SEC-S16 / W4 | "The Environment and Our Health" by @huzaifanaveed1

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_{“The same boiling water that softens the potato hardens the egg. You need to dictate your environment, and not let the environment dictate you."}

What do I understand by the word environment?

It's simple. Everything that surrounds me is my environment. Environment doesn't necessarily have to be on a grand scale. It can be as small as your energy. The energy that you carry. Or the energy that people around you carry. Have you noticed when you're with a group of people who like to complain a lot, you yourself start thinking in a pessimistic way, but when you're surrounded by opportunistic people and energetic people, you start gaining confidence. You start believing in yourself. For me, that is environment.

If we talk on broader terms, then environment is what we have created around ourselves. The air, the pollution, the way of living, all of this counts as environment. The living and the non living, and every other thing that exists in our ecosystem is our environment.

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How do our surroundings impact our well-being?

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Country	Life Expectancy
UK	80.9 years
Germany	80.94 years
Pakistan	66.5 years

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Why do you think I shared life expectancies of these three countries above? It is to inform you all the effects our surroundings have on us. Why do you think the life expectancies in the UK or in Germany are more than us Pakistanis? Do people not get old there? Do people not get sick there? Yes they do. So what's the difference one might think...

It's our surroundings. It's our environment.

Karachi has ranked as the most polluted city in the world, followed by New Delhi in India and Lahore at the third spot. According to IQAir, a Swiss air quality monitor, Karachi had the highest level of pollution in its air in the world with 260 particulate matter.

This is the news I read a couple of hours ago. It's not my intention to demean the place I live in. But I can't deny facts. We have numerous things that we can appreciate in this country but one thing that we're lagging behind is ethics. No one is to blame. We're to blame. I blame myself. You should blame yourself. We should work together on this issue.

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This is what an average'Kachra kundi' looks like where we live. Is it not the case? Am I lying? You know I'm not. Soo, the point is, environment plays a huge huge role in our wellbeing. And who's responsible for the environment? Us. We are.

What are some ways pollution, like air or water pollution, can affect our health?

Last year, I visited Islamabad. One of the most beautiful capitals in the world. There I was hiking with my friend and we happened to cross a stream of water gushing down from a mountain. We sat down around it and my friend, who's from Islamabad told me to take a sip from the water directly. My metropolitan brain couldn't grasp it for a second. We're used to drinking only mineral water here in Karachi. Anyway, I took his advice and took a sip. It was like ecstasy. I'm not kidding. My brain stopped working for a second and I went into a 3 second hallucination, drinking pure water in my life probably for the first time.

That is when I realised what have I done to myself. What air and water pollution has done to my body. Air pollution still remains on top in causing multiple respiratory diseases such as asthma, bronchitis and other COPDs. Mind you, I also have acute bronchitis. Water pollution causes so many gastric problems that it'd be too much to list them here.

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What are some simple actions you take every day to promote environmental health?

Charity begins at home. It's absolutely useless to play the blame game. I'm glad that you asked this question. There are a lot of things that can be done to counter pollution and a few things that I try to implement as well. Such as, limiting my use of plastic. Plastic remains one of the most dangerous things to our ecosystem. It causes water pollution. Burning Plastic causes air pollution.

There's this 3 Rs method that I have been trying to implement. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Reduce the consumption of hazardous materials. Reuse things and recycle them to reduce pollution. Another thing is to fight the urbanization. How can we do that? By planting trees. No matter what the state is carrying out, you on micro level should plant trees whenever wherever possible. The future generations will thank you for doing this.

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How can education and awareness play a role in promoting environmental health?

“Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

This quote is soo on point. You stop someone from creating pollution, he might listen to you for the sake of it. You raise awareness regarding pollution, you can actually teach people about what they're doing is bad.

Education and awareness has to be number one on the list in countering any problem. If you can teach someone regarding something, you have basically taught his whole generation. He'll continue wuth his teachings to his family. Raising awareness isn't an easy task. Raising awareness on a large scale, even more difficult.

We need mass awareness sessions from the state. But we can't always rely on the state can we? So we gotta do what we can. For example, in the hospital, I know that what I'll tell my patients, they'll listen to me because they trust me as they know I'm a qualified person. Similarly if we need to raise awareness regarding pollution, we need to implement it first. The first step is to stop polluting our environment, only then will people listen to us.

That's it from my side. I hope you had a good read. If you have any suggestions for me, do let me know in the comments section. I'd like to invite @weisser-rabe @event-horizon and @malikusman1 for this contest.
Thank you.