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Yeah, hell is here-- and it's man-made!

 


The local arm of a global environment watch group cites the top three corporations it has tabbed as culprits in the mounting plastic garbage woes that bedevil the Philippines and the world at large. Yeah, statistics show the Philippines hogs the third spot in the world's worst nations in mindless scattering of plastic waste-- plastic that takes over 100 years to biodegrade, but they don't rot at all.
 
Citations were awarded to (1) manufacturer of cornmeal-based snacks and non-carbonated drinks; (2,3) manufacturers of personal hygiene and beauty care products retailed cheap to consumers in plastic sachets.
 
Watchdog insists that these outfits ought to retrieve-- nationwide, if you please-- those empty plastic packaging and sachets that end-users and consumers have strewn about the nation's every inch of landscape. If natural historian Dr. Loren Eiseley could sneak a word edgewise, he'd likely just repeat himself: "Man is an expression of his landscape."
 
And it is likely that a garbage-choked landscape would have a quaint ilk of men that reeks of and looks trash-like mounds than paragons of humanity.
 
Such Herculean undertaking can eat up an outfit's capital expenditure, and it hasn't occurred to these firms to ply out a start-up, buy back the plastic dirt-cheap, recycle the tons of retrieved plastic as paving material, and use such to pave roads with. 
 
So far, those outfits have other ideas in mind for so-called corporate social responsibility, but we can never tell-- and it ought to be expedient to environment watchdogs to bark some more, harangue corporations with rock-solid feasibility studies, and maybe, help out in providing the technology for the undertaking.
 
The produce could be sold to real estate developers, or-- with the usual sop money and bribes-- to national and local governments.
 
So, it's likely you have seen those waterways in Thailand, strictly a Buddhist nation whose ethos includes a reverence for the environment, which isn't exactly a precept of Christianity, eh? The cafe-au-lait waters in Thai waterways are somehow clean, teem with riverine life and you wonder why those Thais can keep them clean, as most well-stacked ladies scour clean what's between their Thais...
 
Quite futile for me to bellyache about the ugly sights that assault my 38-24-38 vision whenever I cross one of the streams that gird our subdivision here in Bulacan. There will be the usual passel of bathers and women washing clothes that I will by-pass; they'll leave wrappers of detergent bars, shampoo sachets, and plastic wrappers of snacks they brought to the river. Ay, the late maestro Fernando C. Amorsolo ought to have rendered such scenes in oil, if only to leave a memento of torment to this trashy generation.
 
Indeed, the hell described in the Scriptures is Gehenna, merely a dumpsite, a growing mountain of refuse and garbage-- and Gehenna translates to "hell". 
 
Yeah, hell is here in the Philippines, and Filipino Christians have ditched the adage, "cleanliness is next to godliness."

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