Times Of Swaziland: CONSIDER ENVIRONMENT

CONSIDER ENVIRONMENT
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The Editor on 26/04/2018 07:28:00


Sir,
It hurts me to the core each time I see someone carelessly throwing trash
outside the window of a moving car. It baffles me each time having to figure out
what could possibly be going on in the mind of that person at that moment for
them to be that inconsiderate of the environment and the impacts their trash
might have on it.
But as a gender activist, I now understand that my concern does not end at the
potential detrimental and non-aesthetic effects on the environment, but also at
how the degradation of the environment hurts poor women the most.
While many of the people who do not care about the environment may live in town,
women in rural areas tend to be natural resource managers as they use the
environment to gather food, water and firewood. And from a young age, many of us
assisted our mothers with this work. So this isn’t news, really. Again, this
may be news for those living in town, but as resources become scarcer with the
decline in the environment’s health, girls are attending less and less school
to be able to dedicate more time to finding water, or simply because school fees
are no longer available as crop cycles become less predictable.
The country was plagued by a drought and livestock were dying like flies,
depleting both the financial and food resources for many families as farmers
were forced to sell their cattle at very low prices. Who do you think suffered
the most there? The farmers may have suffered because they lost money, but their
daughters suffered becuase they lost the resources that sent them to school,
meaning they lost an education. The literacy rate for women is already
staggering way behind men and anything that disturbs this even further will only
widen the gap.
As if that wasn’t enough, due to traditional and patriarchal gender roles that
devalue unpaid work like childcare and water retrieval, women’s specialised
knowledge in smart and effective climate change adaptation is typically not
respected or taken into consideration in most community decision-making
processes.
An unclean environment also has very bad effects on health, and the number of
clinics and hospitals in the country, coupled with the state most of them are
in, is just not enough to care for all of us.
Climate change is not a myth, it is here and we have seen its effects already,
what more evidence could we possibly need?  I’ve made enemies stopping people
from throwing trash out of car windows, but if they were curious enough they
would take time to research on why, and if not, I hope this short piece of
writing will make everyone understand. Don’t just worry about keeping your car
clean, dig deeper!
Nomsa M