who pays?
Tonight I was wandering around the local park and ruminating on the rubbish and weeds that seem to flourish there. My thoughts might be summarised by those that know me as “typically cynical” but I am not completely without some hope for the future of the human race. The despoiling of our natural environment is however something I find deeply disturbing. Mostly it seems to illustrate just how disconnected people can be, a bottle thrown out of a passing car is pretty much meaningless in most peoples minds. No thought about what happens after the fact. Gone. Away.
So I wonder, in a totally useless and utterly unrealistic way, just how much would it cost to clean up the world? Say, for the sake of this pointless exercise, you are the Eco Cop for this tiny section of the galaxy and you do your rounds only to discover just how much of a mess the human race has made of paradise earth. Oh dear! Now genocide is not in the equation, but humans have some concept of user pays so the simplest question is how much does the human race have to pay. Let’s face it, the pursuit of money has pretty much ruled for a long time and much of the rape and pillage of the earth has been done in its name, so its only fair to say that some or a lot of that money should be taken away to pay for the cleanup. But how much?
Now Eco Cop isn’t a bad cop, just fair and she reckons that a wholesale total cleanup is pretty much out of the question. But let’s settle on some half decent objectives, simple ones that simple people shouldn’t have too much difficulty with. Take the oceans for a start, in particular the fish. How much to restock the oceans of the world with the something like the fishstocks that were around 50 years ago? A rough answers in US dollars will do. That shouldn’t be too difficult for such an intelligent species should it?
What about trees? They’re easier, they just grow in the ground. How much to restore half of the forested land to what it was say 100 years ago? If that seems like too many dollars, try pounds sterling, they seem to be worth more these days. Now those couple of little things should keep us busy for a while, but just in case, maybe we should think about the rivers and freshwater lakes of the world. Just a modest target, say a third of the rivers returned to their natural state with their appropriate water quality.
But who is to pay? All of us? Just the rich perhaps, after all screwing the world has usually been done cost free for a long time. Well whoever owns up to the tab better do so soon because pretty soon the stink around here is going to get up everyone’s nose.