Remember that European refugee crisis in 2015? If you don’t, I’m sure you can recall the body of a 3-year-old Syrian child washed up on the shores of Turkey. There would be a flood of emotions rushing into your mind – anger, sadness, questions of how we humans can live. Well I hope you feel something similar when you see this photo:
A simple dead whale, it didn’t die of old age, or having it’s fins cut off for food (ok that applies to sharks). It died due to (highly probable) the 48 pounds worth of plastic in its belly. It’s baby (yes it is a mother), a fetus as quoted by World Wildlife Fund was “in an advanced state of decomposition,”.
Now tell me how to you feel? Nothing yet? Let’s put things in perspective: you’re wondering about doing your own things, living your day. While dining at a restaurant instead of having some nice baby radish or capsicum on your beautiful salad, you have bright red bottle caps instead. Problem is you don’t know the difference, you just eat it – whole. Slowly and unknowingly you finish your three-course meal that is full of juicy meats, vegetable fibre, and plastic. You keep eating till the day you feel something is wrong with your body, or not but unknowingly you just pass on due to the fact that you have consumed so much indigestible materials in your body that your body just can’t function. Could be weeks, months. Who knows. Point is you die, unaware the very cause is in your body due to what you ate.
It is not the first incident where evidence of dead animals die and the cause of their death is directly / indirectly due to the silicone and junk residing in their guts. Google “dead animals plastic” for starters and you’ll see.
We wage war on famine, poverty, racism, white supremacy, why not wage war environmental destruction? The reason to do so is not vengeance or redemption, but for survival of our own race, and our fellow animals on this earth.
This war for mother nature isn’t a new idea, but a reboot of an old fight in need of a perspective. Popular media tried telling and educating us that nature is beautiful, kind and deserves our respect. Star Trek: The Voyage Home in 1986 was one of the movies that had an environmental message featuring an alien structure that is bent of wrecking havoc on earth with insane catastrophic planetary storms until it’s arrival was answered and acknowledged by the then extinct songs of the humpback whales in the fictional year of 2286. It was a novel way to remind us that we need nature more than it needs us.
With more cases of animals dying as a by-product of our lifestyle, a change in habits is necessary. Some might call it a political move, but whatever it is, the European Union Parliament voted to ban of many single-use plastics which is probably a response to so many more deaths of animls attributed to consumption indigestable plastic. It’s a vote for nature, now we need to put this vote in action.
Start by not using straws, carry your own shopping bag, telling your company’s cafeteria to stop using disposable cutlery, request not to have them for your takeout, clean up your trash at home, demand you local municipality to properly organize trash to dispose them responsibly.
Whatever you do – start now. It’s never too late to start doing the right thing.