Its been 11 days now here in Bali. Things have been unfolding with remarkable flow. . Bali is beautiful, but it is also troubled with the blights of development. And the people who live here are overwhelmingly conscious of this.
It reminds me much of Sagada back in the Northern Philippines– A small isolated town blessed with natural beauty and long guarded by a non-consumptive culture that cared deeply for its environment. However, as missionaries paved the way for tourism and capital and consumption, things began to change. The trash began to pile up and the strain on natural resources slowly ramps up. Slow enough that people didn’t get alarmed, streams and fields and gardens began to get paved over. A plastic bag tucked here, a sachet there.
Bali is 20 years ahead of Sagada. I heard about some Swiss tourists who arrived in Bali last week on a two week holiday. They walked the beaches (which are seeped in plastic particles) passed the local landfill (“Garbage mountain”) breathed the air in the streets (most motorcycle riders wear masks) and saw the ditches filled with plastic bags. They left after three days.
I am superbly conscious of not wanting to overly missionize Ecobricks. That said, the folks who I have been meeting have all been overwhelming keen on the Ecobrick concept. They all come it from different angles– an green architect wants to start building with them right way, an association of hundreds of spas that wants to set the example and go zero waste, the founder of one of Bali’s few recycling facilities who is overwhelmed by the plastics that can’t be recycled, to taxi drivers and business owners who see the writing on the wall. Its humbling how fast the connections are thus unfolding.
In Sagada we began Ecobricking because we just had to do something. And it took off. I learned a lot as pilot schools succeeded and… failed. Now to apply what we learned there in Sagada as we get things going in Bali.
Its not so much about the trash already out there– I walked through a store the other day and all I could see was packaging– its about the colossal torrent of plastic about to flow into the ecosystems if we don’t do something now…
And now, there’s something to do about it.
