Are we part of the problem, or the solution?

There are recent reports that the ark of Noah has been found. Five thousand years ago, Noah’s ark settled at the mountain of Ararat, it was hidden under thick glaciers. It was the process of ice melting that made the ark of Noah visible to man. It was then carbon dated. This application testified that the ark is the same that is referred to in the Bible and the Quran. According to the Quran when the ark of Noah is discovered it will only tell us that that the second flood is very near. Is it now, really?

It's sobering to know that the time span we are talking of is less than 10,000 years when the last ice age befell the earth. Looked at on a scale of 4,000 million years that the earth's age is supposed to be, and to realize that man has been around actively only for about 5,000 years can be very humbling.

Picture the alarm cries among millions of ants inside an anthill when there is threat of destruction around it. Picture further the endless confabulations that occur between hundreds of ants before the entire army begins to work its strategy to either resettle or to find ways of beating the challenge that is before them. That will help you understand how our own current dilemma on earth is insignificant and in a certain sense fatal, even perhaps predestined if you were to go by the Biblical or revelatory Word of all ancient religions.

All discussions over the last 10 years on sustainability, on how humans have to find different solutions for the different challenges before us the next 100 years and beyond, is part of such an exercise, where we don't understand completely the larger mosaic and pattern that governs the earth and its far complex and continually changing rhythms. Remember that you are hurtling all the time at about 36,000 kilometers an hour on the orbit while we spin at about 1,500 kilometer every hour on the axis. The numbers of meteors that are hurtling through space and have come lethally close to destroying the earth given their size and momentum and velocity, is so high that it's a miracle that this third rock of this solar system has actually survived as many million years. If you look around at our own mountains, you will realize how the Himalaya in all its majesty and mightiness is a baby at just 20 million years compared to the more solid 700-million-year-old Eastern Ghats or the relatively younger 400-million-year-old Western Ghats. When you walk the higher hills of the Anamalais beyond Ooty, you can 'feel' the primeval collision that must have occurred many hundreds or millions of years ago when the eastern and the western folds of the mountains collided to form those hills and eventually the peninsula of India.

When we look at such expanses, all we can do is breathe a silent prayer at the magnificence of these massive changes in the universe that is part of our larger environment. To imagine that we still don't have a clear understanding of the number of solar systems in the galaxy that we belong to, and what exists beyond this galaxy in the Universe, is in itself something that can take you away from your current sets of challenges of living in our urban milieus.

Human settlement is very, very recent for us to be even claiming to have any knowledge of how we can combat and get on top of such environments and the forces that govern such environments. All we can do is to see that we offer our silent thanks for what we have, use our enormous ingenuity to see that we bring harmony to all that we have around us and continue to live on while we hoping to offer some decent legacy to those generations after us.

When you next stumble upon an anthill think about it: you are as small or as large as that one soldier in that complex ant army that has been the inspiration for many of our own military strategies in human history.

The writer heads BCIL Zed Homes, India's ecohomes pioneer.