EcoBlog: July 26, 2008

July 26, 2008
The other night Jason & I watched Penn & Teller’s new show “Bullsh*t”. I’ve watched it before, an episode about NASA, and enjoyed the program. This particular broadcast focused on global warming and issues surrounding it like “carbon credits” or “carbon offsets”, and the huge amount of energy that Al Gore’s new home reportedly used not long ago. The gist of the show is that we don’t know for sure if global warming is real, but that there are companies preying on folk’s feeling of guilt for their impact on the environment, and people willing to pay to have that guilt absolved, just like the Catholic Church before the reforms of Martin Luther. The problem is that there are little regulations on these companies and folks too lazy to do the research to find out what their money is actually going to. Additionally, I was a little bothered that a seeming lack of information was presented. I’m not saying that Al Gore is a saint. What I am concerned about is that before we call VP Gore lots of names and such, we might want to look at the subsequent energy usage of his home. The large amounts of energy used supposedly took place during the conversion of Gore’s home to more energy-efficient things like solar panels and such. Installation would take energy, no? So my only query would be this: What does Al & Tipper’s energy bill look like post-conversion? If it’s still high, by all means, fling the mud with wild abandon. If not, Penn & Teller need to do more homework along with all of the homework that they already do.
I was irked that the hosts in their ire stated that we shouldn’t have to change our way of living. Of course we should! I’m not saying that everyone should only take one shower a week and live on a commune. What I am saying is that the majority of Americans have un-realistic expectations. Our way of living has not always been as it is now.
For generations around the world, even right here in the USA, people have had the understanding that conservation of food, resources, energy, etc, is so incredibly important because you don’t know what will happen next year, or the year after that. Will there be a drought? Will there be floods? Will there be war or other violent strife? We have not only become too comfortable, we have become spoiled. When it comes to consumption, we seem to focus on ourselves and our families primarily, and not on the population as a whole, whether that be of our country, or the world. Not to say that Americans don’t care, we do, but we have lost touch with what our grandparents and their parents understood as far as ONLY TAKING WHAT WE NEED and NOT MORE. We throw out tons of food every year, we take multiple trips in our cars when we could be more conservative in our movements, we “forget” to save money and buy things that we can’t afford and then get in to trouble trying to pay for them, we throw away perfectly good items that others could use simply because we are too lazy or too “busy” to take them to a Goodwill or another group of the sort, even though many of these organizations will come to your door and pick items up for you.
This isn’t a city or country thing either. In cities, folks see the poverty of their neighbors, or at least my family did, and would share with them what they could. In the country, where farming was, and in some cases still is, predominant, waste is a sin, and you use everything that you can, not knowing when you will have the provisions that you need. This was the case everywhere during the Depression and in other countries during war-times, such as Europe during WWII.
When did we become so short-sighted? When did we decide to only think about today, and not give a damn about tomorrow? When did we decide to fear the past, and only embrace the latest and the greatest? I believe that it may have been in the 50’s, so why are still living with a half-a-century-old mentality?!
Technology is fabulous, and as an artist I use it in my artwork along with primarily analog components. But I am getting so sick and tired of us not having a clue about the world around us, and how to live in it, not just in our own little make-believe worlds. Global warming may not be real; it may just be natural climate change. Regardless, smog is real! Landfills are real and getting bigger! Car pool, dammit! Ride a bike, for crying out loud! Take the bus already! Recycle that bottle in the bin RIGHT NEXT TO the trash! Take a moment to do the things that the “experts” suggest, and maybe, just maybe, our way of living may actually be even better than it is now.
Maybe that’s the key. Instead of beating people over the head with how mindless we are being about the world around us, the focus should be on how much better we can make our already awesome way of living.