Freefalling & Copious Consumption: #WED2018, Currency & Climate Change in India Now

World Environment Day has been celebrated annually since 1974 to highlight environment protection. “Beat Plastic Pollution” was the theme for this year, and this crisis is one that showcases the very worst of our consumerist economy that makes the disposable OK. And the products that use the most resources end up cheapest and throwaway, or as the popular meme goes, “It’s pretty amazing that our society has reached a point where the effort necessary to extract oil from the ground, ship it to a refinery, turn it into plastic, shape it appropriately, truck it to a store, buy it, and bring it home is considered to be less effort than what it takes to just wash the spoon when you’re done with it.”

#WED2018  #BEATPLASTICPOLLUTION

A lot of the environmental and economic problems we face today are consequences of the mindless consumption that has become the norm. As the first woman environmentalist to win a Nobel Peace Prize (2004), the late and great Wangari Maathai of Kenya, and founder of the Green Belt Movement put it,

“The environment and the economy are really both two sides of the same coin. You cannot sustain the economy if you don’t take care of the environment because we know that the resources that we use whether it is oil, energy, land … all of these are the basis in which development happens. And development is what we say generates a good economy and puts money in our pockets. If we cannot sustain the environment, we can’t not sustain ourselves.”

The soaring fuel prices, a world economy that’s slowing, joblessness caused by automation and climate change are all linked to that greed of mankind that’s ensuring that consumption is the driver of the economy.  The devaluing of the housewives’ unpaid labours, farmer’s and labourer’s efforts and the rule of corporations with power-hungry politicians as their puppets regardless of political party or ideological affiliating, data theft and harvesting are all part of a vicious cycle – a matrix like in the movies if you will that’s fuelled by our greed sharpened by the psychological manipulations and peddling of vast faceless, trans-boundary, emotion- and value-free corporations. 

This summer saw unprecedented death and devastation over multiple instances across north India as a result of dust and thunderstorms. More recently with the onset of the monsoon, flooding in the North-East, Kerala & Karnataka is taking lives and destabilizing the lives of people and displacing them. Recently the dust storm killed seventeen people! Meanwhile it's being called a "dust fall" and is causing an air quality emergency in the National Capital Region - Delhi-NCR. The deforestation of the Aravalli range has been thought to be a major contributor to this unheeded dust-laden winds blowing across the Gangetic plains. The heat waves meanwhile claimed many lives across South Asia especially India and Pakistan. The South-West Monsoon battered India’s west coast with almost super-charged cloudbursts and unprecedented flooding in Karnataka. Yet water crises plagues across the nation, with our hill stations and the poorest communities facing the brunt of the unwise development. Sustainable Development may be the UN roadmap of choice but until the decarbonizing of the economy happens, equitable distribution of resources happens, and excessive consumption of the first world and the privileged across the globe is curbed – it will remain a distant dream.