The American

Modern Times
By Bhrahma
The American WayDid you know that the world’s tallest tree and the widest tree, both from the same family of Sequoias, grew in abundance in the United States of America? The first grows as high as 400 feet and the other has a trunk that can be over 15 feet wide and both can live for more than three thousand years!
Wow! So one is taller than a forty story building, the other has a trunk so thick that a truck can pass through it, and both have been around since before Jesus was born!?
The irony is that these trees are now found only in small pockets within the U.S. that are protected by law…the rest have been cut to make houses, rail roads and….chopsticks!
I did read somewhere they are still cutting down ancient rain forests to feed the demand from Japan, where they make chopsticks from the wood!
And did you know that approximately 20% of the world’s populations (a lot of from the North American Continent) consumes 80 % of the world’s natural resources?!
Holy cow! So the rest of the 80% population survives on just 20%?!
Crazy, isn’t it? The same, educated, ‘environmentally aware’ and self-righteous minority, majority of whom live in one country, the U.S., guzzle more electricity, more gasoline, more paper, wood, coal, wood, fish and foul, than the rest of the world combined. And they continue to do so more wastefully than any third world illiterate has ever done! To give you a simple example, just for a cup of tea in the U.S.… you would use a paper cup with a plastic lid, an aluminum sachet containing the tea bag, a couple of paper sachets for pre-packed sugar, a sachet for the creamer, a wooden or plastic stirrer and a paper napkin… all of which you throw away later!
Instead of the chai in a ceramic cup, that we get here?!
And that’s just one example! The amount of garbage that an average American household produces in a year is approximately twenty times of what an Indian one! I was told that almost 50% of the land-fills in the U.S. today are made being made up of disposable baby diapers!
But to be fair, the developed countries do recycle a lot of their waste, don’t they?!
Vish, is it easier to consume twenty times more and then recycle it or is it easier to curtail wasteful consumption? Do you have recycling as your first concern or prudent consumption? But no one lays emphasis on this while passing any legislation because if we didn’t consume more and more, how would industries grow? How would the GDP targets be met?
Do you mean to say that it is a choice we have to make between economic development and conservation of our resources?
No. It is more a question of having economic development that is sustainable v/s one that is not…after all, what economic development can there be once there is no raw material left to feed the factories?
But in India, we are pretty good about this, aren’t we? We reuse almost everything!
I am just worried that the American mayajaal will catch up with us.