Today is Earth Day and I know that my kids will be celebrating, or at least recognizing it, by picking up garbage in the neighborhoods around their school.
Even though we often feel like we transcend our environment and that we are directing the area around us this is not actually true and just looking around can be a real wakeup call for us and make us realize that we are coexisting in our environment and need to take better care of it.
We can see on a daily basis as the weather changes are happening (whether it is manmade or not), and we can see the effects of building manufacturing plants and oil drilling around the world and how that has changed the environment.
I often think about how I live here in North America and my “carbon footprint” is changing the way the earth is and how people on other continents that don’t have to heat the house 8 months a year, or grocery shop with overpackaged goods built to draw us in. Even things so simple as the fact that in my house we have two cars instead of one only because of the convenience for my 50 kilometer drive to work.
In my more finger pointing moments I can point to other people that are living a life that has a lot of waste and say “Look there, they are polluting the world” but really it is all of us together, in this consumer based society I even see it in my son that will hop from one percieved need to another looking for satisfaction while we still buy too much that ends up in a landfill one day.
But feelings of guilt will never fix a problem and I think the problems that we see this Earth Day are worse than any other and quite probably next year things will be worse than this year. The fact is that we need to all step up, each person trying to make changes while not being concerned with what our neighbors do, really it is just about each of us making changes in how we spend our money and how.
So today as you go along try and see where each of your dollars go, how much of a difference good or bad are you doing by spending your money and what decisions are you making for good or bad?
I know that I have a long way to go but at least we can each start today in making a difference for the better
Happy Earth Day!
Related Blogs
- Related Blogs on Carbon Footprint
- Related Blogs on Continents