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ing it impossible. Even in a remote possibility of disaster, it is wise to take precautionary measures. Such measures are all the more essential in face of the high degree of unpredictability of a dynamic system, with innumerable variables, in precarious balance.
How fragile is the balance and how far reaching are the effects of changes brought about by uncontrolled human desires and ambitions is evident from numerous phenomena widely reported during the past fifty years.
One of these phenomena is ozone layer depletion. For more than forty years scientists have been warning that the quantity of chlorofluorocarbons in the atmosphere is continuously increasing and adversely affecting the protective ozone layer. This layer of ozone-fifteen to twenty kilometers beyond and around the earth-protects life on earth from the devastating effects of ultra-violet rays. The predications based on available information are that, if corrective measures are not taken, this protective layer of ozone could be so much depleted by the third decade of the new millennium that large holes will appear in it. According to these warnings, we still have twenty years to take corrective measures.
In 1985, a group of British scientists on a survey mission to Antarctica were taken aback when they found that a hole had already appeared in the ozone layer above Antarctica and was increasing in size. Why did this happen, defying all the careful calculations and predictions of ozone holes being forty to fifty years away at that time? In all probability, the ozone layer in that part of the atmosphere was already so depleted that a slight nudge created a hole there. It is difficult to pinpoint from exactly where that nudge came.
AHIMSA: THE SCIENCE OF PEACE
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