Raise Awareness - Let's Celebrate Earth Day 2021: Restore our Earth
Today, we celebrate #EarthDay with this year’s theme “Restore our Earth”
With recent space explorations looking for other habitable planets, let us not forget that we are living in one fragile planet that needs our help in restoring and regenerating it for future generation.
We celebrate Earth day yearly to raise awareness and encourage others to be part of the solution to take better care of our planet Earth. A simple action in taking care of our environment will have a huge impact if everyone joins in.
Although we are still in community lockdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we can do our part in protecting our Earth while in our home.
We can reduce plastic waste by avoiding single-use products like straws, bags, and bottles. Proper segregation of biodegradable waste from non-biodegradable materials will also help since biodegradable waste can be converted into organic fertilizer, while non-biodegradable materials can be recycled or reused. Conserve our energy resources by turning off lights and appliances when not in use.
Aggressive slash and burn farming (Kaingin) is a commonly used farming practice in the world’s tropical forests, which greatly contributes to the loss of our biodiversity. |
Destructions of our forests are one of the main contributing factors that worsen global warming and climate change. Our remaining tropical primary forest is threatened due to various anthropogenic activities such as aggressive slash and burn farming (kaingin), limestone quarrying, destructive mining, large-scale plantations (palm oil, banana, fruit trees, etc.), and highland vegetable plots.
In this photo, a mossy-montane forest was converted into vegetable plots and greatly affected the limited distributional range of restricted endemic high elevation species of plant and animals. |
Reforestation and protection of the remaining mossy-montane forest will secure our watershed.
With the increasing demand for palm oil, a primary ingredient of various range of products, the tropical forests are put under pressure of deforestation. We can lessen or consciously avoid buying palm oil-related products to lower the demand. We should also check our consumption patterns. More goods require exploitation of our environment such as through mining.
Limestone Karst areas are known for their importance as an ark of unique biodiversity but because of a wide range of construction and industrial uses, they are slowly destroyed through quarrying. |
Let's protect our remaining primary tropical forest from deforestation and it is not too late to restore it with more reforestation activities. Above are actual images that should make us realize the implications of our actions to our environment. It is not too late, together, let us “Restore our Earth”.
#EarthDay2021
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Text and photos by NMP Botany and National Herbarium Division
© National Museum of the Philippines (2021)
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