by Siân Taylor

In this essay I will explain my view of the situation regarding environmental issues, and in order to do so, I will initially analyse an episode of environmental issue in Italy, that sadly became famous  all over the world.

Moreover I will give my own opinion about why things go this way, and about why, no matter how much people speak about these issues, no one really does anything in order to change  them, or even if they do, no major things really get accomplished.

Starting from about four years ago, in some cities of the southern part of Italy, the waste people produced stopped being taken to the disposal facilities and started accumulating in the middle of the streets. As time went by things kept getting worse and worse, until citizens started to get poorly from the bacteria coming from the decomposing rubbish.

Eventually the garbage was gotten rid of by shipping it, after having paid large amounts of money to the local government, to some third world Country were people “won” Italy’s waste for being poor.

Now, let us examine why this episode happened in the first place. The Italian Mafia, due to a number of corrupted interests, stopped the dustbin men from collecting the rubbish.

Due to this many people suffered for years and years living in unhealthy dangerous environments.

All of this is to state that personally I think that it’s not that environmental issues are too complex to resolve, or that common people do not care about the environment, it’s that the people who have the most power to change things have got many interests not to do so.

It is all about gaining money from it. Governments use waste disposal as a profitable business; Companies create double or more the amount of waste by overly wrapped and deceptive products, we live in a consumerist society where consumers are taught to throw away their “unfashionable” items to buy a brand new model of the same thing. And why? To make the economy go round.

To make the rich people get richer and the poor people get poorer, society is destroying the world they live in.

I am certain that if this were to be a world where money did not exist, people would live in a much healthier environment both for the body and the spirit, because it is for money that marketers create the sense of dissatisfaction in consumers, so they can buy this new item which may resolve their “problem” and make them happier for a short while, and this is, as stated before, the start of a long chain of interests that brings society to destroy the environment they and their children are living in.

Until this chain will not be broken, I think that nothing will be able to change, no matter how most people want it to.