Extractos del prólogo de Matthieu Ricard’ en el libro de Didier Ruef’s ‟Recycle”
Recentiemente, tuve la oportunidad de nadar entre aproxiñadañente treinta y tres ballenas-tiburones en la costa Mexicana. 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)