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Opinions expressed within the content are solely the author's and do not reflect the opinions and beliefs of any listed websites, their affiliates, any entity physical or otherwise, anything, anyone or any other form of matter that isn’t completely and uniquely, me.
18 June 2024
I spent the recent long weekend on a dive trip. Being underwater for me is my escape from the hustle and bustle of life. The open ocean, the silence for an hour, the fish busy in their little lives – “just keep swimming, just keep swimming.” For 60 minutes (more if I’m lucky), my normal world fades away until the dive guide gets my attention to signal a 3-minute safety stop at 5 meters - the end of the dive. My heart and the remaining air in my tank nudge me to stay for another hour but I follow instructions and surface with the group.
This was certainly not the first dive that I surfaced with plastic bits and pieces stuffed into my wetsuit. Grabbed from around coral or floating in the water, these jellyfish-like petroleum babies are relentless. Plastic has been found in the world’s deepest trenches, raining from the sky, in various human organs, and in every landscape imaginable. Our waste. Uncontrolled. Omnipresent.
A part of me feels guilty every time I go diving. I want to learn about the underwater world and our ocean family in order to save it better but I’m also bringing with me a flight and a boat, with a diesel-powered motor, usually also carrying other divers who are just there to get a picture for the ‘gram - completely unfazed by the fact that their blinding strobe lights and horrible buoyancy is damaging the places we pay so much to visit.
Why don’t humans live respectfully anymore?
The way of the indigenous in almost every country in the planet was one of utmost respect for nature. Nature fed them, housed them, and healed them. Not respecting nature could mean death. Not respecting nature still means death. We’re seeing it almost daily in torrential rains, flash floods, extreme heat waves, and uncontrollable wildfires. Yet now, we don’t care.
Why?
When some people are not in their own homes, they don’t care about littering, leaving lights and air conditioners on at full blast, wasting food, and generally making a mess. They do this when they travel, at work, in public places – vandalism, pollution, overconsumption.
Why?
We treat our planet like a toilet.
Waste has been moved around the world from developed country to developing country for decades. When the Basel Convention came along and some countries banned the import of waste, the unwilling nominee was the sea. These statistics were taken from a National Geographic website, “There are 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic debris in the ocean. Of that mass, 269,000 tons float on the surface, while some four billion plastic microfibers per square kilometer litter the deep sea.” If those plastic pieces each weighed just 2 grams, it would amount to 1,040 Eiffel Towers. Now, I’m assuming those pieces are bigger.
“The global average consumption of plastic per person per year is 20.9 kg, with a total worldwide consumption of 158,943,925 tons per year” reports the study written up by Plastic Overshoot Day and Environmental Action, 2023. Singapore, we’re the 4th highest consumer on that graph.
But plastic isn’t all that we waste. For a country that imports almost 90% of its food, Singapore wasted 813 thousand tonnes of food in 2022. When do we spare a thought for our neighbours struggling to put food their own plates, let alone ours? A study published in Anthropol Med. reported that, “nearly 4,00,000 farmers committed suicide in India between 1995 and 2018. This translates into approximately 48 suicides every day.” Many, many farmers around the world have been added to those statistics. This isn’t just happening in developing countries. Farmers in Australia and America are joining their brothers and sisters in farms with their decision to escape from the horrors of climate change, debt, and failure.
We celebrate the people with lots of money – the successful, the ones who have made it, the rich and famous, the celebrities – but for every one of them, there are probably a million who are suffering in silence. The social waste. The second-class citizens. The ones who are swept under the carpet. The ones who have no voice, no vote, no say, no choice.
In Singapore we’re lauded as the world’s 4th wealthiest nation but our nation too is built on the backs of modern day slavery. No Singaporean would ever be treated the way we do our foreign workers. The ones who tirelessly slave night and day for a country they will never call home, for a people who will not look them in the eye, and for an amount of work they do not understand. Why is there a need for so much construction? Why do we have to constantly build, destroy, rebuild? The continuous amounts of pollution and construction waste, the illegal sand shipped in in megatonnes, the human rights laws we loophole our way around in the name of progress.
There are millions of people around the world who have no sanitation, who are undernourished, and who are polluting not because they want to but because there is no infrastructure for them to do otherwise. The poverty line stands at $2.15 a day. In 2019, 701 million people around the world fell in this category. Developed countries prey on these easy pickings. We’ll give you a place to stay and food, you come and work for me. We’ll treat you like shit but you’ll get to send money home to your families.
How did complete and utter disrespect for the planet and all its inhabitants become so accepted that it is now a part of our everyday lives? It is more normal for us to act with disrespect than respect. It is more convenient for us to overconsume than to save. It is expected of us to fight for individual choice than the collective good.
We’re living in a world of shit and we know it.
You all have probably experienced that terrifying moment when you flush the toilet and instead of that almost satisfying glug that takes away all evidence of our inefficient systems, horror strikes, it flows in the other direction.
That terror.
Well, one day the world, that we’re treating as our toilet, is going to overflow and throw all that shit back at us and stuffing it in your wetsuit isn’t going to cut it.