Relationship between Mankind and Nature

   First of all, what is nature exactly? Nature is the phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human’s creations. 

   Mankind is basically us, the human race. So relationship between mankind and nature in other words, how we; the human race treat nature as part of our daily lives.

    Humanity throughout the decades has made changes in nature/environment, unknowingly or knowingly. Those changes already impact our lives. Some can be positives as well as negatives. Sometimes we still ignored the negatives one as well as the origin of the negatives impact. We should not ignore those impacts, because those are the signs that something is wrong with the way we treat nature.

   Thankfully a lot of countries already made some changes to decreased negatives impact in Nature and in our lives. In 2018, the most environmental friendly country is the Switzerland, followed by France and Denmark. These records are based on Environmental Performance Index, a joint project between the Yale Centre for Environmental Law & Policy (YCELP) and the Centre for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia University.

    Let’s look at Switzerland; Switzerland is a mountainous Central European country, home to numerous lakes, villages and the high peaks of the Alps. Switzerland hosts over 8.4 million residents, who understood the importance of environment. Because of that the recycling rate of Switzerland is 54%, 26% above the European average of 28% (2015).  Also their environmental protections policies are arguably the most effective in the world.

  Meanwhile, Indonesia ranked the 133^rd out of 180 countries in 2018. As Uncle Ben once said, great power comes with great responsibility. And in this case the power is the population and the  responsibility is the environment. Indonesia as the 4^th country with the highest population with over 266 million people has many problems with nature itself. These include deforestation; water pollution from industrial wastes, sewage; air pollution in urban areas; smoke and haze from forest fires.   Unfortunately, the government hasn’t made an effective environmental policy unlike Switzerland. That is quite understandable as Indonesia only realize they were treating nature wrong in late 1960s. But of course the action itself starts in 2007 with a United Nation Climate Change Convention in Bali. Even though a convention was already been held, neither the government nor the people change the way they behave towards the environment. With evidence such as the Citarum River that dubbed as the most polluted river in the world and the air pollution in Jakarta that is still an on-going issue until today .

 So what can we do? The easy ones are obviously to separate the litters between organic and non-organic. Then recycling, because 24% of waste in Indonesia is still unmanaged, the government really need to make some policies about recycling and the citizen has to do it. After that, cleaning up all the sewage and rivers; obviously it will become a greater challenge but with teamwork in every city I think we’ll manage.

(This essay was made for TBPSC Speech Competition)

  Best regards,
Tizi