Forget about the nonsense talk about living in a throw-away culture. Here we are in the rainy season of 2016 and the cry mirrors the shame of the past ten years. There is the annual flooding in the city. When the water subsides garbage of all description covers the streets everywhere.
Who dropped the fast food boxes and plastic water bottles? If it was not you and it was not me, who was it? Why do we need lessons in disaster preparedness when we are the actual disaster? Environmental management is not only about noise levels. What about if we are already too deaf and too foolish to grasp the importance of proper garbage disposal? How come we are not losing lives to cholera?
Outside the city the big moan is about the old appliances, car tyres, batteries and rusty discarded industrial and hardware items clogging the rivers. Then there is the rampant indiscriminate illegal changing of water courses as people build without permission. Then, for some people, we surprisingly have massive flooding with water rising several feet.
Thousands of dollars worth of household items and fruit trees are destroyed and there may even be loss of life. Then along comes the ODPM, like the rainy season Santa Claus, bearing gifts of replacement mattresses and urgently-needed food items.
Year after year we have consultations about what should be done for the next rainy season. It is not as if we do not know what to do. We keep waiting for people to clean up after us and the cleaning companies appear unable to cope with the volume of collective ignorance facing them.
There is poor environmental management in both government and the private sector. But we also cannot escape the fact that far too many people are just inexcusably careless. Not uninformed, just nasty.
If the mosquitoes do not kill me off first, I will resubmit this same letter to the editors for 2017, 2018 and 2019.
Lynette Joseph