Many happy returns of the day earth! It's been 4.53 billion years already.

[The wonderful Earth Day greeting, below is reproduced, with permission from and thanks to Balaton Group (balatongroup.org) member Anupam Saraph.  It was posted on the website Pune365.com)

From my human perspective, that’s ridiculously long to comprehend. We humans rarely see beyond our day. Or something we’ve come to call as the short term…

So we end up doing stupid things that we realise are stupid in the short now – or the lifetime of a child born now. Alas, only if we are able to think about the short now. But you have seen many short nows. For you, is that short term?

I’m told by my extremely clever friends who have been studying the lives of stars all their lives, that if we compare our 100 years life to your approximate life span, you’re probably about 45 years old.

We humans have been around for just a little over 7 days of your existence.

I’m enormously grateful to you for you working hard to make yourself habitable for life. You’ve made life thrive for over 35 of your 45 years. My geologist friends explain how you shaped yourself to create the most beautiful landscape we may ever set our eyes on. No landscape designers and engineers can match the magnificence and wisdom of your mountains, plains, rivers, deserts, seas and polar caps.

No architect can parallel your ability to create habitats where such a diverse set of homes for such a remarkable diversity of life may thrive. 

For the fresh air you provide, I express am eternally grateful to you. Without all the plant life that you support, the air would not be breathable. Without their absorbing the carbon from the atmosphere, temperatures would be unliveable. Without them releasing oxygen into the atmosphere our life may just not exist.

Without the bio-geo-chemical cycles you support would you be any different from the 100 billion other planets in our Milky Way? 

For the fresh water I can drink I owe you my sincere thanks. You created the rain so rivers may flow and give us water. So the ground may store it to keep itself from warming and to supply life with water and so that rivers may not dry. For the sea that allows the river to meet the clouds. So the seasons may continue to nourish life.

For the magic you’ve woven on to yourself to create the diversity of life that you support, both plants and animals and the billions of microbes, you’ve added unimaginable joy to existence. Something only you have managed to create among a hundred billion exoplanets in the Milky Way!

For the 1.6 trillion times you tirelessly went around yourself to give us our days so we may live our lives and nights that give us the rhythm of life, I am grateful. For every one of your 4.543 billion journeys around the sun, you created seasons that breathe life into spring, summer, autumn and winter! My amazement at your consistency, persistence and devotion.

Possibly, just like the cells in our bodies don’t recognise the tissue, organ or organism they are a part of, we humans don’t recognise ourselves as the cells in your living body. When our cells fail to work, the tissue and eventually the organ may fail and cause death of the organism. When we humans and our cultures fail, we endanger your health, perhaps your survival. When our cells grow without constraints, we call it cancer. Unless balance is restored and the growth of cancerous cells is stopped we die.

We humans have grown our population, our consumption and the trail of waste and destruction exponentially in less than 1 second of your life. I hope we are not the cancer you contracted.

When cancerous cells spread themselves to other tissue and cause growth of other cells in other tissues, we say the cancer has spread – it has metastasised. In just 0.000002 seconds we’ve destroyed 80 percent of the wildlife you had evolved over 35 years. When we spread our growth culture across your body, destroying other life forms, are we the cancer that has metastasised?

But, it’s your birthday today, So I will not talk of your ill health…It’s our day to celebrate together. It’s our day to hope we will be the life that values and protects you. It’s our day to express gratitude of our relationship.

And it’s my day to express my love for you. It’s my day to pledge my role, small as it may be, to ensure your health for the next 50 years of your life!

Happy Birthday Dear Earth! 

Dr. Anupam Saraph grew up in a Pune that was possibly a tenth of its current expanse and every road was lined by 200 year old trees. He’s committed to the cause of de-addicting the short-termers. 

He can be reached @AnupamSaraph

Exiting the Stage, Safety Harbor Florida, 5 January 2019

The customary retirement age for faculty at the National University of Singapore is about 70 years old.  However shortly after celebrating my 79^thbirthday, I received an offer from the Residential 4 College Master to renew my contract for one or more additional years.  This was a remarkable offer. I had little doubt that if I accepted, I would be able to satisfy the requirements for a peer review of my teaching that university regulations required. 

As I pondered my decision, words of wisdom from my mother came to mind (for her,  aphorisms were a frequently employed parenting tool) “It’s better to leave the stage, while the audience is still applauding.”  

In responding to the Master’s offer, I recalled that when I first learned about the RC4 mission, educating “Systems Citizens,” using System Dynamics Modeling as a foundation, I said I would gladly work for free. This would not be necessary, he responded.  This offer had, in 2014-15 morphed in a joint Visiting Professorship with the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (where I was already teaching) coupled with an appointment as one of the College’s “Resident Fellows” with direct the responsibility for about 100 students in residence. I offered to stay on as “Modeler in Residence,” with flexible schedule, again working without compensation.  My personal goals were to reinvigorate my System Dynamics modeling practice, to move forward with a research agenda emphasizing the envisioning of sustainable development and to spend more time with my family and the diminishing number of old friends who still remained alive. 

In response, the Master offered me the option of remaining for a year as a full time Resident Fellow, making myself available as mentor to students and faculty colleagues and offering an informal weekly colloquium in my apartment to a small group of highly able students who were extending the normal two-year Residential College term for study for a third year.

This kind offer ushered in one of the most rewarding years of my professional life, because of the opportunities it gave me to connect with students informally, without the obligations of marking and assessing. There were also opportunities for speaking and writing, though my research productivity was less and I had hoped for.  As the academic year drew to a close and I made plans to return to the United States, I made a special effort to connect with the friends and mentors who had made such a difference in my life over the preceding eight years.  Now the time has come, with my writings, to give thanks to the students, friends and colleagues in Singapore who have given me so much. Their gifts can never be fully repaid; however, I must do my best.