay rights to freedom of speech to ending poverty, all of these causes need fighting for, but none of them will exist if we don’t protect our home.

Look again at that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived here—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. – Carl Sagan

I have been lucky enough to see around 20% of our planet. My word its beautiful. From the deserts of the Gobi to the coral seas of Southeast Asia, we live on a supermodel of a rock. Yet, if we carry on with our destructive ways, this supermodel will soon lose her looks, and her life.

I bet you are thinking it’s a bit rich coming from a travel blogger that uses planes like most people use busses. Imagine the carbon footprint he creates every year. You are right. I should and can do a lot more. So from today, every flight we take, we pledge to offset it with Woodland Trust. They will plant trees for every aeroplane we use. It’s one small gesture that took me all of a couple of minutes to set up. Imagine if we all make small gestures what we could achieve?

We don’t need our leaders to make the changes for us, we can make the change we want in this world starting with us. The most frustrating thing about what’s happening in the world is that we already have the technology and answers for a lot of our problems. On our recent trip to Sri Lanka we worked with luxury hotels that only use solar power, recycled water, grew lots of their own food and protected the local environment and wildlife.

Some people hate the look of wind farms. Would they prefer oil rigs and fracking? As I read somewhere once, even if we are wrong about climate change and we have made the air cleaner, created more parks and woodland and cleaned up our oceans, I can live with that “mistake”.

Let’s get back to home. Would you walk into your house right now and destroy everything you see? Would you smash the walls down, tear out the kitchen and break all the plumbing? Of course not. That’s how we all have to think about our other home: Earth.

There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth we are all crew – Marshall McLuhan