The glossy and spectacular towers of Shanghai’s new financial district, an iconic symbol of this 21st-century New York, are right opposite the ‘older’ city, with its immaculately restored European-style waterfront and its 6-mile long shopping district. But the Huangpu River which flows between them is an icon if anything of runaway industrialization and reckless disregard for the consequences. By the 1980s it had been reduced to a toxic black syrup, virtually anoxic and biologically dead.
It’s a lot better than that now, which is fortunate since 30% of the city’s drinking water still comes from the Huangpu – but it still has to be very heavily treated chemically, and few citizens drink from the tap, preferring bottled water. In a country where 20% of rivers are toxic to skin contact, and 40% of the remainder are biologically dead, Shanghai is considerably better off than average – than Chongqing, for instance, where the mighty Yangtze turned crimson earlier this year for reasons which are yet to be identified.
So it came as a huge shock to discover the corpses of thousands of dead pigs floating down the river earlier this month, and accumulating in the creeks along with the usual bouillabaisse of food wrappings and fragments of plastic and polystyrene. The authorities assured citizens that there was no risk to the quality of drinking water (a double-edged affirmation, surely?), but the images have been propagated all across the country by armies of microbloggers and have aroused enormous anger and disquiet. Where exactly the dead pigs come from no one knows, but Shanghai’s hinterland is densely populated and its property prices rocketing, so that farm animals are kept in grossly overcrowded conditions and are constantly subject to epidemic infections. The cost of hygienic disposal is high – ergo, the river by night is the obvious choice.
Before we all start hating the Chinese for their callousness and indifference, let’s travel to somewhere as far away from hectic, crowded Shanghai and its bustle as it’s possible to get. This is Midway Island, a Pacific atoll midway between the Eurasian and American landmasses, uninhabited except by millions of seabirds who roost on this tiny crop of land, 2000 km from the nearest place of human habitation.
What should be an oasis of uncontaminated nature has become a graveyard for bird chicks, thanks to the presence nearby of the Pacific Garbage Patch – a floating mass of plastic debris which is now bigger than the Continental United States. Albatross chicks alone on Midway are estimated to consume 5 tonnes of plastic debris a year, with the inevitable consequences. It’s the biggest single reason why this magnificent bird is endangered.
Or let’s come to Europe with its supposedly higher standards of environmental care, and look at a sperm whale recently found dead on a beach in Spain. Its stomach had ruptured, and researchers found it hard to believe the quantity of plastic waste it contained: two dozen sheets of greenhouse roof covering, plastic bags, nine metres of rope, two long hosepipes, plus flowerpots and spray canisters. Can one even imagine the agony of such a death, one’s stomach distended with completely indigestible and toxic plastic garbage, leaving no room to take in anything nourishing?
Speaking for myself, when I read such things I experience rage, grief – and shame. At times I’m ashamed to be a member of a species which, gifted this wonderful planet with its abundance of treasures, uses it with such contempt – like someone who, inheriting a baroque palace, burns the furniture to keep warm and uses the priceless carpets as a toilet. And the rage is also about my impotence to do anything about it, knowing that these problems would persist for centuries even if we stopped producing plastics today – which is far from the case. On the contrary, with 3D printers we’ll soon all be able to produce our very own plastic gewgaws and trinkets at home to add to the existing mountains. And then, because I don’t like feeling impotent rage or helpless shame, I let it go; my attention goes to something else – something in my own life, perhaps – leaving behind a residuum of guilt, a little private emotional garbage patch if you like.
And none of these emotions is helpful; they won’t help to resolve the planetary crisis any more than they help to deal with other crises: collective or individual alike. When we experience rage, shame or guilt in relation to someone our response is to blame and reject them – i.e. to project the hateful feelings onto them. (Alternatively, for some of us, to buy the guilt and to wear it like a hair shirt or a ball and chain.) And exactly the same thing happens in a social/environmental context – look at the hatred and negativity which was directed at Al Gore for ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. Guess what, we don’t like inconvenient truths, and we tend to shoot messengers who bear them.
Even people who somehow contrive so to furnish their mental worlds as not to ‘believe in’ man-made global warming can’t deny that we’re treating the planet as a garbage dump. Yet they still furiously oppose simple measures like banning throwaway plastic bags or limiting food packaging and rage against ‘tree-huggers’ and ‘environazis’ – in the same way as someone who consistently abuses his partner or children knows deep inside how profoundly he’s betraying them, but rejects that unbearable knowledge by blaming them for his actions.
Or others – and many active environmentalists fall into this category – are consumed with guilt and with the burden of the knowledge of what we’re doing to our planet, and it’s this that drives their actions. Whether or not the actions themselves are helpful, the attendant emotions certainly aren’t. We only break out of the cycle of guilt and shame through love and forgiveness – of ourselves, of other people and of the planet itself.
Let’s allow ourselves to tremble with love and wonder at the beauty of what still remains, let’s celebrate and try to propagate that love, and let it drive our actions – all of them. We naturally cherish and care for what we love – and Gaia includes and embraces all the people who live on the planet and their states of mind as well as the whales and seabirds, the phytoplankton and the trees. It’s not an easy way out, quite the reverse – love if anything is a tougher discipline than hatred and projection. But it’s the only way that we can bring about change for the better, change that lasts.
