Man-made vs Natural

Man-made and natural.. how many times have we heard about these phrases? Virtually all literature in school text books, fiction and non fiction books, in articles, papers, even in our day to day talk.. we talk about these.

Any talk or literature about environment cannot be devoid of these phrases. We talk about man destroying nature with all that he creates. So what does man create which contributes towards destruction of nature.

Man creates pollution of air through his industries, automobiles and all the other things. This creates problems for our Ozone layer so on and so forth

Man creates concrete jungles and uses lot of wood for paper, building material and for all the paraphernelia for a comforatable living. This results in deforestation and trees and forests are vanishing fast. This causes many species of flora and fauna to go extinct.

Man creates non bio degradable waste like plastic which pollutes the water sources including the subterranian table and also soil etc.

The list can go on and on.. Is this blog sounding very familiar? You bet it is.. just an another environment talk by somebody who is concerned about environement.

But I just want to put a different perspective to this. What is man-made and what is natural? Is man not "nature-made"? Is man not part of nature? If not then who made us? How did we evolve? Darwin has provided us a very plausible theory of our evolution from the very simple living beings like single celled organisms to water living creatures to amphibians to land animals to mammals to primates to homo sapiens, what we are today. We call all of the living beings till the primates except homo sapiens are nature, but then only homo sapiens are'nt? This does not convince me.

Why is there a distinction like this? Has it been created by us just because we have one more sense, may be only numerically, more than the other creatures in nature? Or is it just because we want to make ourselves different from nature itself?

We have seen in the past that nature has found its own ways of regulating itself. We understand now that that there has been different stages in the life of earth, when nature has so called kept itself in check. The rise and fall of the dinosaurs, the very carefully crafted food chains so on and so forth. May be man is one such ploy by nature itself. We are part of nature. If we do not stop doing things as described above, may be man will play the part of the asteroid(??) which destroyed the dinosaurs, albeit in a different way.

Though this article is talking about man being part of nature, I do not subscribe to the fact that we should just continue doing what we are doing towards our environment, but we need to see how we can safegaurd it. We really need to ensure that we take care of our environment and not destroy it.

It is just that there can be nothing called man-made and natural. Everything is natural, because we are part of nature. So what we do is also natural. We just have to do what we do naturally better :-).

I simply dont understand when a weaver bird can weave its nest with all kinds of material it finds (may be including strands of plastic :-) ), it is called as a stroke of brilliance of nature, but when a man builds a house it is called man-made and not natural. Sounds goofy.

Racism in sports

I thought we are moving forward from the dark ages of racism into much better era, but I guess we still aren't there. Just couple of days back, we had Dean Jones sacked in disgrace by Ten Sports from its commentary team. The offence - he made a racist comment against a South African Cricket Player.

The circumstances are actually more intriguing here. Apparently Dean, made the comment about Amla, during the break between the overs, a time where normally all the channels take an ad break. But it was'nt Dean's day. One channel did not seem to have taken the ad break, and so his comments were aired live, the South African board protested and Ten Sports promptly sacked him.

Now what we need to see here is why are such comments made in the first place. Dean claims that it was a rush of moment that he blurted out something and he did not really mean it. I sincerely hope what he is saying is true. Nobody other than him would know the truth. But then, commentrators and other personalities in the media, have a great responsibilty especially with live transmissions. I mean, have you tried being politically correct always. It is so difficult. So it is all the more a challenging job.

As far the incident, Jones seems to have apologized to great lengths to everybody including Amla, the board, the company and to all listeners. But then I hope he really means it. He was not a bad commentrator and would like to see him back in the commentry box, but defintely with no such thoughts as this.

And I support Ten Sports' prompt action and it defintely should reflect as a precedent to any such incidents in future.

Talking about racisim in sports, the recently held FIFA World Cup held in Germany emphasized so much on abolishing racism from sports. Sure, the Fatherland has come a long from days of Nazis. I was so happy at seeing the strong message being sent out with huge banners at the start of each of the matches. Kudos to FIFA and German organizers for chosing that as the theme for this year.

About anything

As the title goes, this blog is where I am going to "write" about anything. From the time I started my blogs, I had to ensure that my blogs were somewhere around my blog title, not that somebody would cut my hand off, but then, the blog title means something after all, does'nt it.