I’m concerned for our environment, as I have been for quite some time now, yet never as a placard waving, demonstrating, protesting, ‘greenie.’
I’m more of a home recycling, no littering, and try-to-do-the-right-thing for the environment myself, and hopefully influence someone else to do the same. While that will never stop, due to me embracing my own awareness and responsibility within that do-the-right-thing ethos, a single image I saw this week has left me in me despair, when I think of our community, society, and even national efforts to save, or at least conserve the Earth.
The image was of the city, or mega-city, of Shanghai, in China. It was absolutely wreathed in an unhealthy smog, certainly to some extent poisonous, that lay on the city, suffocating to the extent that you could barely make out the contrast between its gigantic skyscrapers and its twisting, grey river. In fact, the entire image was just a hundred shades of grey, dirty, and disgusting, frightening in its asphyxiation, indiscreetly stifling, and I was horrified.
I thought to myself “What am I doing? What’s the point?” Here I am, worried about a MacDonald’s wrapper wafting in the wind, a plastic bottle on the beach, or a cigarette butt in the gutter. I’m worried, concerned, about trivialities, aren’t I? In the greater scheme of things, what I’m doing, inspired by do-gooder politicians who want their ‘green’ credentials franked, is an absolute waste of time!
Pollution, for those who don’t know, is the undesirable integration of foreign substances into our land, water, or air that has a negative impact upon humans, animals, plant life, and soil. Excessive carbon monoxide in the atmosphere, results in respiratory ailments, nervous disorders, and cardiovascular disorders, while water pollution can lead to waterborne diseases, and harm to aquatic species.
When I look further, and see more images of Shanghai, and other Chinese cities, like Daqing, China’s capital of oil production, Handan, and Suzhou, along with Moscow, New York, Istanbul, Seoul, London, Lagos, Mumbai, Sao Paulo, Johannesburg, Hanoi, Torino, Rotterdam, Osaka, Chennai, and Hamburg, suffering under the stultifying effects of the blanket of toxic smog, I’m absolutely devastated that world leaders have not done more.
In fact, it’s a dystopian unpleasantry that national and local governments can place any value on control of the individual, even to the extent of prosecutions, when the same ‘politicians,’ turn a virtual blind eye to big business. Their level of collusion and corruption with manufacturers and industrialists, is such that it lets wholesale neglect occur. Ordinary Joe Bloggs gets the weight of the judiciary and the law down on him, while the ‘big noters,’ get barely a stern word.
Why am I being made to feel badly about the exhaust emissions from my petrol-powered car in the face of the industrial poisoning of ‘my’ atmosphere, by the pharmaceutical company just a few miles down the road? I see this as a microcosm of what’s happening around the world, and on a much larger scale. Why do they allow it? Why do we put up with it? Why are we even a little concerned about such a comparatively minor issue when the big issue is standing right there in front of us?
So, excuse my cynicism, but when I got a pamphlet from my local council telling me to “recycle and reuse,” to “conserve gas, electricity, and water,” and to “avoid using paper,” I nearly choked on my breakfast. I DO reuse, and I DO recycle. I pay for my utilities, so surely, I can decide how much I use, and let’s face it, at those prices, it’ll be no more than I must! And paper... well, that pamphlet could well have been a soft copy, emailed, couldn’t it? Globally, local authorities are a meaningless carbuncle on the environmental landscape.
We are being ‘conned’ that we are the problem, therefore responsible for the solution to environmental pollution. We are not! But... if we don’t keep doing our bit, being responsible individually, there is no chance of the hierarchy ever doing so, and that is so, so, disappointing.
The writer is a media consultant
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