Pollution: The Deathstroke of India

India Trip IV

Is there anything so sickening as watching a gentle beast blighted by a malice of your own design? Even worse, when that poor animal is so maimed and so beyond help that death is the best recourse? The war waged by humans on nature has brought wanton death to our little blue planet, and the struggle is known (though perhaps not felt) by all, and nowhere is it more apparent than India. Indeed, of all the color and vibrancy which the country offers, the sight which sticks with me most is the sight of an old cow, loping her way down a road, stumbling in sickness as her eyelids drooped heavily. A single piece of plastic dangled out of her mouth mockingly, as but one of many that she had ingested.

India's beauty is long since marred by the uncaring attitude with which the locals trash the place, and while in America we loathe litterers and condemn even a few pieces of plastic on the ground, in India it is perfectly acceptable to simply throw ones trash on the ground where they stand, and the roadsides are just as filled with plastic as they are grass. On those same roadsides cows, horses, and pigs graze and forage for food, unintentionally swallowing up plastic which accumulates in their stomach over time, causing a most long and painful illness.

As one who knows that the climate crisis is urgent, I often struggle to express the ramifications of our reliance on fossil fuels, though one stark image is that of the Great Barrier Reef, where I snorkeled two summers ago and saw first had the awful decay of the once rich ecosystem. But after this visit to India, I have a new way of describing runaway pollution and overpopulation.

Despite being "imbibed with a rich history" (my own words), the air is in fact more memorable for the smokers cough I attained, and the weight I felt in my lungs during my stay. The smog casts a bleak horizon, and shields the warmth of the sun itself on most winter days, at which time it's also likely to descend on the cities, causing visibility to be reduced to near zero and the poisonous air to be even more a threat to people. There is an air quality index used by various countries around the world, and it's normally healthy under a value of 200. The air quality in New Delhi was so bad that it broke the meters, topping them out at 999. Even weather.com lists the air as at best "Unhealthy" and at worst "Hazardous", and I've seen it at the latter more often than I care to admit. Largely, the pollution comes from farmers burning crops, and that is a most easy problem to fix, if one was bold enough. But more on that later.

For now we come to the trash. The endless mountains of plastic which comprise the landscape of India more than the dirt and rocks. It's with a horrid candidness which I say that people just dump their trash where they please, and that little institutions exist that manage trash. It, along with the defecation, put a rot in the very air, and the reek seems to permeate every fabric and cell that it touches.

But what then is the solution to this crisis, of which words can hardly do justice? Oh, how I wish I were a child again, unable to comprehend the complexities which this question brings. Prime Minister Modi has set out to clean up India, and indeed good steps have been made, like a hardline plastic bag ban and a promise to remove trash from streets. But it's not really up to him at the end of the day, because the people themselves have to desire a cleaner India for the dream to be actualized, and it looks like that simply isn't happening

Sure, some of the upper middle class wealthy are able to recycle and manage their trash, and you can even tell someone in that economic class the dangers of littering, which they will hear with an earnest ear, and most likely hearken to your worlds. But try telling the guy who sits all day at a stand selling bagged chips and snacks for less then a few dollars a day to mind where he puts his trash. Try telling the woman who roasts peanuts a day for almost nothing in return that she shouldn't pollute the country. And try telling people who make nothing and who have no hope of escaping their hellish socio economic status not to pollute the Ganges River, at once the most sacred and disgustingly polluted river in the world. Of course, strides have been made to clean it up, and have succeeded to some degree, but people still do not care much for the river. And why should they? When there is no hope, one can only life out their lives with a prayer for death to come quickly, and pay no heed to the world around them.

These things are impossible while the economy does not provide them benefit enough to care about the health of the nation. Why give back to a world which has seemingly cruelly endowed life to them, laughing in their misery as they eek out the barest existence? It saddens me deeply that a country which I care about should fall into such utter ruin, and I can only now implore that we take climate change as a serious threat. One needs only to look at the depressing state of Indian sanitation and cleanliness to ascertain that it is a most important adversary. There are not enough words in my lexicon that I could use to describe the utter calamity which exists in this small subcontinent, and while I understand that I sound like a doomsday prophet, know that it is only wrought out of concern for the planet, the only little one that we have ever known.