Environmental Pollution on a Day to Day Basis
Today in the Environmental Management class we talked about hazardous pollutants and their effect, not only on the environment but also in society. As you can see in other posts we saw a very shocking video about indiscriminate use of very harmful pesticides in India. As I watched this, I couldn’t help thinking that this doesn’t just happen in very remote rural areas of developing countries. And here is a personal tale of awareness success:
My mother in law is from a small town in Avila and she has her piece of land where every year she grows her vegetables. Her parents used to make a living out of their land, but she doesn’t. She does it because she likes it, she likes her field, she loves her flowers and she really enjoys consuming her own produce. The first time I saw her spray her tomatoes with “medicina” (pesticides), I was shocked! I couldn’t believe how she could put this on the very tomatoes we were all going to eat a few months later, and of course she was spraying without a mask or anything. But this is what she had learned from her parents and the idea of losing the crop after all that work was enough to forget about the skull on the bottle (and she’s not an illiterate farmer in India).
I told her about an ecological solution (purín) to the pest affecting her crop “el pulgón” that a friend had told me about and last year we tried it. What you do is you take a plant that grows on the riverside and causes hives if you touch it: nettle “ortiga”, you crush it into a pulp and put water. Then you leave it some days for it to ferment (it smells really bad). Then you drain it and spray the liquid on the plants. The insect is not killed, but the substance is so disgusting that it doesn’t go near the sprayed plants. The result was great. This year she had a great harvest, the liquid doesn’t affect the vegetables and I have convinced my mother in law not to use pesticides again.
There are a lot of alternative solutions that can be implemented depending on the specific case. It might take more effort, you might have to do some research, but there are things that can be done and it’s in every one of us to contribute to a less hazardous environment on our day to day lives.
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20 Jan 2011
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Daniela Noriega Casas
IMSD /
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