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> I have always been disappointed that "sacred" animals are allowed to eat garbage on the street. The "sacred" part is extraneous. Consider that at one time t
by danans 5y ago
> I have always been disappointed that "sacred" animals are allowed to eat garbage on the street.
The "sacred" part is extraneous.
Consider that at one time the trash used to be all organic (mostly vegetable) waste and the cows were essentially transforming that into usable calories as milk. This was at a time when raw ingredients like grain were milled close to home, often in the home, so lots of cow-edible organic waste was produced. In that context, it's a great way of squeezing every usable calorie/nutrient out of what would otherwise be wasted.
With time, agrarian India became industrial and then consumerist India, and with that came the advent of large scale disposable plastics and the culture of throwing them away, but without the waste management infrastructure of developed societies. This resulted in what you saw.
What was once an ancient efficiency hack turned into an unpriced externality, with both aesthetic and environmental consequences.
Of course there is also a lack of civic sense in allowing the situation to persist, but that is a present in any society (not just India) with high corruption and low institutional trust.
- mikepurvis 5y agoIt's just nuts to me all the examples there are of this basic pattern, where a traditional organic waste pipeline that had worked great for millennia was abruptly ruined in the 20th century by the introduction of plastic trash. All the major rivers are essentially this— Yangtze, Nile, Ganges, plus a number of indigenous cultures which have disposal practices that very much do not work for long-lived plastic items (tossed off a cliff, etc).
- danans 5y agoArguably the same pattern exists in our historical energy consumption. We moved from societies that mined recently sequestered biomass for energy (AKA wood burning) to a society that mined biomass sequestered eons ago for energy (coal, natural gas, petroleum) without realizing soon enough that the former of biomass was mostly atmospheric carbon neutral and the latter type was not at all carbon neutral. And now we are paying the environmental consequences and trying to develop the global civic sense to fix the issue.