rannofo

The river Rannofo is in the south of India. Four tributaries pay their nasty tribute to this once mighty giver of life in a great churning mass of chemical processes kicked off by various reactive particles at the more aggressive end of the Periodic Table of Elements. The levels of pollution in the tributaries are not unusual by Indian, Asian or even global standards of water pollution. One of them, the Supar, is a muddy cesspool with the olfactory properties of one of those Yellowstone mud-holes, the ones that smell like a million stink bombs had been thrown into a vast vat of vapors-inducing vapidity by especially ugly redheaded stepchildren. The second one used to be called Viriditas, the Greening Power. Today nobody remembers why it was called Viriditas. It greens no more, and nobody remembers when people started calling it something else. The new name cannot be mentioned in polite company or in front of your mother. The third one is not really a river anymore. It is not a tributary in the natural sense, where water happily springs forth from a meadow in the high Alps, or seeps out of the ground in a swampy sweet smelling marsh with dragonflies buzzing and little birds flying lazy loops in the air. It used to be all that. But now its headwaters are the spouts of a mighty coal burning power station, that produces four Gigawatt of electricity. The financing of which was approved by the World Bank on Monday April 7th, also known as the day that humanity signed its own death warrant. The fourth tributary is on fire more days than not.

Originally, I set out to write this story as a metaphor of hope in the tenacity of humanity and our amazing ability to survive horrible situations. The four tributaries would miraculously clean each other up in this great churning mass of chemical reaction. I wanted to brush the cobwebs of my old mental periodic table, and come up with a process where this becomes reality. But now that I set all the ugly veritas down on paper, I don’t want to anymore. Because if I do, somewhere some idiot will take it as a metaphor, not of destruction and willfulness, but of some magical way that we will by pure chance happen upon, enabling us to pollute the living daylights out of our home planet and happily survive in a clean world anyway. Well, it won’t so I don’t.

Your little future Gandhi of the green movement will not bath in the soothing waters of the Rannofo (orig. ran-more-four => Ranmofo => mama would wash my mouth with soap, so => ran-no-four => Rannofo), and will not discover nature’s wonderful self-cleansing ways, and will not apply his newly found idea of green resistance the world over, and will not save humanity from itself.

Instead he will die of a large amount of chemically induced ailments at a very young age. His parents knowing the reasons for his death, but nevertheless powerless to stop it, will not be able to find recourse from the polluters. The polluters are the whole entire world, and how do you sue something like that? The financiers at the World Bank, the planners of factories, the consumers of products, the drivers of cars and the users of cloth driers. It is one giant tragedy of the commons, and that description has never more hit the last nail in our coffin right on the bloody head.