Burning Plastic. Third World Poverty, The Global Climate Change Movement's Forgotten Child

                                     As night falls, people are burning their piles of trash, much of which contain plastic and Styrofoam. This is a poor country, one of many, in which the official government position is to not burn trash because of global climate change, and yet the infrastructure does not exist to pick up trash except for in the affluent areas where life is orderly. For the vast majority of people, most of whom live in poverty, there is no such thing as garbage pickup. Trash is everywhere, as people eat the cheap, low quality foods served up by big multinational food corporations, wrapped in plastic, where the only option is to throw the plastic to the ground. The people living in their shacks collect the plastic from the ground when enough of it is present to burn in an open fire. The fires, they say, have a benefit in warding off mosquitoes. And even after the fires, trash and plastic is still everywhere. When there is enough rain, much of it will end up in waters leading to the ocean, where the plastic will become part of the toxic stew already adversely affecting the oceans.
                                     The trash fires, which are everywhere at nightfall, release toxic clouds of foul smelling smoke. A business owner said to me, "There is no garbage pickup like in the states. We are not supposed to burn garbage and plastic because of global warming, but there is no alternative."
                                      People are unwittingly poisoning themselves from these toxic fires. And when the day comes when they will need medical care, they will become part of the millions upon millions of people that will receive no care from the already overwhelmed and inadequate health care services provided by most countries.
                                       In the orderly and affluent world, where climate change is of great concern, the whole environmental movement is now big business fully integrated into their sanitized, orderly view of the world.
                                    Meanwhile, the toxic fires continue, far from the eyes of the world's movers and shakers, where feeling good and business still trumps facing and changing terrible realities. The impact of third world poverty on the environment and its enormous cost in human suffering continues. Overpopulation and the failure to provide safe family planning in the face of religious and political resistance continues.The world continues to burn, continues to be contaminated, as humans as a species destroy their habitat, and people unwittingly poison themselves.