Plastic can help save the environment
Bated breath and on tenterhooks probably aren’t the best words to describe how we waited to hear that a whale and her calf had been rescued from the Northland beach where they were stranded last weekend. But the sad outcome was no surprise.
Although whales have been stranding themselves on beaches since not long after beaches began, we are still pretty hopeless when it comes to getting them back into the water.
Whale-saving specialists Project Jonah have been around since 1974. Greenpeace and others are highly focused on the need to protect whales.
New Zealand, thanks to our location, has a higher level of whale strandings than most countries and might have been expected to have nailed whale rescuing by now. This, sadly, is not the case.
The Marine Mammal Medic Handbook isn’t much help. Its advice comes down to “wait for the tide to come in and float them out with a bit of a push”.
As with whale rescues, most of our strategies for saving the environment in general could best be summed up by adapting American writer Charles Dudley Warner’s drollery that “Everyone talks about the weather but no one does anything about it” — or, in the case of the environment, nobody does anything about it that will prove useful in the long term.
Many of our faddish, well-meaning and allegedly environmentally friendly behaviours are anything but. They help our consciences rather than our planet. The carefully controlled growth of genetically modified foods, for instance, could do a lot more than current practices to feed more people, more cheaply, than will be possible, thanks to blinkered ideological resistance to taking advantage of that tried and tested science.
The feel-good revolution in plastic-bag use has to be the single biggest change to shopping practices since the advent of online. But plastic bans may be misguided, according to an English researcher.
Rhoda Trimingham is a blue-ribbon green. She has an electric car, solar panels and a smart fridge. She is also a member
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