THE GENEROUS NATURAL WORLD vs OUR UNNATURAL RESPONSE:

The natural world satisfies both human needs and wants, so it is an ideal
friend. As a friend, the natural world supplies in excess all the necessary resources to
cover all our basic needs as well as our desires. Surprisingly, instead of being thankful
towards a planet that offers everything to undeserving beings, or even instead of
acting wisely for selfish reasons, human beings have behaved treacherously, spoiling
every corner of their own natural habitat.
People need food to survive. The natural world yields an incredible variety of
vegetables, fruits, and meat to eat. People need clothes to keep warm. The natural
world provides them with cotton, wool, leather and feathers to make clothes. People
need a shelter to live. The natural world offers them stone, cement and wood to build
houses. People need conveyances to travel. The natural world gives them animals to
take them wherever they want to go, apart from the rivers, which have always been
wonderful means of communication and transportation.
On top of all that, humanitys friend, the natural world, offers lots of
entertainment for humans. For those people who like travelling, they can enjoy
thousands of amazing views in the natural world. For those people who are fond of
swimming and sunbathing, they can find lots of fantastic rivers, lakes and seas. For
those people who love skiing, there are many incredibly beautiful snow-capped
mountains. For those people who prefer skating, the natural world offers awesome
frozen lakes.
On the other hand, the natural world also brings disasters that may be seen as
a terrible enemy: floods and droughts destroy both cattle and crops, volcanoes
destroy everything around them, and tornadoes and earthquakes may be extremely
destructive as well. Scientists, however, put all the blame on human beings for all
these catastrophes. In recent years, the number of seisms, floods, droughts, and
volcano eruptions have skyrocketed as compared with the figures from three or four
decades ago. Indisputably, the natural ecosystem is like a chain where every part is
connected to all the rest, and so any alteration in one will inevitably cause changes in
many others, changes that are sometimes umpredictable.
Human beings have misused all the wonderful natural resources the planet has
so generously offered them, and so today they have to face some of the consequences

of their irresponsabilites. The natural world is so amazing and so wonderful that it

even has a system to recover from plunder, but the extent to which human beings
have despoiled the natural resources makes it impossible for the planet to regenerate.
Radiactivity, industrial dumping, deforestation, animal extinction, electrical and
electronic waste, water poisoning, and the like are eroding the expectations of the
future generations.
Besides the human race, there is no scientific record whatsoever of any species
that destroys its own environment so drastically and so unwisely. The attitude people
have towards their own habitat does not seem to be even natural, for all animal
species understand they depend on their territory to survive, and so they defend it
the best they can, and they migrate only when they look for better conditions to
survive. Human beings, by contrast, have developed chemical and nuclear weapons to
destroy each other. Irrational hatred between nations might soon put an end to this
spectacular world. And to make matters worse, just a few seem to care. What used
to be a beautiful friendly relationship has turned into betrayal and destruction. But I
wonder who will destroy who in the end?

Ana Sofa Fernndez Gao

Lic. Filologa Inglesa
11 mayo 2015