Green living for ?new-age’ consumers?

summer or the sound of frogs in the monsoon?

As soon as these elements of nature in our personal world find a “value” in the world of markets, they become scarce commodities. So milk that was once shared by human and calf alike is now sold by Mother Dairy in kiosks. We do not consider the plight of the calf who may have gone hungry for weeks and sacrificed its own health in favour of our palates. The meat and leather industry provide for us products that divorce the method of extraction and processing from the cosmetic appeal of the product.

Do we even know how or where our fruit and vegetables were grown? We do know that they were transported from afar because we pay more for them ever since the price of petrol went up. Does it matter whether these were grown with chemical fertilizers and pesticides or that they were induced to ripen with ethylene gas? And do we care that these are the product of genetic engineering targeted towards making the corn uniformly larger and colourful, fetching a better price yet losing precious nutritional and biological diversity in the process?

What price energy?

It is said that every new problem is the result of a solution to an earlier problem. We take it for granted that modern developers will solve all the problems they create. Take the energy crisis for instance. We are willing to produce nuclear waste that will pollute its storage site for tens of thousands of years just so that we can get 7% more electricity today. Why is wind power not as popular as a nuclear reactor? Who will be held responsible if today’s nuclear waste disposal fails 3 generations from now? Why is it so difficult to cover all our barren deserts with parabolic reflectors and other solar energy

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5