The 2084 Precept (46 page)

"I wouldn't like to be one of your
archeologists in a couple of thousand years' time, that's all I can
say."

"Yes, they will certainly be getting
quantity instead of quality. All of this stuff will be doubling and
tripling as 2.5 billion Chinese and Indians continue down the road
to the consumer levels already attained by our 'developed' areas.
Not to mention the Africans, the Indonesians, the South Americans
and other large and fast-growing population centers. Immense
quantities of this waste are piles of innards, bones, and other
remains from slaughterhouses and laboratories—don't forget the
billions of land animals we butcher every year—hospital and other
medical refuse including human organs and syringes, around 40
million tons of poisonous electronic waste, and of course other
toxic wastes, including pesticides and even deadly, radioactive
nuclear waste."

“Nuclear waste?”

“Yes. From nuclear bombs, nuclear bomb
accidents, nuclear reactor accidents, nuclear bomb testing and so
on. Huge areas of pollution around the planet: Russia, Ukraine,
China, USA, Greenland, Spain, Japan, and so forth, including plenty
of island groups used for testing and, of course, the oceans
themselves.

"12
billion
tons of overall waste
every year, you said. Where do you put it all?"

"Well, we put it wherever we can. Of course,
some of us don't like to keep all of this trash—particularly not
the dangerous stuff—and so we cleverly ship it off to other parts
of the planet. A lot of it never gets there, it being more
profitable to dump it into the oceans in transit…and you don't have
to bother with a licence for that. But some of it does arrive,
licences having been granted in certain areas by greedy and corrupt
birdbrains or dictators who accept large bribes to permit the
poisoning of their countries.. That is why, for example, 40,000
tons of hazardous pesticides are lying around right now somewhere
in Africa. Just lying around."

"Just like that?"

"Just like that, Jeremy. And we have many
garbage dumps worldwide, believe me. Let me tell you about one that
I have seen with my own eyes. It is located at the seaport of
Manila in the Philippines. Smokey Mountain it's called. Smokey
Mountain is a human version of hell. It is a stinking, noxious
mountain of human waste, about 300,000 m
²
in area at the
time I saw it and 70 meters high. It reeks of death, it reeks of
rotting animal flesh, of excrement, of sulphur, of whatever else
you care to name. It is populated by a few hundred garbage dump
dwellers: men, women and children who scrape a living by wading
through greyish-blue pools of unidentified slimy substances,
collecting re-saleable trash such as used condoms, or else burning
tires from which they extract the wire which sells for 30 cents per
kilo. Smoke pollution, 35 degrees centigrade, high humidity,
millions of disease-ridden flies. These people live in huts
constructed out of garbage, and some of them are even born there,
some marry there and some die there. They contract diseases of the
lungs, of the eyes, of the skin, and worse things still."

"A man-made Hades?" proffered Jeremy.

"Yes, but don't worry. The elected clowns
who created this situation have now had a wonderful idea to resolve
it, flap, flap. They are going to close the dump and start shipping
all of the shit to an unpopulated, unspoiled island. They may
already have started for all I know. A pity about all the poor
animals on the island, but what the hell, life is tough. And who
cares about a beautiful island anyway? And then we have oil
pollution."

"Oil pollution?"

"Yes, land-based oil pollution. This far
exceeds the oil pollution of the oceans caused by oil tanker
disasters, drilling platform catastrophes and so on. Vast swathes
of land in countries like Russia, Nigeria and many others are
polluted with oil. At the same time, a lot of this reaches the sea,
about a million tons of it worldwide each year. Let me give you an
insignificant example, Aserbaidschan. Aserbaidschan is a relatively
small oil-producing country which still manages to run off about
100,000 tons per year of contaminated oil into the Caspian Sea. And
as we stand at our petrol station tanking up our car for €100, we
don't see and we don’t want to see the local oil workers, who earn
about €200 per month to pump the oil overflows into the stinking
drainage ditches which traverse the blackened sludge of the silent
and lifeless Baku landscape. Nor do we see the resulting deaths of
millions of birds and marine life. The main thing is, we get to
tank our car."

Including myself of course.

"To summarize, Jeremy, we pollute everything
everywhere. There are huge garbage dumps all over the planet. We
even have a smallish one on our planet’s highest point, Mount
Everest. There are an estimated 50 tons of garbage up there right
now."

"O.K., I've got the picture. Do you think we
could stop there and move on to the pollution of your oceans?"

Good. As usual, I was doing my best to give
him his money's worth. But, also as usual, the less time it took,
so much the better.

"Right you are, Jeremy. First of all, you
should know that we continue to poison our oceans by the minute. We
shovel around 8 million tons of garbage, including toxic waste,
into our seas every year. The cumulative effect of this is
tremendous. The Pacific Ocean now has an area which is no more and
no less than a floating sump of human garbage covering—it's a fact,
check it out—over 1 million km
²
. And yes indeed, like
everything else, it is growing. This causes the death of millions
of marine life forms each year, including a million seabirds which
swallow plastic refuse, seals which become entangled in objects
such as beer crates, and so on and so forth. Even a relatively
small ocean such as the North Sea is fed about 30,000 tons of our
ghastly mixtures every year. And then we have large amounts of
radioactive nuclear waste lying around on our sea floors, some of
which has already started to leak out into the sea. And then we
have the ships."

"The ships?" asked Jeremy.

"Yes. Actually, the only ones I know a
little bit about are cruise ships, floating hotels, but they will
serve as an example. These ships are far more polluting per
passenger-kilometer than airplanes. Add to that the fact that many
passengers fly to and from their departure and arrival ports, and
you have a double pollution effect. Most of these ships run on
bunker fuel, the cheapest and dirtiest of fuel oils, and they
discharge about 800 million liters of oily bilge water per year
into the oceans. They also produce over 6 billion liters of sewage
per year, 30 billion liters of polluted water (from showers,
galleys, laundries and so on) and 100 thousand liters of hazardous
wastes including, for example, used cooking oil. They also poison
the atmosphere with untold amounts of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen
oxide emissions from their engines. And there are hundreds of these
cruise ships travelling around our oceans. Non-stop."

"And all of this is merely because some of
you prefer to spend your vacation time in a hotel which floats,
rather than in one which doesn't?"

"Yes, that is correct. There is no other
reason whatsoever. But to all of this we have to add the numbers of
untold thousands of freighters, tankers, warships, ferries,
research and exploration ships, fishing fleets, private yachts and
so forth. I am afraid I am unaware of the statistics for them all.
Not that it matters. The effect of all of these activities is
catastrophic. We are turning our oceans into stinking, deadly
swamps and we are poisoning millions of fish and ocean mammals
every year. And even the Arctic ice will have completely
disappeared long before I am dead."

"And nobody is doing anything about this
either?"

"No, Jeremy. Certainly there are the blind
optimists. And there are the elected clowns as usual with their
international conferences, their platforms for arguing and arguing
and arguing. In fact they have been holding meetings and muttering
to each other for decades, but they can't agree on anything, or at
least not on anything effective, and so everything has got worse
and worse and continues to get even worse than that. The
usual."

"Hmm…could we move on to air, do you
think?"

"Our atmosphere? Yes indeed. Our atmosphere,
which by the way is 78% nitrogen, is very thin. There is actually
no definite boundary between our atmosphere and outer space, but
something called the Kármán line is generally accepted as the
limit, about 100 kilometers from the planet's surface. In other
words, you could drive up there in a car and arrive in under an
hour. Except you can't of course because of gravity. But that part
of the atmosphere in which we could actually
survive
is only
about 10 kilometers thick; in other words you could drive up there
and also drive back in around 10 minutes. Not that we could survive
at all if we weren't lucky enough to have our magnetic fields and a
layer of ozone in our atmosphere which filters the sun's deadly
ultraviolet rays. Without that we would all be dead. But—I don’t
know whether you can believe this, Jeremy—we are destroying that as
well."

"What is ozone?" Jeremy asked.

"Ozone is something which is produced when
ultraviolet light strikes two-oxygen atoms and splits them into
individual atoms. These two types of atom combine and absorb up to
99% of the sun's ultraviolet light which is highly dangerous to
exposed life forms on our planet. The ozone layer is in our
stratosphere, only about twenty to thirty kilometers from the
planet's surface."

Jeremy took off his jacket, hung it on the
back of a chair. Adjusted his tie, walked over to the window and
stared out at the boring view of the building opposite.

"Fortunate," he said.

"Fortunate indeed. So…not content with the
highly intelligent activities I have already spoken about so far
this afternoon, Jeremy, we are at the same time pursuing another
highly intelligent activity, namely, we are knowingly and
consciously undertaking the terminal destruction of our planet's
lungs. Our planet's very
thin and fragile
lungs."

"It doesn't surprise me," said Jeremy. He is
perhaps reaching the stage where nothing can surprise him
anymore.

"I'll start off with the deforestation of
the planet," I began. "We have already made great steps in this
direction and, as usual, we are accelerating our activities still
further. For example, in the past three decades alone we have
destroyed 70% of all the forests in Asia. Three decades to decimate
forests which have been around for over 50 million years. And if we
want to take South America, over 20,000 km
²
of rain
forest are destroyed in Brazil alone each and every year.
Each
year. 20,000 km2,
Jeremy. This is mainly achieved through
thousands and thousands of man-made fires, all easily visible as a
myriad of red points on our satellite photography. Fire, you see,
is the easiest and cheapest way in which to turn these areas into
agricultural land."

"I believe it," said Jeremy. Could it be
that Jeremy had advanced from his lack of surprise and indifference
to the glorious and wondrous world of cynicism?

"Yes, well, Brazil is only an example.
Colossal deforestation occurs around the globe, North America, you
name it. In fact, the country currently releasing more carbon
dioxide through deforestation than any other country on the planet
is Indonesia. And apart from destroying our atmosphere, we are also
destroying the habitats of our planet’s poor, helpless animals and
birds, including truly magnificent animals such as the South
American jaguar and the Siberian tiger. The habitat destruction
also makes it easier to hunt them and these are therefore the next
ones slotted to become extinct, the latest victims of the human
extermination factory. For example, Jeremy, China has a growing
appetite for tiger parts used in making tiger bone wine and
traditional medicines and, at $10,000 a carcass, it is not
surprising that around 40 of the few remaining tigers are killed
each year. Illegally of course; the birdbrain law to prevent the
killing is as usual ineffective, flap, flap."

"Yes…but you mentioned your satellite
photography. What do your politicians do when they see the
photographic proof of all of this?"

"They do the same as they always do, Jeremy.
They spend decades holding meetings and muttering to each other,
creating a few agreements here and there to do something about it
at some point in time in the future—on those few occasions when
they can agree, that is, and without of course the agreement of
certain major powers in any case—and then they all get up, highly
contented, extremely self-satisfied and feeling oh, so very proud
of themselves, a job well done old chap, and pollute their way back
again to their various homes around the planet, where is my monthly
salary please."

"The same as usual. O.K.," said Jeremy. "But
what I don't understand, they must surely be aware of what is
happening to your atmosphere—your very thin atmosphere as you
correctly described it?"

"Oh yes, they are aware, and that is the
paradox. The clowns are in possession of all the scientific data
regarding the exploding populations and the effects of industrial
pollution, deforestation, travel, transport and so on and they know
exactly what is happening. They drown in the billions of fresh
statistics that are fed to them and their minions each and every
year."

“Such as?”

“Such as official forecasts which state that
this will be the planet’s warmest year
ever
since recorded
human knowledge. Such as the Arctic ice will
completely
disappear within a decade or two. Such as there are 420
million
fewer birds living in Europe than there were just
twenty-five years ago…and so on.”