Tag: environment

Zero

Back to zero, this lockdown for me is a forced rethink of what I need to do, or love to do. I have had a forced reset after my brain injury and after a few years I have a pretty solid base. And I got into a rhythm again. I sometimes forget to focus on the goals I have set after my return to the ‘real world’.

After adjusting to the lockdown and getting my head around it, I have spent some time going tru my notes and thoughts just after my revalidation. It was very much focussed around learning and getting some old ideas done. Mostly focussed around creativity and music. It’s has been hard getting started on those things for some reason. This part of my goals has been overshadowed by the day to day stuff I need to do. So I am now need to set some time for it.

This new crisis has also made me think we as a society need a reset, a bold start from scratch, back to zero.

It has also shown the fragility of our system and the need to rethink a large part of it. For me a lot needs to get back to zero. Start to rethink the whole idea of how we need to organize society and how we do things.

The focus on economic growth and keeping big business happy is long overdue. The metrics we use for calculating our output is one of the past. The cost of every crisis lands on the weakest shoulders. Most people haven’t really recovered from the financial crisis of 2008 and are now here. It might seem as if there was a recovery but most people just got back to a level of were they were in 2008.

The main problem is the inability for most people to get there financial situation more stable, workers rights have steadily been downgraded, the gig economy is not one that benefits most workers. And thus most people. Combining this with the every growing privatizing of healthcare , utilities and so on it’s a risk cocktail that has again landed on the same group of people.

The risk for society as a whole has gone up as well, the governments around the world have stepped in at an enormous cost for the future , all in a all in bet for quick recovery. Which might not happen.

So while this is all pretty gloomy it also gives us as a opportunity to force a few long overdue changes. The most important is the mindset about how we measure the wealth in our society. It needs to be a new mix of economic growth , health and happiness of the people and nature. A focus more on the quality of life and things rather than just things and masses of them.

It’s just a thought but these levels of leverage on financial , environmental and human risk our current system is very much unsustainable. Hopefully this new crisis will give way to forward thinking and real problem solving. I for one hope for the best.

Chemical waste

The whole world applauded the Paris environmental treaty. Which mostly covered the restriction of the fossil fuels. This all to prevent the rise temperature worldwide. Good work on all fronts. Everybody happy, mostly because everything that has been agreed can be easily outmanoeuvred. Simply because you can travel the world with all the carbon emission rights and buy or sell any paper deficit or surplus you might have. As with all matters which nobody really cares about. It’s near impossible to check.

Same thing with waste. Mountains of waste. And these massive amounts of waste is a more pressing problem at the moment I think. Since a very large part of the industrial waste is simply dumped around the world, where it should be disposed of in the proper way. And on paper it most likely is, at least when people are able to track it and check it. There is a massive waste trade around the globe. And hopefully somewhere someone is doing the right thing and getting rid of it the way it’s supposed to at the end of it all. Well that assumption is wrong.

I had read about the illegal dumping of loads of industrial waste in Italy in the book Gomorra by Robert Saviano. And in some articles in newspapers and magazines over the years. Last week I watched a documentary on 2doc a Dutch documentary about these illegal dumps. they used to dump it and dump tons of clean soil on top. The dumping nowadays is done by orchestrating fires , and once the fire is burning the chemical waste is dumped on the fire. This produces toxic fumes. And a lot of the toxic materials end up in the bottom due to the rain and the water used by the fire department when extinguishing the fire.

This has resulted in extreme levels of heavy metals and other toxic materials in the fruits and vegetables that farmers grow on the lands surrounding all these illegal dump sites. It has caused variations of cancer which you normally come across with elderly people , now people as young as a couple of months have been diagnosed with these types of cancer.

More shockingly the money to clean up this mess, paid for by among others the European tax payers , ended up in the pockets of the criminals that dumped it their in the first place, cleaning absolutely nothing. All this has never been checked , although there was a nice piece of paper outlining all the parameters of the cleaning. But nobody cares after the ink is dry. And in the statistics it’s probably marked as clean again. In the meantime everything stays the same. And nobody wakes up.

The documentary (in Dutch). De gifcirkel