Plastic nightmare
Its oh so convenient and ubiquitous. Now its a plague. What was the whispered to be the future is now here to stay in the present.
In addition to spewing reams of climate changing gases into the atmosphere our industrious and burgeoning petrochemical industry that has spawned an effluent that is everywhere. About six months ago I saw a story on the wires about a patch of plastic garbage in the Pacific Ocean that staggers the imagination. More than 100 million tonnes of plastic, or 2.5 per cent of all the plastic produced since 1950 is now floating in this manmade dump that is fouling the largest ocean in the world. The patch is estimated to be about the size of the entire United States and is growing.
In my travels around the world, no matter where I have gone I have found plastic. My most memorable encounter with our waste was outside a small ancient Sassanid fortress called Rein about 40 kilometres from the city of Kerman in Iran. The beauty of that country and the desert left me speechless. As I looked out across the desert to the foot of the distant mountains I saw what I though was a desert flower bloom. As far as I could see the were multi-coloured patches that I thought were desert flowers blooming. I took a bit of a stroll into the scrub and realized that what I was seeing was not the bloom of flowers, but rather colourful pieces of plastic caught on the dried up desert plants. It was a startling revelation. The entire desert was covered in this multihued detritus. Here I was in a remote desert close to the Afghan border and the commercial waste of our civilization was there with me.
No matter where I have travelled our plastic has been there before me, befouling land and water. Its outrageous and deadly. On one level it spoils the esthetics of the scenery, but on another its a waste that will last thousands of years and it gradually breaks down, will release toxins and poisons back into the environment, that is unless it is ingested, or tangles the other creatures of our planet first and strangles them from within and without.
On so many levels plastic is a metaphor for bad. A plastic person is artificial, untrustworthy. Plastic money the road to indebtedness. Plastic is cheap. And now plastic is deadly, everywhere and a sign of what our civilization is.
How many animals have to die horrible deaths, choking, starving deaths before we stop making this blight? Its not just shopping bags, but appliances, computers, consumer items, building materials, clothes, wrap, garbage and on and on. Its precisely because it is so convenient and cheap that we have let our love affair with consumerism create create a monster of awful proportions. Next time you buy, think of where what you buy will end up, when it is no useful to you. How will become part of the solution? Don’t buy as much, slow the consumerism down. Think.