The Plastic Skin

I travel a fair bit during the week. This place and space I travel along and through is one I have begun to know a fair bit. It is a highway and a key route between rural towns and onto the larger ones.

However, there are some troubling thoughts I digest at times along the journey to and fro. The landscape or road is not what it once was.

I witness, like anyone who casts their gaze from accelerating on a bitumen strip at 110km/h, a debris that is as varied in form as the human eye is in colour and tone. The debris is mostly a collection of widely spread plastic.

Pollution is not a new issue, and perhaps this is why it is easily negated sometimes. Even more obesely ironic is the statements on signs between towns “Keep our town beautiful” and “Littering is Illegal,” right near a wasteland of plastic on the ground, below this erected steel pole that is now reflective of a brazen self-deception that could be above anyone’s head .  What is worse is that shires and councils capitalize on this knowingness  of the plastic wasteland, and call in those who have done “bad” to do literally the dirty work to clean up. This comes in the form of CSOs, or Community Service Orders that are given by a court.

CSOs are the real guilt trip, and condition the offender into even more of a real criminal through the law system by stating that for alternative punishment you are required to do what we cannot, but always have the option to do so. We, in fact, don’t give a damn. I just think this is a terrible way of trying to teach someone anything.

Is it acceptable to pronounce “It’s not my actions that have created this”, or, for example, “I do place my garbage in the bin”. Are the people in their cars responsible for the litter? The people who consume or deliberately leave waste on the road? The ones who are not aware something has fallen? Is it all of us? Some of us? The consumers? These are questions to ask, but ultimately they are only in the realm of debate and, unfortunately (sometimes), shaming.

Ultimation comes through action.

Where it comes from and where it happens to lie down and degenerate into the bare flesh, the literal outer skin of the earth is fascinating, in a disturbing way, but not the point of this post.What is the point is to do something about this, and this post is a way of asserting that yes, I can do something, even on a stretch that is a total of 100km in length.

I have had an ambition that has crystallized into a plan of action. For this highway I drive along has seen enough of this junk. I mean,  on a wider scale, think of what that is all eventually doing to us- all of us-in a way, as there are many other roads that have a ‘plastic skin’.  To realise the trees out there suffer; the soil that harbours and filters water and other minerals are all changed as a result of the surface chemical it is trying to digest.

We also suffer.

And things like this are indigestible. To accept that things are alright is to deny oneself the true connection with nature and the world. The further this comparison of distancing and othering is made, the real worse off we are.

I will keep you updated on this journey as I clean along my hometown to the place which I work. I would hope at best that people who see me in my locale as they drive along the way realise that there is always time to do something and shatter that ignorance.

Peace,

 

Tom.