environmentalism

I will confess that while I have always cared a great deal about humanitarianism, I really couldn't have cared less about environmentalism. I think this was because I didn't see the effects of ignoring it at all. My parents recycled and bought organic food, but I didn't really understand at all why it would make that much of a difference if I turned the heat up or left the lights on or threw away my plastic bottles.

I think that while you are in college, you are probably the most ecologically friendly you will ever be (for most people). My carbon/eco footprint is significantly lower than it was in high school. But I'm starting to care more. I have avoided organic food because it is so much more expensive, and money conservation is very important in college. Now I understand that there are more globally important things than conserving money, and buying more expensive things is sometimes not a bad thing, if they are better for the environment.

Actually, being in college has made me far less wasteful. There is something about being completely accountable for your own actions that makes you more aware of the effect those actions have on you and those around you. It was easy to waste food my parents bought with their money, much less easy to waste food I bought with my (really their) money. I am more aware of how senseless it is.

It's too bad that things are so stratified so that people in America are living as if there are eight worlds while people in Africa are living as if there's only an acre. It's also too bad that people that are trying to reverse that are getting labelled as crazy liberal hippie green folks. I can't decide if it is good or bad that being "green" is currently a fad for college age kids. It's probably a good thing, because then we have to at least pretend we know something about the environment if we want to be cool.

So while I didn't use to be that interested in environmentalism, I'm changing my mind. I'm realizing that the crazy liberal hippies are really the only sane people, because everyone else is behaving as if somehow the earth is going to be amazingly fertile forever and ever when really there is so much evidence that it is dying because of how we are treating it. Everyone else (me included) has their eyes shut to actualities, and relies perhaps too much on scientific progress coming up with solutions that allow our hurtling expansion to continue. I guess people are acting as if they can defy population dynamics. There is a human carrying capacity, and while endorsing this crazy, industrialized society has temporarily inflated it, it really can't last for long, and then what will happen? As the Black-Eyed-Peas say in what may be the best song every, "we've only got one world, one world, that's all we've got, one world, one world."

Why is it suddenly normal to behave as if we have an infinite number of worlds, and radical to observe reality? We in America have just maybe always been privileged with the ability to ignore things as they actually are. We live in this dreamworld, and as we dream, those that are aware of the problems are madly trying to build solutions so as not to awaken us from our dreams. But our dreams are getting so extravagent that the solutions being madly built are not big enough to sustain them, and soon everyone is going to have to wake up to the idea that they have been living this nice dream while parts of the world have been awake in a nightmare.

My parents don't believe in global warming. But really, honestly, even if you concede the global warming point (which I'll confess global warming is rather imminent), there are so many other things that will also destroy us that are really undeniable.

I'm sure a lot of parents were annoyed at having to endure a political message while watching "Happy Feet" and especially "Wall-E," but honestly, I think that if things don't change, the world will go the way that Wall-E went. Science and industry destroy us, and they are the only saviors we have. We destroy this world and wait patiently for the spaceship that will take us to the next.

So I think that now that I am realizing this, and caring a bit more, I will read some "green" books and see what I can do to quit contributing to this madness.