Super typhoon dumps “gifts“ on China: who will be next?
Guangdong province in China has turned into a huge dump, with a lot of plastic trash floating in standing water after the super typhoon “Mangkhut.”
On Sept. 16, the super typhoon Mangkhut made landfall in Guangdong province and caused four deaths, battering areas such as Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Macau. Following the storm, Mangkhut has finally turned back into a sweet fruit, but the typhoon left a mess in Guangdong province.
Tons of plastic rubbish encompassed the residential buildings, bursting into the first floors. Plastic rubbish at the entrance of elevators in the mall blocked people’s way. Many cars were surrounded by the amount of tiny, confetti-like pieces of broken plastic, so that the cars could not even move.
Pondering the natural disaster and its human-made plastic disaster, I began to think about how important it is to revere nature.
At the same time, I heard a voice saying, “You, the plastic rubbish is returned by the ocean, and nature returns environmental pollution which you have caused in the past!”
The fury of the ocean starkly contrasts with the indifference and carelessness with which people threw away their rubbish in the first place.
The ocean is all-embracing, taking away not only human sorrow but also human waste. However, nature only used half a day letting people wake up.
“By 2050, we’ll be making more than three times as much plastic stuff as we did in 2014,” says one study.
The typhoon Mangkhut is an early warning to mankind that although the ocean has shown us its good side with breeding kinds of marine organism and marine resources, the plastic in the ocean has not disappeared. They are coming back to humans in myriad different ways.
If the destruction continues unchecked, the ending result will be the destruction of humanity’s own homeland.
But does the earth really need our salvation? Actually, the human beings need self-redemption.
“The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sunspots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles. Hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages,” said George Carlin, an American social critic. “And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going. We are!”
The earth never needs our help, and this beautiful blue planet is not going to die anyway. Nature does not retaliate against human beings. The earth is living about 4,500,000,000 years but human is only around 200,000 years. The human beings have to save themselves.
To the earth, humans are like fleas. It could just shake and get rid of us. However, by the time the earth hits the reset button, it is only human beings who will suffer.
The super typhoon Mangkhut is a warning but making me extremely frightened. People might think it is far away from them but actually the disaster is looking at us incessantly. We should revere nature, as well as save ourselves.