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In the middle of each year, the calendar of global conscience turns to World Oceans Day on June 8. This year’s theme, “Wonder: Sustaining What Sustains Us”, hangs over Kerala’s ravaged coastline like a cruel joke, as did the motif of World Environment Day on June 5 – “End Plastic Pollution”.

Even as diplomats in Nice and Seoul exchange platitudes about marine conservation, the sinking on May 25 of the MSC ELSA-3 – the container ship, which went down in stormy waters off Kerala’s coast – has revealed what progress truly costs when measured in broken ecosystems and broken lives.

The facts read like an indictment of our times.

On May 24, the Liberian-flagged container ship departed the newly inaugurated Vizhinjam Port into the teeth of the southwest monsoon. Fishing boats had been ordered ashore – the sea was too dangerous for small craft. Yet the 300-metre behemoth, laden with containers (some with calcium carbide, others brimming with polyethylene pellets), received clearance to sail.

Within hours, it listed violently. By dawn, the MSC ELSA-3 lay at the bottom of the Arabian Sea, just 38 nautical miles from the port that had so recklessly released it.

This was no act of God, as insurers and corporations will soon claim. It was...