Dr Innas All—he needs no introduction—has said that air and earth and water, in fact, everything in Bangladesh is polluted. This observation on Tuesday served as an apt curtain-raiser for yesterday's World Environment Day. Even a man of his scientific stature, as also indeed the one than whom none has for long a better bona fide in every respect, namely our universally respected Acting President, in a way. used the current spell of natural calamities affecting Bangladesh to drive home the need for environment awareness. Tying things in this fashion somewhat fudges the issues and the intended effect is lost. The repeating tidal surges, the procession of tornadoes occur as compulsions for reacting to the needs of a living healthful nature around us only very remotely—and let us not fall into thinking that if these were not there—the citizens of this land would have needed little to care for environment.

In fact. Dr Pramanik. the chief of the environment directorate-general hit on a more cogent reason for our need to be responsive to nature and environment in the same seminar. A degenerating environment and the mounting pressure of a growing population, increasing use of chemical Insecticides and defiling nature with more and more wastes and effluents would rob all of our land, water included, of its generative and life-sustaining powers and reduce it to an expanse of dead sands. We want to Join Dr Pramanik In reminding ourselves that this is an on-going process— well on its way—and stealthy silent thing would, if not stemmed in time, wreak ruination that even a thousand passing tidal surges or tornadoes cannot. And it is more directly to prevent that eventuality every Bangladesh citizen should start responding to the call of SOS from nature as if It were one from God Himself.

But all this approach of being made to do something under pain of some Jeremiahesque scare-warning is a poor substitute for a love for nature and the living environment just for the sense of well-being and fulfilment and serenity and a life-giving quletltude that are guaranteed to be had in return. Our response to nature should Indeed auger a love affair in earnest, although somewhat belated, as against the combative tenor it had ever after the exit of the predominance of the pantheistic worldview and the onset of the mechanical-dependent civilisation. And what better illustrates appreciation of that than a call to go for the trees—not with the executioner's axe ♦but for more and more of these to grow by the billion. Although the Prime Minister's fervent appeal to each of Bangladesh's 110 million population to plant a sapling each was an unfortunate example of flimsy drafting by men paid to do a less ridiculous job—she hit on our best bet against an otherwise inexorable ethnic decline.

So then, let us have more trees—for every day unto decades galore rather than holding seminars with repeating familiar faces sitting those out— and walkathons or whatever else the townsfolk think up for their own fun. And let us have a tab— a strict one—on how Government itself goes about this planting business.