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 Harvard has asked Professor Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. of the Harvard Law School and first African-American dean at the college, to step down from his position. The esteemed professor had announced his intention to defend Harvey Weinstein in January, which led to months of student protests before Harvard finally made the call to ask him to step down. Weinstein is well-known for not just producing exquisite works of cinema, but also for molesting, sexually harassing, groping and raping over 80 women. The numbers probably exceed a 100, as not all women come forward.

Twitter was immediately up in arms about this decision, with hundreds of people supporting the lawyer for doing his just duty to defend an unpleasant character. Well-known journalist Glenn Greenwald immediately put out a Tweet in his defense, calling out the “racism”. The fact that over 80 women had faced sexual, mental and psychological trauma for years, with serious consequences to their careers, financial security and emotional well-being seems trivial, compared to the injury faced by Professor Sullivan Jr. in doing his legal duty.

While the right for all violators to a fair defense is enshrined in the law, I wonder if the African-American students who stepped out in such vociferous outrage against the dean’s ouster would have done the same for a white Harvard law professor who took the same decision to defend a police officer who’d killed over 80 unarmed black teenagers. Would they be as enthusiastic if the law professor in question decided to defend the man who bombed the black churches? What about defending the leaders of the Rwanda genocide—surely they too are entitled to a legal defense? But would a white professor who did that still expect to hold on to his teaching position? I doubt.

The reason why a white professor would choose not to defend such a character is simple—while it is written in the law that everyone is entitled to a defense, simple human decency and awareness of the atrocities faced by African-Americans at the hands of the police would make this decision to stay away from such a character a no-brainer.

Note there is no “ism” for women who draw the same outrage—a mass rapist is entitled to his legal defense, but the 80 women who came forth and the many who didn’t don’t deserve the same defense. “Sexism” doesn’t even begin to touch the level of misogyny in the way this debate is unfolding. I see not a single Tweet in defense of the women who were Weinstein’s victims.

If only this debate was just about an African-American man’s right to do his unpleasant duty. This is not just the 100 odd women whom Weinstein probably raped in his lifetime, but the thousands of women who have faced sexual violence in conflict and war, the millions who have suffered workplace sexual violence and rape, and the ever increasing cases of male impunity which creates conditions ripe for rape of girls, aged a few months to teenagers, at the hands of men of all ages in developing countries.

If Harvard thinks this debate is only about racism, it is wrong. (Sullivan Jr. is still in the faculty.) This is about the lives of millions of women who have been affected and harmed by sexual violence worldwide. Sexual violence offenders permeate every institution at every level worldwide, pushing women out from public life, affecting their emotional and financial security, and making them even more vulnerable to violence.

What goes on at Harvard filters down everywhere and becomes legal norms in every other country, including Third World countries with poor legal regimes like Nepal. As an academic institution which often comes in the top rankings of the entire world, Harvard cannot afford to think this is about the abstract rule of law.

To allow someone to flaunt his male privilege in this manner would be akin to allowing someone who defended Nazis to be on the law faculty. The mass atrocity committed by the notorious Weinstein ticks all the boxes of a crime against humanity. I was myself surprised to learn this, but you don’t need millions of people affected by a crime for it to be a crime against humanity—about 80 will do if the crime is egregious enough. And you cannot have a man who defends crimes against humanity teaching students at Harvard.

For the many girls and women of Nepal who’ve faced violence in school at the hands of teachers, such as the women who were molested as children by Uttam Tripathi at Lalitpur Madhyamik Vidhyalaya, these scars never heal. For the women in Nepal who were raped and killed during the conflict by soldiers, justice will now only come in the form of how we reshape institutions so they are free of predators, including opportunistic ones who will use their social and institutional standing to defend other predators.

Let’s have a true debate about who the victims are in this discourse. It is not law professor Sullivan Jr. If the concern is about African-American faculty and their marginalization at Harvard, the solution is simple: hire the many brilliant black women lawyers who have fought hard and long all through their lives against sexual violence. There are many of them, all equally powerful and all equally capable of becoming deans of the college.

Any man this tone deaf to the worldwide #MeToo movement doesn’t deserve to be teaching at one of the finest colleges in the world. For Harvard to allow this man to remain on the faculty would be a travesty of justice.

The world’s waterways—oceans, rivers, Antarctic ice sheets, Arc­tic polar bear habitats, Alpine mountain lakes, Himalayan gla­ciers—are inundated with plastic. At first, it was just a garbage problem, something we as humans thought we would be able to deal with as we advanced technologically. We could always rely on recycling.This thought comforted us with its reassurance. The familiar man­tra: ‘Reduce, reuse, recycle’ was chanted at institutional settings and activist ones. The power of this rep­etition was enough to shield us from our own arrogant, self-destructive scientific certainty.

In the past few years, the scale of the plastic threat has become clear. We are now inundated, according to scientific estimates, with 8.3 billion tons of this non-biodegradable mate­rial since 1950. That’s one ton for every living person on earth. Only 6 percent of US plastics was “recy­cled” (more accurately, shipped to China to be incinerated). This will plummet to 2 percent with China’s import recyclables ban.

The US produces 19.5 percent of the world’s plastics—55 Mtons in 2012, according to Polymerda­tabase.com. Europe produces 20 percent, China 25 percent (same source). PlasticsEurope’s “Plastics: The Facts” says 51.2Mtons were pro­duced in 2016 in Europe. This indus­try newsletter also states very high recycling rates which don’t match with facts on the ground.

Recycling has been shown to be a myth: much of the recyclable waste ends up being shipped from rich countries to poor communities in middle income countries like Malay­sia and Thailand where it is inciner­ated due to lack of recycling capa­bilities. Protests of local inhabitants go unheard. How can a city like New York City, mighty beyond belief in the global financial landscape, not be able to dump its trash wherever it wants?

The only problem with this model of the rich trashing the poor is the interconnected nature of the planet. Inevitably, emissions from burning plastic returns to people in the US in the form of global warming, causing massive storms, cyclones and hurri­canes in coastal areas. The ocean, rapidly warming through these man­made atrocities, is forecasted to inundate the same New York City which now dumps massive amounts of plastic trash in South-East Asia.

We may not realize it, but our food items are significantly more expensive because we are paying for their plastic packaging

The scale of this problem is clear to everyone. But no government, municipality or mayor has lifted a finger to halt the tide of plastic, despite overwhelming evidence that the status quo is suicidal, not just for humans but for all forms of life on earth. Why is that?

Plastic is a product of the petro­leum industry, which has reigned with its petrodollar power for the past century. Petroleum and plastic companies are registered on the stock market, their value counted in trillions. The biggest corpora­tions selling petroleum also sell plastic. Plastic industries employ 1.45 million in Europe and 1 million in the US. In 2012, the US plastic industries made over $380 billion annual turnover, with $13 billion trade surplus (Polymerdatabase.com). These MNCs have lobbyists in Washington. They are an “American success story”.

Also deceiving is the activist response. “Circular economy” is the catchphrase being pushed by bil­lionaire philanthropists in response to plastic pollution. Institutions which promote this are under the illusion that 1,000 billion tons of plastic generated since mankind started to make this destructive sub­stance can not only be vacuumed up and repurposed (a Sisyphean task), but also that plastic can continue to pour out of the pipeline because we now have this reliable Circular Economy in motion.

This is as dangerous a myth as recycling. Any modern object, for example a laptop, is created through multiple supply chains which provide materials and parts from countries scattered globally. A circular economy would need a massive apparatus to reclaim, reship and repurpose each tiny part, the costs of which MNCs do not want to bear. Perhaps policy may make them change their mind. Left to their own purposes, MNCs would rather pump and dump in a disposable economy.

Loop, a much-hyped new com­pany, the founder of which social­ized with billionaires in Davos and got new customers, ostensibly recy­cles containers for big MNCs. The only problem: it again asks its com­panies to create plastic containers—only this time they’re used 100 times instead of once. The hype of the new Silicon Valley entrepreneurs doesn’t match the reality of the plastic men­ace on the ground.

I asked Nestle on Twitter how they would clean up the mess they had caused so far. They sent me their new guidelines on sustain­able packaging. It included a pol­icy to still use plastic bottles, but with 35 percent recycled content by 2025. To imagine Nestle plan­ning to manufacture this object for the next six years when sustainable options are available is deranged, in my opinion. But can any force stop them? What law or ethical guide­line is in operation to modulate, regulate or punish global crimes of large corporations?

Ocean warming and microplas­tic pollution have led to danger­ous die-offs of plant, animal and insect species—coral, frogs, insects, birds, penguins, polar bears, among others.

It is clear our gleeful arson of the planet has catastrophic ecological and economic costs. The pyramid of life is at risk. We can alter our course by globally banning all forms of plastic now. Or we can continue to delude ourselves with bedtime sto­ries of the circular economy, which will cost us another few decades, in much the same way as the myth of recycling lost us valuable time since the 1980s.

Nepalis pay a massive “plastic tax”—we may not realize it, but our food items are significantly more expensive because we are paying for their plastic packaging. The gov­ernment should invest in sustain­able packaging that can be made from our own natural resources, which would save us billions of rupees a year.

This much is clear: Nepal’s Hima­layan glaciers, which provide spring water for a billion-plus inhabitants, are melting from global warming. Our drinking water supply is at risk. If we continue to manufacture and burn plastic, we have no future in the subcontinent.

WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange has been taken into cus­tody by the British Police. After almost seven years in the Ecua­dorian Embassy, he was dragged out, looking haggard and mag­nificent as Tolstoy with a giant white beard. The Ecuadorian Embassy had given him gener­ous refuge till a change of regime brought an end to his asylum status—who knew asylum could be revoked? Maybe the catshit had something to do with it. One of the demands of the embassy was that Assange clean up after his cat. Video footage has also surfaced showing him trying to learn how to skateboard inside the embassy.

Assange was probably a night­mare tenant. Kudos to the Ecua­dorians for suffering through seven years of a celebrity jour­nalist living in their premises. But now the question arises—what next?

First and foremost is the freedom of the press, which all democratic nation-states must uphold

First and foremost is the freedom of the press, which all democratic nation-states must uphold. Assange was involved in collecting information on war crimes conducted by the US mil­itary. This reportage is the job of a journalist, which he was in full measure. In keeping with the times, his methods of informa­tion collection involved a large amount of cyber data. Collecting information for the purposes of verifying a story, especially a story as massive as the one WikiLeaks was working on, has always been the professional prerogative of the press, and one that cannot be hampered by any state institution.

Putting Assange in jail is the equivalent of what the Nepal Police has just done to jour­nalist Arjun Giri, the editor of Tandav Weekly (tandavweekly.com), who was detained and charged under cybercrime law on April 15. His crime? Reporting on a financial fraud conducted by a member of a powerful family that rules Pokhara. Giri is a member of Nepal Journalists Forum, Kaski Chapter. Clearly if people had issue with his reportage, they should have printed rebuttals or put a lawsuit on him for defama­tion of character. Instead, they went to the police and put him in jail for cybercrime. Reporting on stories is not a crime—but often in tin-pot democracies like Nepal, where the police can be used for the ends of pow­erful families, this misuse of the law is possible.

The US however is not a tin-pot democracy. It is the home of the brave and land of the free. Journalism holds special respect there—at least it did, before Trump took a person­ally antagonistic position to the press and started to attack its members with impunity. Assange has done nothing that another bea­con of democracy, Noam Chomsky, has not done over a lifetime of critiquing the US military and its atrocities world­wide. The only difference is that Assange, a freewheeling Aussie with libertarian tendencies, has drawn the ire of his jealous contemporaries who will never break a story as important as this one, as Glenn Greenwald pointed out. “Narcissist” is a favorite insult to hurl at Assange, which is odd because he’s clearly sacrificed his life to a cause much larger than himself.

This much is clear: Assange, despite the vociferous insults heaped upon him by the corpo­rate American press, has already consolidated his legacy. Perse­cuting him now brings forth the opposite results desired by the US state. Extremely negative publicity is sure to follow any attempts to extra­dite him to the US. A friend of mine who studied Evangelicals used to say they love perse­cution—the more persecuted they were, the more their suf­fering elevated them towards Christ. Something similar is in operation here: the more Assange is persecuted, the more his already canonized image is going to solidify with the young and the moderates, globally.The US is already on shaky ground due to Trumpian isola­tion policies. Separating itself from rule of law and the freedom of the press is not going to make it more popular in the inter­national stage. Britain is caught between Brexit and the annoyed Europeans, and any attempts now to cozy up with the Trump regime is only going to make their position more tenacious on the European continent. The only solution now is a speedy legal resolution which drops all charges against Assange and his publica­tion, and a quiet flight back to Australia with his cat.

The author is a writer and filmmaker from Nepal. She has a BA in international relations from Brown University