Humans have committed countless errors in history leading to wars, famines and biological extinctions. The biggest of all is, what we witness in the form of climate change and transboundary pollution. One wonders was it always like that in human history? In order to understand it, an attempt was made to look into ancient texts written during 300 BCE to 300 CE in an ancient language of India, Tamil. To our surprise these ancient texts indeed spoke about ‘modern’ inter-relatedness and interdependencies of environmental resources and their sustainable utilisation in line with UN SDGs. These texts on critical reading, revealed clear cases of planetary boundaries being defined, a proposal for a circular economy and global resource nexus. Analysis of poems as an interface between global problems and poetic aesthetics leading to Factor X, is a finding which is both exciting and hope-giving.