Choose moderation and unburden the earth December 21, 2020, 7:52 PM IST By Narayani Ganesh A new year never fails to inspire us to get on those weighing scales and make a solemn, earnest resolution to shed the extra kilos. Walk regularly, eat right, exercise, are all on the to-do list at least for a couple of weeks until it all gets forgotten in the hurly burly of life. But what of the weight, the burden, we’ve been heaping on Planet Earth? Do we have any thoughts on shedding those extra kilos before we paint ourselves into a corner? According to scientists researching human impact on Earth, the mass of all human-created things including built-up infrastructure, vehicles and all manner of manufactured goods, now “exceeds the weight of all living things on the planet.” Not only that, using a combination of computational and experimental synthetic biology tools and satellite imagery, systems biologist Ron Milo of the Weizmann Institute of Science and his team in Israel approximate that “the amount of new material added every week equals the total weight of Earth’s nearly eight billion people.” And we thought it is only our homes that are overflowing with stuff. So, not only do we need to declutter our individual homes, we also need to set about decluttering our collective home, Planet Earth!