Legacy of Conscience

Inspired by my daughter and son-in-law, who spent a weekend away on Long Beach, Vancouver Island, and were dismayed at the amount of plastic they found all over the beaches there, dutifully picking up three buckets full the stuff before leaving the beach, I realized that we all need to do our "eco duty" more often.

I have learned that travelling the world is a great teacher - culturally, historically, and informationally. Some of the most beautiful landscapes in the world are in the third world countries, and yet those countries are some of the worst offenders of strewing garbage everywhere and polluting the environment with carbon emissions. My train journey through the Carpathian Mountains to the Ukraine nearly 5 years ago was an eye-opener in more ways than one. The streams and rivers were clogged with plastic bags hanging from the shrubs and trees along the banks, strewn on the banks and caught up on rocks in the water. The garbage piles along the train tracks were proof that there was no garbage pickup in most towns and villages and that folks just burned their rubbish or tossed it where it could not be seen from the town. The air pollution in places like Tunisia, Mexico City and parts of Eastern Europe were horrific - great banks of yellowish-grey smog lying over the towns. I equated that kind of pollution with industrial first world cities like Detroit and Hamilton...not so. The Third World is actually a great culprit of pollution world-wide - i.e. the slash burning in the forests of Indonesia pulluting the mainland of China, the nuclear accidents in Russia sending clouds of radioactive gases across Northern Europe. On the other side of the coin, I was amazed at the clean air and the impeccably tidy landscapes in New Zealand - one of the most environmentally aware countries I have ever been in. New Zealanders treasure their environment and make sure that it stays that way by instituting stringent rules about imports of any kind which might affect their natural environment in any way.
If our next generation is taught to understand what a precious legacy we all have inherited, and how fragile it is, perhaps we may look forward to a future for them and their children's children which is brighter and cleaner than ours is today. Just picking up the plastic from the beaches is a great start!