I was therefore surprised the other day when I was discussing climate change with a group of three friends who all believed that the change in climate was due to a natural cycle. We’ve had extreme hot and cold periods before the world had its industrial giants and no one suggested then that the early print makers or iron foundries were to blame. Further, while my friends agreed that pollution was a massive problem, it was thought that it should be separated from the climate-change issue and dealt with independently.
As we went into more detail, recycling of plastics was cited as something that needed attention. Plastics found in the sea and ingested by fish and mammals rightly hits the headlines and is something that needs to be addressed urgently. The initial approach has been a call to ban single-use plastic, but maybe we should first admit to ourselves how it gets into the sea. Vast shipments of plastics are sent by the West to poorer countries for recycling and much of it is building up into mountains of waste or washed out to sea. It can’t be a surprise that the poorer countries have limited resources to recycle and have been overwhelmed by the amount of plastic dumped on their shores.
As an important measure, the UN has just announced that almost all countries have agreed to restrict future shipments of hard-to-recycle plastic waste and this should be the first step to alleviate the problem. It serves no purpose to blame the receiving countries, such as Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia, when it’s the West that has given them the problem.
After my wife returned from La Paz, the capital of Bolivia, I asked her what the city was like. Her main impression was of the heavy pollution that hung over the city, the squalor and the unhealthy environment. I had a similar answer from a acquaintance who returned from Guatemala City. We in the affluent West can easily ignore the fact that other, less fortunate countries have enough problems trying to survive, let alone try to improve their polluted countries.
We are a global yet selfish community and the actions of one part of the world reflect on another. For the West to pass on their problems to poorer countries and expect those problems to go away is naïve and unrealistic. Shout about the amount of plastic discovered in a dead whale, but don’t turn a blind eye to how it got there in the first place. Above all, and back to my original point, let’s not confuse obvious man-made pollution with climate change, which hasn’t been shown to be for any other reason than nature at work.