Two months ago, I started fish keeping as a hobby. Now, I realize it can be an effective vehicle for making people appreciate the seriousness of the climate change problem.
"Climate change", "green living" and "sustainable lifestyles" are just some of the buzzwords that have, of late, been coming dangerously close to being cliches. The problem is hardly anybody actually understands what they mean. Sure, looking them up in online would very easily get you the definitions; but how many of us actually appreciate the seriousness of what they represent? I, for one, never really grasped the idea until my aquarium ecosystem came close to a cataclysmic collapse.
I had been keeping fish for a little over a month when it happened. Intending to super-charge the growth and proliferation of my aquatic plants, I jacked up the yeast content in my home-made CO2 generator, and moved my CO2 diffuser below the tank's filter intake. As anyone with enough experience in planted aquaria knows, supplemental carbon dioxide is essential for plants to thrive; and that it is important for the CO2 to be adequately dissolved into the water, so that the plants all over the tank can absorb it and get the benefit.And so, with my CO2 diffuser bellowing bubbles like an Alka-Seltzer tablet, and my filter sucking most of them up, I observed my tank. All over, there were tiny dust-like bubbles circulating, so I figured I had some really good CO2 distribution. Satisfied, I went off to work.Some ten hours later, I walked into my living room and found a horrible sight--the entire tank was clouded with algae, and the water surface was teeming with floating, motionless fish!
Almost instinctively, I knew what had gone wrong: my tank water contained so much dissolved carbon dioxide that my fish were suffocating. Franticly I disconnected my CO2 generator from the system (and made a big, foul-smelling mess when the fermenting yeast solution squirted out of its bottle), and hooked up a length of airline tubing to my powerhead (to infuse oxygen from the room into my tank water). I also hastily changed half of the water in the tank and scraped away all the algae that had so quickly grown on the glass. Within minutes, a few of the fish started stirring, so I thought I'd wait to see if any of them would actually make it. After two hours, many of them were swimming on their own power, albeit visibly disoriented. Sadly, for the rest, it was simply too late. In all, I lost seven fish out of my original stock of 17. By morning, everything seemed to be back to normal. There was some consolation to be had, however, from the fact that my aquatic flora did boom--especially the grass-like sword plants.
As I took stock of what this experience had taught me, it all dawned on me: I had just witnessed first-hand what's happening to mother Earth. Scientists and environment experts often try to explain the phenomenon of climate change by enumerating the harmful gases--most of which we couldn't even pronounce--being emitted into the atmosphere as a result of our daily activities. But the simple fact is that we are poisoning the air we breathe, just as the overdose of carbon dioxide poisoned the water in my fish tank. And, just as my fish had no way of leaving my tank, we too have no chance of leaving earth for a healthier planet.
Fortunately, in the same way that some of my fish were able to live through the disaster, we too have hope (or at least, I'd like to think so). If we act quickly enough to correct the situation (just as I did with my fish tank), it will only be a matter of time before we begin breathing clean air again, and maybe--just maybe--some of us will make it through. Though it comes in so many different forms, the culprit, ultimately, is carbon dioxide. And the sooner we cut down on it, the better.
It sounds like a simple lesson in aquarium fish keeping--carbon dioxide is necessary for the health of aquatic plants, but too much of it can be disastrous for fish. But from a broader perspective, it's a sobering reminder of how fragile our planet is, and how crucial it is for us to take its health seriously.
Make no mistake about it, people: climate change is a very real and immediate threat to our very existence. True, it's pretty much as mind-boggling as a trigonometry problem; and if for the life of you, you couldn't get your head around it, no one can blame you. Try fish keeping instead.
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