I took Captain Planet to heart. If I followed his suggestions, I reasoned, I’d be closer to the world in which he lived. If CP said to recycle lest the Evil win, then recycle I would. What I didn’t know then was that the cartoon was aimed at suburban American kids, and so a lot of the suggestions were things that didn’t work in Pakistan. “Use the green box outside your local supermarket to recycle!” or “Always use paper bags, or better yet, bring a cloth one you can reuse!” or “Ride a bike to school” made sense in theory but didn’t pan out in Real Life. Inspired to be Greener (and hoping I would develop a superpower that was not sarcasm), I made my mother take me straight to Al-Fatah in Lahore so I could find a green box to send things to the mythic and wonderful recycling plant.
This happened in the mid-90s, and I assure you, as nascent as the Green Revolution was then globally, it was non-existent in Lahore. Al-Fatah didn’t have a recycling box, green or otherwise. Neither did Main Market’s Pioneer Store (remember when that store was Everything?) and the reusable cloth bag I lugged back and forth grew mold and was thrown away. I wasn’t allowed to ride to school and by the end of the summer I would have killed Captain Planet myself if it meant one more hour of air-conditioning. The blackened plumes of diesel smoke around the city convinced me that Captain Planet’s rules didn’t apply here anyway (a v paki way of thinking, in retrospect).
That cartoon is common to more people of my age group than you would believe. Practically everyone I’ve met around the world knows about it, and sees it as a basic building block for an entire generation that grew up under the specter of global warming. At the very least it educated millions of children about how to live sustainably, lest in 20 years the only place to see a polar bear would be in a zoo (“kind of like today then…?”). Eventually, we were taught about global warming in school as a fact (my Islamiyat teacher believed it was hell’s flames breaking into our world), and later movies like “An Inconvenient Truth” — Al Gore’s global revenge for losing the White House — played on the terror and chaos that daydreaming about a natural apocalypse can inspire.
Given that it is the greatest crisis now facing humankind, I think about it shockingly little. I don’t think many of us really “think” about global warming. I don’t recycle profusely, I admit to throwing away cans of Diet Coke and despite my best efforts, I still don’t know what to do with used batteries other than make garden sculptures. But every so often, something will remind me of our looming planetary fate. (The strange taste in my mouth after a day out in polluted Mumbai; the layer of dirt on your face after a drive in Karachi; that first breath you take in the mountain air as you gasp “so that’s what oxygen tastes like!”)
Just this week scientists announced that the Antarctic Ice Shelf, that mass of cold near the bottom of the planet, has begun melting and will never, ever stop. Apparently this is what all scientists not funded by energy companies have been warning us about for decades. This is the first time their warning is not just a possibility, or the plot to a summer disaster movie; people, this is really happening. The ice sheet will melt over (max) in the next two hundred years and will add another 10 ft to global sea levels (so long Maldives, nice to know ya New York, sucks to be you Tuvalu).
It may seem like a fluffy, non-issue thing to write about but that’s mainly because it’s far easier not to think about it here (like child workers…boo!). Running my own house now, I notice more than ever what I throw away and how much of it can be reused (could make a boat with my Nestle bottles alone). But on the whole it seems to me that, because this is Pakistan, being environmentally conscious is a luxury that privileged folks don’t concern themselves with.
[quote]What if we won our big battle against the terrorists only to be wiped out by a great gust of wind?[/quote]
People like the environmentalist Rafay Alam disagree, and thank god for that. He has been trying to get people to ride bikes in Lahore (I’ve almost run into his touring group twice with my gas-guzzling car on Jail Road, which would have been v embarrassing for obvious reasons) in an effort to clean up the city. He was also responsible for saving a bunch of the trees on the canal that would otherwise have been destroyed while the Sharifs were making those awful wasteful walkways. We need more like him.
Still, the walkways are better than the bus lanes. Though popular with “the masses”, the bridges are rushed hatchet jobs over heritage sites done with little or no attention to either the local architecture or their green impact. Islamabad is about to get its own too. This isn’t a burger concern. Karachi and Peshawar are among the world’s most polluted cities (how did Peshawar make it? Do they have industries of just guns now?) and all the others are upwind in India. The neighborhood doesn’t look like it’ll change in a hurry.
All I’m saying is: how much would it suck if we won our big battle against the terrorists only to be wiped out by a great gust of wind?
Please, use a cloth bag.
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