Happy Earth Day

Today is Earth Day - The one day of the year we have set aside to think about what we can do to save the world ecosystem that we are decimating at an incalculable rate.  It's a day of recycling, of volunteering, of buying the bottle of water that donates 5 cents to the world wildlife fund instead of the cheaper store brand bottle.

OK, that's as cynical as I'm going to let myself get.  Part of what I've come to understand in the past couple of years is that cynicism is NOT wit, and it never helps anything.

What are you doing this Earth Day?  Did you even know it was Earth Day?  I'm laying in bed sick.  I don't know what I caught (a girl at work did call in with strep throat), but it has set up shop in my lungs, and is apparently producing cotton by the bushel.  I feel like I'm operating with only half a lung.

Let's talk about the bad:

I have my doubts as to the effectiveness of a single, media-hyped Earth Day.  The other year, Suzi volunteered to go plant some trees with a group of Starbucks employees.  Before they all got in their gasoline powered cars and drove out into the woods, they all stopped at a Starbucks and picked up some coffee in disposable cups.  How many trees did it take to produce those cups?  If those cups were composted instead of thrown in a landfill, they would eventually return to the cycle of life on the planet (hopefully the chemicals used to make them weren't too toxic), but the plastic lids will be around long after the current 'climate crisis' has come to a resolution.  Obviously, this was a flawed endeavor.  There are a lot of flawed endeavors.

There is a brand of bottled water called Ethos.  For every bottle purchased, 5 cents or so goes toward getting water to dehydrated children in Africa.  Maybe elsewhere too, but I think it's Africa.  Sounds good?  The problem with this plan is that the bottles of water being sold are killing the ecosystems of the planet, which is a far worse crime than letting a few thousand (or million, or whatever) kids die of dirty water diseases.  If the ecosystem goes, we'll lose a lot more people than that.

The bottles kill the ecosystem like so:  To produce the plastic bottles, resources are taken from the planet.  The resources are then turned into severely toxic chemicals (if they weren't already, like oil).  These chemicals then make the pretty plastic bottles, which leach toxins into the water we drink out of them, which hurt us, then (some) come out in our pee and go down the line to hurt other plants and animals, which are eaten by other animals and plants which are in turn hurt by the chemicals, and then we eat those plants and animals and get hurt by the chemicals again.  If the bottle is recycled, it will produce just as much toxic waste as it did when it was produced the first time.  If it's put in a landfill, it will sit for a thousand years leaching chemicals into the earth.  Yes, by now we should all know that plastic is goddamn horrible. 

But what about the water in that charitable Ethos bottle?  Where did it come from?  I guarantee that it came from thousands of miles away.  So what?  Well, when you take water out of an ecosystem and transport it thousands of miles away, it does not return to that ecosystem.  It is now a part of the system that it ended up at.  This is the sneaky way that bottled water is extremely dangerous.  Water tables around the world are dropping, meaning that less and less fresh water is available in the world.  We are simply pumping the water out of individual ecosystems faster than the planet can put it back in.  Bottled water companies pump out FUCKLOADS of water from a system, then ship it around the world so that people can drink it and then pee it into a sewage treatment facility that will probably put it in the ocean instead of back where it belongs.

Yeah, water evaporates off the ocean and becomes rain, but that doesn't mean that pouring water into the Gulf of Mexico will ensure rainfall in India, or even in Florida.  A lot of rain falls right back into the ocean.  Various climate factors will push the water vapor this way and that, but I'm telling you that the rain in that midwestern thunderstorm did NOT come from the coast of Norway.

Even if rain does fall where it is needed, how much of it gets back down into the water table?  Rain that falls on concrete either evaporates and goes elsewhere, or it runs into a sewer that puts it back in the ocean, or into a river that runs to the ocean.  And there is a damn lot of concrete in the world.  Many areas that are dried out have soil that can't accept a lot of water all at once, so when it rains the water rushes away to more permeable lands, leaving the parched areas just as parched as they were before the rain - so even if the bottle you dumped in the Gulf of Mexico made it rain in Kenya, the Kenyans couldn't drink it.

So, bottled water bad, even when it tries to be good.  That's just one example of a good intention that does a lot of bad.

My intention here is not to give you a bunch of examples of people miserably failing in their quest to do right by the world.  My intention is to encourage you to think about what you do, and what others do, when we try to do the right thing.  People often pick a cause, and get so focused on it that they lose sight of other problems.  Have you ever seen somebody in a "save the trees" T-shirt carrying a plastic bag of goods from a convenience store, or using a paper cup?  I have.  Does that mean the person doesn't want to actually "save the trees"?  Not at all.  They've probably just focused on one or two ways to "save the trees" (like logging or volunteering to plant trees) and have failed to think of the world as a system, where a change in one part affects all the other parts.  Planting trees, picking up trash, protesting GM crops, and distributing information to raise environmental awareness are all well and good, but we must consider how we go about doing these good things.

And now let's talk about the good.

If you look at the statistics, numbers, and studies regarding environmental damage and the 'climate crisis', there is not much good news to be had.  I think that the chances of humanity correcting its bad behavior and saving life as we know it look pretty slim.  What we need is a cultural shift in the way we perceive our role on this planet, and that is a change of cyclopean magnitude.  The essence of 'the good' in this case is that change can happen.  By thinking about environmental issues, you are initiating a change in yourself.  By acting on those thoughts you create a positive change in yourself and your immediate surroundings.  By repeating those actions, you increase awareness in those around you.  Whether or not change will come in time we cannot know.  What we can know is that we can change.  And in the knowing, have we not begun?

Have a happy and positive Earth Day, doing what you know you can to make life better :)