Introduction by Croakey: This year’s World Environment Day, on 5 June, brought calls for collective action to end plastic pollution, which United Nations chief António Guterres said “is choking our planet – harming ecosystems, wellbeing, and the climate”.
In August, countries will come together in Geneva, Switzerland, to hammer out a new global treaty to end plastic pollution. On Monday, 9 June, the UN Ocean Conference opens in Nice, France, following World Ocean Day on 8 June.
According to a report in the Environment Journal, titled ‘Conversation we need to have on World Environment Day’, we have not done nearly enough to clean up our coastal areas and deep sea waters.
“Plastic pollution increased by 10 percent last year alone, and even as we upend industries and economies in the name of net zero, plastics could be responsible for around 19 percent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions by 2040 as manufacturing continues to grow,” it says.
In Australia, many communities are experiencing and witnessing the ill health of oceans and waterways, such as algal blooms killing marine life in South Australia, and the industrial use of antibiotics amid mass fish deaths in salmon farms along the coastlines of lutruwita/Tasmania.
On a more hopeful note, Indigenous rangers are contributing to research surveying estuaries in New South Wales, producing a large publicly available biodiversity dataset.
“Rangers detected platypus in the lower reaches of Bega River, in places where they were thought to have disappeared. Totemic species such as dolphins were widespread across the state, including urban estuaries such as Botany Bay in Sydney, while mullet and bream were found shifting between the mouth and further upriver,” researchers reported in The Conversation this week.
Also marking World Environment Day, the United Nations published a list of 10 ways to reduce your environmental impact, though no doubt some Croakey readers might like to also see some more structural recommendations.
Meanwhile, Dr Simon Judkins, a prominent emergency medicine physician and advocate for climate action, has cast a clinical eye over the state of Mother Earth, to provide the cautionary tale below.
Simon Judkins writes:
Mother Earth is sick. Very sick. Intensive care level sick. The clinicians, the scientists and other carers are looking at the monitors, the charts, the results of the tests they have run.
These are all indicating one thing: their patient is dying and something drastic needs to change to reverse that outcome.
Covered in life-sucking parasites and lethal viruses that are extracting her life energy and releasing toxins into the body, the Earth is close to a tipping point, where there will be no cure.
Her temperature is skyrocketing. Multiple systems are failing. The gases are all wrong and changing the ventilator settings just isn’t working.
Her CO2 levels are rising. Her lungs , the forests and oceans that ventilate and oxygenate, have been damaged through years of abuse, with pollutants taking their toll and causing irreversible damage.
Her heart, the pump that keeps her alive, is weakening; it is fibrillating and failing.
Like our overheated oceans, where currents pump energy around the globe to affect temperatures and seasons, rainfalls and drought, her heart has weakened, slowed and is about to stop, with devastating circumstances.
The arteries and veins are blocked and blood flow, which nourishes the limbs and vital organs is almost at a halt… Rivers of oxygen and nutrients, which vitalise soils, crops and our ocean, are dried up and blocked by waste and plastics. They deliver toxins across landscapes and oceans instead of fertile nutrients and life-giving fresh water.
The gut is not functioning, not capable of absorbing any nutrients to restore good health. The farmlands of countries across Mother Earth are now dry, have no nutrients in their soils, and are abused by years of overuse. Food supplies are impacted.
Leeches and parasites
Mother Earth is capable of fighting back, but the leeches and parasites that infect her are determined to ensure that they survive by sucking her strength and nutrients until there is nothing left. She is unable to recover while the viruses keep attacking.
All who rely on her are aware that their patient, their loved one, the entity that has sustained them over their lives, is close to death.
Desperately, the Earth’s healers and carers try all means possible to restore health. All agree that prevention would have been better. If the viruses and parasites that infected Earth had been dealt with years ago, when we all knew the damage they were causing, we wouldn’t be in this desperate situation.
If the smoking had stopped, the atmosphere had been cleansed, if the arteries had been unclogged and the lungs given a chance to repair, if the heart had been protected, we may not be here; but we are.
The Earth is still beautiful, still harbouring life, and will hang on for as long as she can. But the organisms that infect her that don’t care about their host’s survival, not realising that Earth’s demise will be their own.
As the scientists and clinicians do what they can to combat the diseases that ravage their patient, shadowy figures are lurking in the background.
“We aren’t sucking the life away,” they say, “we are just making our lives better by taking all that valuable earth energy. But I tell you what, trust us, and we will invent a cure…we have some ideas. We just need more of your money to put in the fix.”
The Earth’s family, desperate and ill-informed, hand over more. The fossil fuel executive smiles….”Suckers…”
“Sorry…did you call us suckers?”
“No….I’ll get more suckers…. To suck the bad toxins out and bury them deep down inside so they can’t cause harm again.”
And he takes the money, never to be seen again.
There are more crisis meetings, more calls for action, but inaction prevails. The infecting organisms continue to cause damage, the viruses eat away from the inside , the loved ones continue to pay the bills, the patient continues to deteriorate…
It all seems hopeless…
A stranger with an orange hue sticks his head through the curtains.
“I can fix all of this ! I promise you, if you employ me, I’ll have this done on day one. I have a miracle cure that only I know the secret. Trust me. I know more about these organisms, these toxins and viruses than anyone else.”
The specialists roll their eyes, and say no, it won’t work. But the family, desperate to see things improve, desperate for their Earth to recover and their lives to get better hand over their money, trust and power to the over-confident, orange salesman.
“Here it is… Ivermectin !!” he cries. “ Inject it, drink it, bath in it…it cures all ills. Trust me. I have shares in the company.”
The Earth, still aware, sighs. She knows that she is sick, but she also knows that she will recover.
Eventually, all the viruses and infecting organisms, which are taking her energy, trying to take her life for their own survival, will die before she does. She has seen this before.
The rise and fall, the changes, the adaptions. She will recover, and, hopefully, foster life again; hopefully life that sustains her while being sustained.
But sadly, many of those people who love her for what she is, for her beauty, her giving, her life and her generosity, will also perish. Some may survive and hopefully learn.
The cycle of life will continue, but what it looks like we don’t yet know…
Author details
Dr Simon Judkins, an emergency physician, is a member of Croakey Health Media and was recently elected president of the Victorian branch of the Australian Medical Association.
See Croakey’s archive of articles on the environmental determinants of health
