I am going to put in simple terms:
This "travel" disease almost all humans have is the new imperialism.
This destroys ecology, animals, economy, health and god knows what else. It's sheer stupidity.
The simple explanation (or causal reason) behind this disease was described aptly by Pascal centuries ago.
All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
Thanks Eat, Pray, & Love book and the movie, add women in upper case to that Pascal's quote.
This beautiful paradise of an Island named Mauritius has already been decimated by nothing but traveler's diet and shit.
Read this piece, weep, reflect, and eradicate this disease from your system.
The United Nations Development Program said our beaches have shrunk by as much as 20 meters in the last few decades, that the loss of tourism could cost us over $100 million per year by 2060, if nothing is done to save our coastline.
December 2022. Our November rains are expected in mid-January. Our reservoirs are 3 percent full. It’s the worst drought since the early 2000s.
There’s nothing to do but swim. We listen to the radio for jellyfish warnings: “Explosion” is the word of choice experts use to describe the creatures who’ve smothered every coastline. Manifestations of a sick ocean, they spawned due to warmer temperatures, overfishing, changing weather patterns.
Today the sky is postcard-perfect, the sea devoid of jellyfish, the beach packed with tourists.
I think of the carbon emissions of each plane that lands here. The emissions of each of our 106 hotels. Air conditioning units struggling to cool rooms in peak season. Tourists pouring themselves a bath, cleansing themselves of their 12-hour flight. Ignorant that the rest of us have to live on only four to eight hours of water flowing through our taps most days in high summer. Tourists, their sunscreen-coated bodies plunging into the lagoon, leaving a film on the water, poisoning corals. Tourists, delighting in our bathwater lagoon, look it’s so crystal-clear you can see the bottom, a dead zone framed in buoys, cleansed of most of its creatures.
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There were only four Mauritius kestrels in 1974; they are endemic to Mauritius, and were, at the time, the most endangered bird of prey in the world. Colonialism had quite a lot to do with their decline, practically from the moment the Dutch set foot here in the early 18th century: the colonists shrivelled our forests, brought rats on their boats. Three hundred or so years later — after the French and English colonial administrations had their go, pillaging the environment; after they’d driven species to extinction; after Mauritius claimed its independence and multiple economic booms and further, consequential ecological devastation — the kestrels were left with almost no homes. By 2009, however, they’d flourished to around 600 individuals, thanks to the work of the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation and other organizations. They are beautiful animals, though I’ve never seen one in the wild before. Their fluffy white breasts are spotted with brown, as if they’d been dotted over with a thick brush. We have 1 percent of our natural forests left and they live there, up in the Bambous mountains and in the Black River Gorges National Park.
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I read books written mostly by white men in supremely rich countries on how to think about climate disaster. Some concepts I understand in my body: global warming as a hyperobject, heat like honey glistening all over my skin, so viscous that showering won’t remove the stickiness.
I read books that trace the contours of my lifeline. The statistics that predict our future, that suggest the manner of our deaths, the stages and degrees at which our bodies will gradually shut down.
“Recently, researchers estimated that by 2050 as many as 150 million people in the developing world will be at risk of protein deficiency as the result of nutrient collapse,” writes David Wallace-Wells in The Uninhabitable Earth. “138 million could suffer from a deficiency of zinc, essential to healthy pregnancies; and 1.4 billion could face a dramatic decline in dietary iron — pointing to a possible epidemic of anaemia.” I’m already borderline anaemic, like many women in my country and their mothers. In the ministry of health’s Health Statistics Report 2021, 38 percent of all Mauritian women who received antenatal care in public hospitals were reported as anaemic.
“Sudden rainfall shocks — both deluges and their opposite, droughts — can devastate agricultural communities economically, but also produce what scientists call, with understatement, “nutritional deficiencies” in foetuses and infants, writes Wallace Wells.
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