Plastic future

The garden of plastic tulips in the Philippines holds a dark message — that in the foreseeable future, this will be the representation of the nature that once was. The children of the future will have to look at a plastic tree and a plastic flower and try to imagine what the real tree and real flower must have been like before being made extinct (“Philippine city turns plastic trash into tulips for tourist attraction,” Sept.25, Gulf Today).

We imagine dinosaurs through the fossils and they are re-created from the perceived structure of the skeletal remains found buried in the earth. The recreation can of course never match the real thing. The plastic tulip garden is as much a recreation of the future which depicts what once was. A time will come when a generation of people will not know what a tree was.

So instead of celebrating a plastic tulip garden we should cry because of it. Is this the kind of future we are presenting to the next generation? Do they even want such a bad inheritance?

Abilasha D
By email