Even as science unmasks the sinister side of plastic, we are becoming ever more dependent on it. Is there a way out of this deadly addiction?
STELLA MCCARTNEY is an English fashion designer known for her support of animal rights. Her label assiduously eschews fur or leather. This June, she announced a line of luxury goods fashioned out of yarn spun from plastic garbage gleaned from the oceans. “To take something that is destructive and turn it into something that’s sexy and cool, how can that not be luxury?” Stella told The New York Times.
Far away from the glitz of Stella’s fashion universe, last September, a zealous 19-year-old environmental activist named Jawahar took his own life by jumping into a canal in the temple town of Thanjavur. He left behind a video recording of his suicide note: “I am sacrificing my life in the hope that it will trigger serious concern about plastic use in India. Since all of my peaceful means of protest failed, I’m forced to choose suicide...”
Two contrasting reactions to the modern pandemic of plastic pollution, one fighting, the other funereal, but both signify the Faustian nature of our toxic love affair with plastic. Obscenely cheap,magnificently protean, and addictively convenient, it has become the preeminent “lubricant of globalisation”—we now produce 20 times more plastic than 50 years ago, which is expected to double in the next 20 years.
In an everyday sense, even though we live in a virtual sea of plastic, we become conscious of it only when it is virtually immortal, ugly discards stare at us mortals from open sewers, landfills, rivers, and beaches. But it has a darker underbelly, glimpsed only occasionally through pictures and videos of poor workers recycling plastic waste in horrendous working conditions. More worryingly, the merchants of doubt hired by the plastic industry have muddied the case against plastic’s health hazards so much that most of us continue to patronise it fecklessly.
Esta historia es de la edición August 1, 2017 de Down To Earth.
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Esta historia es de la edición August 1, 2017 de Down To Earth.
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INVISIBLE THREAT
Significant presence of microplastics in Puducherry’s agricultural soil raises concerns for soil and crop health
Feeding off each other
VEGETARIAN MOVEMENTS IN SOUTH ASIA AND THE WEST GREW WITH MUTUAL SUPPORT AND VALIDATION
India's unhealthy patent amendments
Despite strong pleas, the Modi regime has changed the rules to impose a cost on those who challenge faulty patents
URBAN DISCOMFORT
Poorly planned, heat-trapping infrastructure, along with dwindling natural spaces, turn up the temperatures in major Indian cities
BLAZING SUN IS ON
Rising temperatures are testing the limits of human tolerance to heat. With their predominantly built-up landscape, urban areas offer no respite. A study by the Centre for Science and Environment on the morphology and heat patterns of nine Indian cities over the past decade shows how these urban centres are turning into heat islands with a potentially serious impact on human health. An analysis by Rajneesh Sareen, Mitashi Singh and Nimish Gupta, with Shagun in Haryana and Kiran Pandey
"H5N1 may be more severe than COVID-19"
In early April, the US confirmed the first case of avian influenza in livestock, along with cow-to-human transmission of the virus disease.
A PSYCHEDELIC HIGH
Driven by surge in global trials and low success rate of current medications in treating mental health problems, researchers call for home-grown clinical trials of psychedelic drugs
Locked out
Two years after becoming the only state to be excluded from the Centre's ruralemployment guarantee scheme, villages in West Bengal grapple with distress migration and debt traps
'Protection from climate change part of right to life'
The Supreme Court of India, on April 5, recognised that citizens have a right to be free from the adverse effects of climate change, saying it is intertwined with the fundamental rights to life and equality. Here are the key arguments articulated by the three-judge bench of Chief Justice DY Chandrachud and Justices JB Pardiwala and Manoj Misra in their judgement
Weaving dreams
Tribal communities in West Bengal slowly embrace traditional weaving to ensure sustainable livelihood