What does the climate changed world look like? The melting of the polar ice caps seems distant, the rise of the sea level seems abstract, the failure of crops a world away. But on any given day, India provides an impression of what life looks like when climate change comes home to roost. To an Australian, it intimates a certain post-apocalyptic reality even in a place as beautiful as Kochi. To be sure, this future is more easily seen in the big cities – Mumbai, New Delhi, Calcutta – where acres of slums with dirty water and open sewers sit next to glittering office towers of extraordinary wealth, where luxury cars pass by malnourished livestock feeding on trash, where people cook on small coal fires as others glide by wearing the latest sneakers. Here, the lives of the poor inconvenience the dreams of the rich. This inequality is what we project onto a future that is wrought by global warming. But we do not have to wait for it. A difficult life is already here for many. It is there too in rural areas, where farmer suicides are rampant and people get by on the smell of an oily rag, generations of the indentured enslaved to the ways of a life that is at the mercy of the seasons and remembers debit, credit and one’s place in the world in an altogether unmeritocratic way. 

One thing that is common though, one thing I have seen in Matheran, Bangalore, Trivandrum is rubbish, or more specifically, plastic. There is plastic everywhere despite shops mainly using paper bags and despite the fact that people make small roadside fires to burn their rubbish in the thick, smoggy twilight at the end of each day. Perhaps this is the norm – plastic is all over the world and most places have lax rules when it comes to rubbish collection, but here one notices it more than at home. It is an unavoidable sign that we continue to trash the planet without a real care in the world for how we live on it. 

Kochi is no different. On the beach, styrofoam, bags, cans, all manner of refuse is tangled up with seaweed and strewn as far as the eye can see. On some days, you see more rubbish than you do sand. It is as if people do not actually see how dirty it is, do not have anything to compare it to, so simply get on with living amidst what is almost a tip. What I struggle with is how this can be easily fixed, especially when there is such surplus labour here, where people mill around aimlessly or simply chuck out a bottle when they have finished drinking. Like everywhere, this is where the Pacific Trash Vortex begins and though we are in the Indian Ocean, water is connected wherever you go. There are five trillion pieces of plastic in the ocean already and many birds and fish are riddled with what scientists call ‘new sand’. When they are cut open it seems as though their diet is actually plastic rather than food. 

But there are extraordinary individuals and hope in the midst of this. Clean Fort Kochi Foundation is one group that gets together every Saturday to pick up rubbish and the local government here attempts to implement better practice when it comes to caring for the environment. Plastic bags are hard to come by and many shops have substituted them with a waxy paper instead. This Saturday the sun beat down and the volunteers bent over to pick up the discarded pieces of a lifestyle that sends us hurtling toward a world we cannot even have nightmares about. There are other groups like this around the world Clean C in Cape Town, Bali Beach Clean Up in Indonesia, Tangaroa Blue in Western Australia. What they share is not only a belief in a cleaner future, but the material action at the coal face that contributes to what matters in the here and now. It might be a bandaid on an axe wound but that is what we have, waiting for help to arrive from on high. 

I talk with my landlord Dilip about it while a small fire burns in the yard, giving off that sickly smell of plastic and green waste. He says 

Now everything is being thrown away, everything is being plastic. Before we used to eat on banana leaves, you may have seen, some places are like this still. But now everyone is using plastic, but it used to be more beautiful than it is now, if you can believe. I myself am using plastics, but I don’t like it so much. 

In Kochi, the middle class is growing and tourists come from the world over, clutching bottles of over priced water in the heat of the day. Water as that lifeblood, as that wellspring, resource, need and right, is charged here. The politics of it are fraught be that the flooding in neighbouring districts, the dirty faucets in impoverished areas or the rubbish that accumulates when visitors simply drink because of health and safety fears. The government of Kerala deserves recognition for the work it undertakes in infrastructure, health and education, all of which make it the best state in India when it comes to these indicators. But a green consciousness that would have us ban plastics, that would help us make Clean Fort Kochi unnecessary is what has to take place. This can be done without ruling out the development people long for, but it means everyone must take responsibility. This might mean refill stations for clean drinking water, this might mean recycling plastic, this might mean volunteering. Whatever shape or form the individual contribution take it needs to be part of a system that tells us a story that we are working together to make the world a cleaner, and safer, place to dwell.