Precious Planet Earth: Our Only Home

Text by Arun Toké, editor and Photographs by Paul Dix, Oregon.

Happy Earth Day 2026!

Planet Earth, our only home has been around for billions of years. Since its beginning, it has gone through many transformations and changes of all sorts—geological, ecological, biological.

Since the humble beginnings of industrial revolution and human embrace of capitalism and the subsequent growth of multinational corporations and large-scale international trade, we have added several new dimensions to the changes to our global home.

With exponentially-increasing human population, now approaching 8.4 billions in 2026, the extraction, production, and consumption of fossil fuels, minerals, plastics, and other chemicals have skyrocketed. Our carbon footprint is at its peak level and still rising at ecologically unsustainable rate! Carbondioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases are accumulating in our atmosphere and increasing the temperatures. The air, water, and land pollution is in every corner and all continents. The very ecology of the biosphere is being altered. The human-caused climate change appears inevitable; and its impact is already being felt. The clock is ticking and the destructive consequences of climate change will be felt around the globe in a matter of decades.

Unfortunately, the leaders of our governments, corporations, and businesses, either ignore the understanding gained through scientific knowledge and computer modeling, or pretend to be ignorant of its consequences. They keep on doing business as usual—growth, growth, growth. Wanting more profits and more control over the market, they go for more production, more consumption, and as a result, more pollution! The current U.S. leaders are favoring ecologically-suicidal fossil fuels—oil, fracked gas, and coal—over renewable energy like wind mills and photovoltaic (solar) power.

We don’t live on an island; everything is interconnected in nature! Planetary systems—water cycles, weather systems, ocean currents, trade winds, etc.—have made our Earth a unified system capable of nurturing diverse fauna and flora over the millions of years. But humanity, with our amazing ability to invent and create technological know-how, and then, to build huge systems to serve our ever-growing population, has reached a state where we’re able to altar the very environment that has nurtured us! We don’t realize that the planetary systems are so huge that they have a huge momentum. If we don’t act until after we see the dire results or feel the heat, we will fail to protect our only home!

In this photo essay, we offer a glimpse of our precious planetary home. But having experienced various parts of this beautiful home of ours in real life, we know the limitations of this virtual medium. This medium is unable to fully convey the multi-sensory, magnificent nature of the Planet Earth! We want all of us to experience it in real life, because we know that when we’ve experienced it, we’d love it! And when we love nature, we’d do all we can to preserve its beauty, its wholesomeness.

Wishing you a beautiful Earth Day, every day!

Text by Arun Narayan Toké, editor, Skipping Stones, and photographs by Paul Dix, nature photographer and world-traveler, Oregon.