COMMENT | It takes a toll on Earth - calculate the true costs or perish

COMMENT | Today is World Environment Day.

The pandemic we are facing is becoming endemic, meaning that it may stay with us forever (hopefully in a more controllable and less virulent form). And we will have to learn to live with nature and its many furies. We are a part of nature, not apart from nature.

We think we are humankind and have become very arrogant about our cleverness and our abilities to do so many things without thinking about what effect we bring onto nature and the other fellow inhabitants on earth.

These include the invisible viruses and bacteria, which by the way, are much more abundant (higher biomass) than all the animals (including humans) put together. Plants have the highest biomass.

Man's dominance over nature has brought havoc to nature and our lives, bringing irreparable damage and destruction and we continue to do so.

Mainly by the capitalistic logic of greed, growth, expansion, accumulation, competition, progress, speed, domination, control and so on, which we have imbibed as the norm. And many of us see it as the only way to move forward as an individual or humanity.

We are always looking towards more growth and progress as imagined by the rich and powerful who set the legal, ideological, economic, political, enforcement and other frameworks which define what we can/should do and cannot/should not do.

As Frederic Bastiat, the 19th century French economist and philosopher, said, “When ...