As Didier Ruef wrote, “While the re-use and recovery of waste is part of everyday life in developing countries, our consumer society has turned waste into garbage, by taking away its economic value.”
I have witnessed this transformation in a country that 25 years ago had never even seen a bottle of Coca-Cola. When the first plastic bottles appeared in eastern Tibet, there was no question of discarding them. Once the drink was quickly ingested, the light airtight container, was carefully preserved. The bottles, whole or with the top part removed, were used as a drinking cup, a receptacle for milk, a butter jar, a pot to collect small objects, vases to put flowers on the altar as an offering to Buddha or to protect objects from the weather, etc. If by chance a few not environmentally conscious travelers threw empty plastic bottles on the roadside, nomadic children were quick to seize this precious bounty.

Twenty-five years later, the plastic bottles are neither rare nor precious in Tibet. They are scattered amidst the meadows of wild flowers. Tibetans no longer attribute any value to them and have not yet grasped that as they are not made of cloth or leather, or wood, or any other natural material which, when thrown away, will soon disap¬pear, eaten by animals, dissolved by rain or disintegrated by time.

However, in one of the valleys in which the association with which I am involved helped to build a clinic and finance the activities of a school, a remarkable man, a specialist in traditional medicine, who is also a writer and an artist, has in the course of a whole year explained to the farmers and nomads that this waste will continue to litter the fields and rivers for a century, disrupting the sacred geography and harming the health of living beings. He placed almost every¬where containers for collecting the garbage which was once simply abandoned. A year later, this valley was as clean as a park in Switzerland.

Tools which at first helped us to survive, but their unbridled development and the waste they produce now threatens our survival. We have now moved from a world where one produced to meet the genuine needs of society to one which strives to “create” artificial needs. In this way the consumer society of today was born.
As Didier Ruef notes, “it is time to change our behavior and our way of social functioning.
(to be continued)

Recently, I had the opportunity to swim in the middle of around thirty whale-sharks off the Mexican coast. But amidst the sun’s rays that lit up the shimmering ocean and the sharks around us, floating like great bubbles of mineral water were plastic bags and waste of all shapes and sizes as well as, strangely, an airport baggage check.

The development and usage of tools is such that, for the first time in the history of mankind the proliferation of manufactured objects is likely to cause irreversible damage to our ecosystem.
Indeed, the benefits we have sought have had undesirable side effects on our lives and our natural environment. Manufactured objects and waste proliferate, chain reactions are generated by the substances released, changes in the surface and the atmosphere of the earth are a direct consequence of the waste released as well as of the complex tools that we use today and discard in the environment.

From plastic debris that swarms in the ocean (some planktons have been found to contain up to 30% of its weight in residues of plastic micro particles, which are then absorbed by all cetaceans) to radioactive fall¬out from the 468 nuclear explosions which have occurred in Kazakhstan at the time of the Soviet Union in the utmost contempt of the fate of the local people. Even today, the number of cancers and leukemia in adults and children is. frightening as well as the continuing number of deformities in newly born infants. Everywhere waste has produced a damaging effect on our lives.

Twenty-five years after the Bhopal chemical disaster in India, tens of thousands of survivors still suffer after-effects of pesticides released by the industrial explosion that killed over 10,000 people (of whom 3,500 died instantly). They have received only meager allowances from the American company Union Carbide, which, from the locals’ perspective, remains totally indifferent to the human tragedy that it has caused far from home headquarters.
(to be continued)

The manufacture of a tool consisted at first in modification and assembly of natural objects to help man makes things better and faster than with his bare hands. When no longer useful, these tools and the products which were made from them, were discarded and returned to nature. Millennia later, only objects made of hard materials such as stone have left long lasting traces.

Then man learned to make fire, to extract metals from crude ores, to mix substances with each other and thereby produce compounds with new properties. These are then abandoned in the environment and contribute to change it in various ways, often unpredictably and sometimes with harmful consequences in the short or long term.
(To be continued)