Brilliant Bonnin Bashes Britain’s Unsustainable Consumption

Liz Bonnin is a French-Irish scientist and natural history presenter. She is a national treasure as far as I am concerned because she spells it out the way it should be spelt out and I’m referring to the reason why, “The 3 biggest environmental threats are plastic pollution, climate change and biodiversity loss”. Yes, the reason is human consumerism/consumption. All three conservation and environmental issues mentioned by Bonnin are connected to “our insatiable appetite for consumption”.

Plastic pollution of the oceans
Plastic pollution of the oceans. Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

Liz Bonnin has presented the BBC1 documentary Drowning in Plastic. In a courageous move, whenever she buys stuff at her local retailers she leaves the plastic wrapping at the supermarket. I presume that she removes the product that she has bought from its plastic wrapping at the till and hands it over to the customer service person. As I said, I think that’s pretty courageous because is going to cause a little bit of a rumpus, which, I presume is what she wants.

She wants retailers to become inundated with plastic packaging. And she says that, “Supermarkets are obliged to take plastic wrapping from customers. If retailers get inundated with all our plastic packaging, they will implement change. We have to change our habits. I will never again by water in a plastic bottle.”

Just to be clear, plastic is poisoning the planet. It’s in every square inch of the oceans getting into the marine wildlife food chain and ending up inside human bodies. So it’s damaging ocean wildlife and us in a wanton, reckless act of mad human consumption and unsustainability. Britain’s supermarkets churn out more than 59 billion pieces of plastic packaging annually according to a Greenpeace report. And the trend is that it is getting worse because of rampant human population growth.

The scourge of plastic is a major conservation issue. Habits have to change. There is no question about it and people realise it. It is dawning on the citizens of the world, belatedly. But Bonnin is unhappy because she would like to present positive television shows about the natural environment and animals but instead she said, “I’m presenting hard-hitting environmental films. I feel as if I’m looking down the barrel of a gun. We have no more time.”

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