It’s Not Easy Being Green

Do you ever wonder if Mother Earth is trying to get rid of us, kind of like a dog shaking fleas? With all the natural and man-made disasters in the world today, makes me wonder.

Man has used and abused this planet ever since his appearance several millennia ago. It may have finally caught up with us. Until the Industrial Revolution, humans caused relatively little damage to their environment; but with the advent of the machine and its inherent pollution and waste, the earth was doomed. We have polluted the skies with our carbon emissions to the point of destroying the ozone layer that protects us from the sun. We have polluted the earth with our land-fills full of plastic that will be there thousands of years from now. We have polluted virtually every body of water on earth with waste, chemicals, and now oil. What exactly will it take to wake us up that we are destroying our home?

I’m no expert, but sometimes I wonder if the earth has had enough of us. The number and severity of tornadoes in the Midwest have increased; hurricanes seem to come more often with more devastating results to the nations they hit; earthquakes are more prevalent and tidal waves more catastrophic. Add to all this the rampaging oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and I wonder that more of the world’s animal and plant species have not gone extinct.

The world is going “green.” You can’t help but read about it, or see it on television. It’s a relatively new term, dating back to the 1970s. It hadn’t really caught on worldwide until just a few years ago. But environmentalists have been around since ancient Greece and Rome, complaining even back then about air, water and noise pollution.

Individually most of us are aware that we need to “clean up our act.” We recycle plastic, glass, cans and papers. We conserve energy by turning off lights, use air conditioning less, and combine errands making one trip instead of several. The encouraging thing is that if we ALL did our part, it would have an effect on world pollution. The sad thing is, most of us don’t.

I don’t know if global warming is a fact or not. I suspect it is. But I do know my environment is changing and not for the better. One person cannot do much to reverse the effects of thousands of years of abuse of our planet, but collectively we can make a difference. Our children are learning the new 3 r’s: “reduce, reuse, recycle.” Sometimes it takes us older folk a bit longer to jump on the bandwagon. It’s not easy being green, as Kermit says, but we can be taught – hopefully before it’s too late.