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Karthik Nadig

Home is a documentary on Earth by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, a French photographer, journalist and environmentalist. The film is entirely composed of aerial view of the earth which portrays diversity of life and present state of the earth. The theme of the film is about the delicate balance which nature maintains and how our actions disrupted it.

The documentary shows harsh facts and awful truths about the impact of disruption of natural balance. The movie concludes with a positive tone, showing what is being done and can be done to reverse it.

Here, are some facts (not from the documentary):

  1. About 4000 chemicals are released into the atmosphere by smoking cigarette, 400 of which are toxic. To make 300 cigarettes, on an average, a tree gets wasted. In Britain about 34 million days worth of working hours were lost in 2007 due to leave; because of smoking related sickness. Primly smoking increases the risk of erectile dysfunction by about 50%. Those numbers will make sense when you’ll know that you breathe in about 15,000 liters of air in a day.
  2. Ever heard of Great pacific garbage patch, humanity has to be congratulated for this amazing feat. The estimated size of the affected area is about 700,000 km² to more than 15 million km², may contain over 100 million tons of debris.
  3. 80% of the urban waste in India ends up in the rivers, about 3 billion liters of waste per day. Only 55% of the 15 million Delhi residents are connected to the city’s sewage system, this is supposedly a good figure compared to the other cities.
  4. In some areas of India, the groundwater tables have dropped as much as 70 centimeters (about 25 inches). Up to 25% of India’s agriculture may be threatened by the depletion of groundwater resources. In the Czech Republic 70% of surface and ground waters are polluted, mostly with agricultural and industrial wastes.
  5. About 1/3 of the water each person uses on a daily basis is wasted. Each person in the UK uses 150 liters of water a day. Fixing a leaking tap can save as much as 5000 liters a year. During an average monsoon season in India, about 10000 liters of rain water can be harvested from a roof of 25 sq ft.
  6. Out of the top 10 most polluted cities in the world 4 of them belong to India (Delhi, Kolkata, Kanpur, Lucknow), Delhi being the second most polluted city in the world. 400,000 Chinese die prematurely each year from respiratory illnesses and other diseases related to air pollution.
  7. In US, 1.5 million barrels of crude oil (enough fuel to run 100,000 cars for a year) is used to produce 60 million bottles, all of which will end up in the landfill in a day.

Those numbers are staggering, so is the world population (about 7 billion). A few minor changes and using the resources frugally, or even trying to do that will significantly contribute to reduce the adverse effects of pollution and wastage.


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