Desire , the mother of all environmental problems ?

About a year back, Greenpeace was campaigning against Nestle with a short video "Have a Break " (You tube link :http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BCA8dQfGi0). The campaign was to ask Nestle CEO to stop sourcing palm oil from Sina Mas in Indonesia responsible for cutting hectares of pristine rainforests and impacting the habitat of Orangutans. The video provoked my search for information on Sina Mas and impacts on rainforests , and that is when I decided to stop eating chocolates of any kind. Now I have two reasons to stay away from chocolates 1) For the palm oil and 2) For the aluminum coated plastic cover packaging which is nonrecyclable . It was an easy decision not to buy chocolates, but it was tougher to refuse these when they reach our homes as gifts ... Gifts when refused has the potential to strain relationships . Later, I started using the refusal as an opportunity to spread the word, fully aware that not even 1 out of 1000 would stop eating chocolates ! This is more difficult when compared to asking people to carry a jute bag :-) because you are directly interfering with the most difficult sense organ - the tongue ! Most often, our needs are defined by our desires - the mother of all problems ! So my journey of refusal continued with very less people understanding the impact of Sina Mas on Orangutans - afterall, who is worried about Orangutans ?!!^&

Biodiverisity, the delicate web of life that connects all the species, the symbiotic relationships that has evolved through natural history is normally ignored in our day-to-day consumerism when we deal with environmental impacts. A peep into magazines like Sanctuary Asia and other you tube links, gives me insights into a longer list of objects of my desire to be discarded from my life

1. Leather items : Though there is a claim that it is made from farmed animals just for the purpose of leather, we need to be aware that species like Sand Boa are caught and skinned for leather ; The fashionable items like winter jackets seen in large retail stores like the Wal-Marts , Macys abroad are made of skin from foxes (1 jacket = 20 foxes) ! When a predator species is killed and eliminated, the ecosystem becomes imbalanced

I stopped buying leather , and that was when the new comer in my family a co sister whom I was meeting for the first time in my life gifted me with a leather purse ... Do I refuse, and hurt her sentiments or do I accept and say thank you, never buy leather again as mark of respect to my concern for sand boas and foxes ?

2. Painting brush : I am no artist, but there were occassions in my life where I had a choice to gift a painting brush and colour box to a kid . Many of my friends who deal with destitute kids buy these to encourage and nurture the creative thinking in children. The brush is made by killing thousands of squirrels for the fur on its tail.

3. Kimberley Clark and Kleenux : This is one company that has wipped out the boreal forests in the Northern hemisphere for making tissues from virgin wood. When forests are wipped out from the face of the earth, we wipe out millions of species - known and unknown . It was not just the boreal , but the amazon too that has been wiped out for grain production, corn, biodiesel and paper . I try to take lesser and lesser prinoutouts, but I can never find myself competely devoid of using paper. Am I not contributing to species loss from the face of this earth by using paper ? I had been a spectator to this species loss working in an IT company for more than a decade ... IT firms, are not paperless offices, they are producers of waste from high quality bond paper !!!

4. Switch your lights on and you kill an animal, probably the majestic tiger : India is dependent on hydro electric power and coal for our power genration. Using this laptop by connecting to the grid, I am forced to kill a tiger's habitat... If the dam height of mullaperiyar is increased, then Periyar tiger reserve would lose some of its wildlife to water.. the impacts would be irreparable. If Sairandhri river in Silent Valley was dammed, we would have lost the lion tailed macaques endemic to the region. If gundia hydel project gets sanctioned then we would lose Gundian Indian frog which is found in a single , small area of western ghats . Why is Tata building a port in Dhamra, and why are the Olive ridleys threatened ? The port would become the easiest entry point for transporting coal from Indonesia. So can we count how many species we are already eliminating by swtiching the lights on or depending on a water source far away from us ?

5. Corn the omnipresent: I love tomato ketchup with cutlets . The ketchup and cutlet sounds vegan as long as there is no animal matter in it. Well, there is a hidden monster in the form of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), which hides behind most of the processed food. Watch Robert Lustig to know how HFCS is equivalent to alcohol - HFCS can cause liver cirrhosis and no wonder teetotallers of this age end up getting treated for liver cirrhosis (I have to known cases in my family). Where does corn come from ? During the past 40 years, close to 20 percent of the Amazon rain forest has been cut down—more than in all the previous 450 years since European colonization began. While Monsanto razes the rainforests for cultvating genetically modified corn, Minnesota based Cargill cuts Amazon for cultivating soy .. all at the cost of millions of known and unknown species... I need to now stop eating ketchup and other processed food, more for my own health than for the love for Amazon.

6. Palm Oil : Recently I watched "Greenthemovie" (http://www.greenthefilm.com/) and that was when the whole gamut of our consumerism and desires came into a full perspective. Sina Mas and palm oil are beyond Nestle and chocolates - palm oil is used in a multitude of products including cosmetics. Well, if I have to stop all of them, I would need to truly become a sadhu... I am not saying it is impossible, it is just that I need to keep a close watch on my desires and every product and material I buy !

We still have a long long way to go ... It is easy for me to avoid milk from another species, obviously for reasons that are known about adulteration in milk production , but what about the electricity we use and palm oil that we are unaware of ?

According to Garfield " Anybody can exercise, but this kind of lethargy takes real discpline " .. Well, I am working on it - my desires :-)