On my visit to Qatar, one of the things that struck me is the fact that the oil floating in the Persian Gulf isn’t just in the fluid form carried by the huge tankers that ply the waters off this small but affluent Middle Eastern Kingdom. Petroleum can also be found in its waters and on its beaches as the key component of countless plastic bottles. Traveling more than 129 kilometers from Doha over nothing but sand dunes and water, plastic bottles seemed to be everywhere. And in tidal flats, you see plastic bags as well. Along the shore, it seems there is a bottle every two or three yards as far as one can walk and the eye can see.
Based on what I’ve witnessed on this trip, I am starting to believe that this plastic pollution crisis is even bigger than I thought it was three years ago when I first got involved in the recycling business. The challenge now is how to address the issue in a region like the Middle East, where major political change is now in the process of taking place.
One approach could actually help to resolve two problems – not only that of eliminating this growing pollution threat, but providing employment in countries where lack of opportunity has served as a major impetus for extremism. The “Arab Spring” has been led by multitudes of college-educated young people who need work and want to be part of the solution going forward. Might the job of cleaning up the plastic be turned over to them, as well as that of finding ways to reduce energy use and educating the rest of the region’s inhabitants in the conservation of its water and natural resources?
Just as in the recent uprisings, social media could play an important role in promoting practices such as recycling and various other forms of environmental activism. But essential to any such effort, I believe, would be giving the progressive youth movement in this region a new sense of empowerment that it not only can bring about revolutions against dictators, but a ‘green revolution’ as well – one that I believe would help create positive con
nections to sustainability efforts around the world and in turn, a sense of common cause between people of different cultures.
Perhaps what’s needed is an “Earth Corps,” in which student environmental advisors from other countries could be brought in to offer training in sustainability initiatives aimed at lowering energy usage, increasing recycling, and encouraging organic agriculture (which in many places has been losing out to the use of toxic chemicals and genetically modified seeds). Might the academic community be the right place to get such a campaign under way? Would enlightened corporations be willing to act as sponsors?
But perhaps most important, could that other form of oil – plastic – actually serve as the catalyst that provides a more secure economic future and a new sense of mission for the youth of the Arab Spring?
Maybe I am just engaging in wishful thinking, but having seen the Persian Gulf beginning to choke on plastic bottles and having heard the frustrations and aspirations of an emerging new generation in the Middle East makes me think such a nexus is a real possibility. I like to believe that these legions of impassioned, ambitious and newly liberated young people could be engaged to help pull our oceans back from the brink while bringing a greater sense of harmony to the planet as a whole.
