Yesterday, 22 April, 2015, was Earth Day. It is instructive that the day's significance was mostly ignored by the Ghanaian media - and lost on society generally. In the main, as a people, we have looked on as our natural heritage has been trashed, and steadily eroded.
This lack of interest in protecting the natural environment - particularly from the greed of ruthless individuals, and rapacious businesses engaged in destructive and unsustainable activities such as illegal logging, illegal gold mining and sand-winning - has led to vast swathes of the Ghanaian countryside being degraded and polluted, some on an apocalyptic scale.
Yet, before the advent of the first Europeans in what eventually became known as the Gold Coast, we lived in harmony with Mother Nature - and took active steps at all material times to ensure that the natural environment was kept in a pristine state.
Alas, what the human race seems to forget, is that it is humankind's existence that is actually threatened - not the biosphere we inhabit with other living things and whose features are shaped by the passage of time in periods that are measured in millions of years.
The planet Earth will always recover from whatever calamities befall it, as a result of the activities of human beings, over time.
Having failed the younger generation in so many ways, perhaps the older generation in Ghana can make amends, by strictly enforcing the many laws passed to protect the natural environment - particularly those laws that deal with illegal logging, illegal gold mining and illegal sand-winning - so that at the very least, coming generations of our people, can enjoy the same quality of life that we enjoy today: if not better.
Additionally, now, more than ever, as the number of vehicle owners in Ghana grows at a rapid pace, we have a duty to ensure that air quality in urban Ghana, does not deteriorate to the point where it poses a risk to public health.
Worldwide vehicular emissions contribute greatly to global warming.
As Ghana's gift to humankind, to commemorate Earth Day, 2016, why does President Mahama's administration not ask the South African-born US electric carmaker, Elon Musk, of Tesla Motors, to negotiate with the world's global automobile manufacturing giants, to club together, to pay Colonel Kofi Abaka Jackson US$10 billions, to obtain the rights to his invention that enables electric cars to maintain the power of their batteries whiles in motion - obviating the need for expensive recharging-station-infrastructure: and speed up the switch to electric vehicles globally?
Ghana would immediately be put on the world map as having made a significant contribution to slowing down global warming by the lowering of the total amount of worldwide vehicular emissions - resulting from the increase in the use of electric vehicles globally made possible by the adoption of Colonel Kofi Abaka Jackson's invention by the global car industry.
And it would do absolutely no harm to anyone, if Ghana shared the US$10 billions with Colonel Jackson on a 50-50 basis - and uses its share to improve the country's off-grid roof-top solar power generating capacity: in partnership with SolarCity, a US solar company that Elon Musk chairs, and which is owned by his cousins, Peter and Lyndon Rive.
Would that not be a fitting bonus for households and businesses countrywide - were Ghana to present such a special and rare gift to humankind, on Earth Day, 22 April, 2016?
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