I Ignored The Urgency Of Addressing Climate Change. Then My House Caught On Fire.
Having family living on three different continents, I still fly quite often. As an example of utter irony, my carry-on bag, which travelled with me for 6,736 miles to New York and back, has a sticker that reads “Combat Climate Change.” Even at the local farmers’ market in New York’s Upper West Side, where I went for shopping on a sunny Friday morning, I was upset to observe supposed environmentally conscious farmers placing two tomatoes in a massive plastic bag.
Similarly, at my local supermarket in a posh district of Tokyo, a single apple is packaged up in plastic without much concern.
Owing to local governments’ sorting rules, which are some of the strictest in the world, Japan recycles most of its plastic waste: Council for PET Bottle Recycling puts the figure close to 85% in 2017 – one of the highest in the world. But like Takuro-kun asked me during our conversation in Tokyo: “Wouldn’t it be better if you didn’t use plastics in the first place?”
Meanwhile, in Turkey, this year’s climate-themed Istanbul Biennale is titled the “seventh continent’, which is a reference to the island of plastic floating adrift in the Pacific Ocean. The event’s main sponsor is none other than the Koç Holding – one of Turkey’s biggest conglomerates and, with the oil giant Shell, owner of the top two oil refineries in Turkey, Tüpraş and Petkim. While Koç should be applauded for their sponsorship, it should be noted that they also own Tofaş, Turkey’s largest manufacturer of cars and trucks running on, of course, fossil fuels.
Other members of my generation, some of whom are political leaders in their countries, are also largely in denial of the urgency these kids, like Thunberg and Takuro-kun, want to emphasise. Take the Alamos gold mining controversy this past summer, where a Turkish government spokesman said that the mine was not even “technically” located in Mt. Ida, and that cyanide would not be used (Alamos’ website says otherwise.)