Did I mention that its arid and windy? Yes, well its VERY dry and VERY windy...
The trees disappeared within 100Km or so, and then the rest of the plants were gone within another 100Km... Its just rocks and earth and sand dunes blowing in the wind...
What riding through this arid country in northern Peru brought to my imagination is - "What would the moon look like if people had been living there for about twenty years or so? - Probably like this!"
... And its not a good thing!
Sadly, people are notoriously lazy. And I dont think that living on the moon would change it, and when it comes to dealing with things that we no longer need, we just dump them anywhere...
And thats what it looks like here... Its a lunar landscape with a "human touch" !
Which is to say, there is refuse of every imaginable sort strewn all over the place here... everywhere!
Actually its worse here than it would be on the moon because the wind takes things from where they are dropped and spreads them everywhere. On the moon they would just stay put. There are car/truck tires, rubble from demolished buildings, dead horses,bags of garbage, glass bottles, and of course many thousands of plastic bags and bottles etc. And thats just the visible waste... You know that the exact same thing happens with all the noxious chemical wastes like used engine oil and paint and industrial chemicals too, and they do far more damage to the environment. And it doesnt even need waste to damage a delicate environment... There are random car and truck tracks that head off the road, do a few random turns, possibly a circle and then make there way back to the road... In this arid country, its all highly visible, and it all lasts for many many many years... Nature works on a very slow schedule when there are no "biological" workers to speed it up. And its all very ugly to my eye.
But, its not a problem specific to Peru. On the contrary, I see it everywhere there are people... The more people and the poorer the people, the bigger the problem.
It all comes down to people thinking we are separate from nature and not respecting it... Cos its more convenient not to bother... Sad but predictable.
But, then, in the middle of nowhere, there are large areas of cultivated land with crops of sugar cane, and corn, and rice paddies!!!
Its people doing there thing again, and its not specific to Peru again. Ive seen this sort of thing from Canada and the USA all the way South to here. People are using irrigation to turn arid land into productive farm land.
And that should be a good thing right?... But Im not convinced it is.
This sort of intensive, industrialised agriculture uses lots of water, energy, synthetic fertiliser, pesticides and herbicides. Its very hard on the environment and it seems to me that most of the time this is being done, its for low grade, bulk food stuffs. And it seems to me that people are using a great deal of energy to pump water from underground aquifers to produce this "low value" food... and in the US Im sure that in some places, the corn being grown is being subsidised by government funding, and being used for biofuel production... And again, Im sure that in some cases, that underground water supply is a "one time" use possibility... its not being replenished by nature...
This seems to me to be all grossly wasteful of energy and fresh water and government funding... Not Sustainable!
In short, I think its a very bad practice and that it wont be too long before we get to see consequences. I think future generations will likely look back at these practices and... well, "Not think well of us"!
But again... Im not really qualified in this field, so hopefully Im wrong :)))
