Earth Day 2008 and its impact on developing Caribbean Countries.
April 20, 2008
What are you doing to help the environment?
It seems like a far cry from the realities of daily life for developing Caribbean nations to be impacted by the symbolism of Earth Day. With the world’s economics in crisis, developing Caribbean nations are holding the short end of the stick.
Currently in Haiti there is an outcry for staple foods that led to the streets in riots. In Guyana the prices for staple products are doubling and tripling. The cost of energy has double around the globe within a single year. On 4/18/2008 a barrel of oil was trading on the open market for over 114.00 USD. Significant climate change is visually apparent in every corner of earth. The polar ice caps that are critical for the maintenance of the earth’s temperature are melting at an alarming rate. Rising ocean levels will in the generation of my children post alarming threats to costal cities. According to www.time.com , the top ten industrially polluted cities are in China, India, Peru, Russia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Zambia but this does not include the many more cities around the globe that are heavily polluted. In New City for example, on a bright summer day while crossing one of the bridges within the city limits, I could notice the thick smog that seems to wrap the city in a gray blanket. Within the city itself, the air on a typical summer day seems un-breathable helped by the exhaust fumes from hundreds of automobiles bustling by.
But for the majority of the population who lives well below the poverty line in the lower Caribbean basin countries, like Guyana, Jamaica etc survival matters the most. Cost of living has increased when compensation has remained on average the same within the last few years. Thus, the initiative to partake in greener initiatives is secondary. Earth Day does not mean much when feeding a family becomes a struggle. Controlling automobile emissions is an abstract ideal because getting from point to the next is more important than how you get there. Burning land for cultivation does not mean much to the man who depends on the land for survival.
The majority of the problem that places planet Earth in such a crisis was caused by industrialized nation’s global expansion into the far reaches of the earth. How about telling the manufacturing companies, Ore mining companies, packaging companies, Electric Power companies etc to cut down of the emissions emitted? Well, these companies have quite large sums of funds that allow them to purchase carbon credits on the open market, which in tern gives them the right to pollute additional tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere every year. Now countries with high forest cover can make money by maintaining a high forest cover but even in this case, commercial logging is wiping away parts of the Amazonian rain forest and more so the life that concentrated there.
What will happen fifty years from now to our earth and to the generation we will leave behind? The thought seems so far fetched but it is simply man’s greed that is causing the planet distress. Last year the oil companies like ExxonMobil, BP, Cheveron released record profits as compared to recent years. While the executives fill their pockets and stockholders relish in the gains, people who live below the poverty line struggle to eat.
So when someone tries to put forward initiatives in going green and saving planet earth like Al Gore http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/11/21/news/CB-GEN-Turks-and-Caicos-Gore.php and tries to impress that upon developing Caribbean nations, it is simply not going to gain momentum because there are other immediate battles to for the people who live there as exemplified in the riots in Haiti.
Earth Day should be about feeding the hungry children of the world and providing critical medicines to combat threatening diseases. In the Caribbean, I am positive food and medicines would be much welcomed than some soliloquy on Global Warming in the Turks and Caicos. The point of fact is, these greener initiates are being spear headed by people that live on a higher social/economical plateau that most of the world because they have nothing else in reference to survival to worry about. But put these very people in the very position the majority of the population lives in, I am sure their primary priorities will be a little different.
So to the people in the Caribbean who are affected by the difficulties of basic survival, I say plant a tree and don’t litter. That is about as much as I can say to you.
Click here to view the list of U.S Top Polluters.
Andrew
- Natural disasters in Myanmar, USA and China: Is the Earth trying to tell us something?
- Haiti: The high cost of food causes shut down in the capital of Port-au-Prince.
- The Surging Cost of Rice Globally: What might be the resulting implications for developing Caribbean nations.
- Guyana: The current burden of increased cost of food
- Caribbean Sex Trade
- Take action! Learn how you can reduce your carbon footprint by making simple changes around you.
- May 1st: Workers Celebrate Labor Day in Guyana
- Profile Guyana: The Immediate Value of living on Term
- Bahamas: CARICOM Secretariat comments on Sex differences in Government Participation (International Women’s Day 3/7/08)
- Global Food Crisis
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Comments
5 Responses to “Earth Day 2008 and its impact on developing Caribbean Countries.”
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Guyana has garbage disposal problems. What do we do with our garbage?
Guyana does not have the proper disposal containment and recycling programs available to reach the entire population. Given that reality the only option is to burn fro now. I know, i understand the implications and enviromental hazards but this is just reality. Teaching people to use less disposable plastics could be a start. It all comes back to wanting a better guyana and believing in the value of others and the country.
On a personal note, a year or two back i was i Denver, Colorado. Denver is a meticulously clean city. I was siting down on a street bench when out of nowhere a piwece of candy wrapper flew by…low and behold a passerby stoped bent down picked it up and tossed it into the nearby trash.
Since i came from NY, it was pretty normal to see garbage on the street and do nothing but not in Denver. Why? Because the people who live in Denver feel that they have personally invested in their city and the local government has personally invested in them. How about that!! a mutually fair deal
Can this translate to Guyana? absolutely!! But which group will be willing to start the process, the gov or the people?
So these companies purchase carbon credits so they can reduce the carbon dioxide in one area only two pollut another area? They do know it’s not leaving the atmosphere and it’s going to remain right here? With all these scientists we have over at CERN recreating the “Big Bang” in a laboratory environment and that’s how we save the world? Through carbon credits?
Tell that to the CEO’s that have to satisify investors.
What large companies have always depended on is the reliable stupidity of the the general public and this carbon trading market is just another way of keeping big polluters in business. What do executives of fortune five hundred companies care about other than their stock options and but they are the ones making the decisions. They are the ones with the big retirement porfolios and houses in the Hamptons, condos in Manhattan etc…