Feeling Green
When I heard that Al Gore had received the 2007 Nobel Prize this past October, I thought to myself, “What has he done recently that would net him such an honor?” The news reports testified that he won the award due to his work associated with the film “An Inconvenient Truth” which focuses on global warming. I made a mental note to myself to rent the video. And then promptly forgot about it.
A few weeks later I was surfing the Internet when I ran across Bruce Sterling’s www.viridiandesign.org site. On it he featured an article about Cuba’s “Special Period,” a time when imports of crude oil and other resources from the collapsed Russia were cut off. The article hit home because it reminded me of how dependent the U.S. is on imported oil. I wondered if I could be as environmentally friendly as Cubans in the face of such an energy crisis.
Then, all the environmental disaster warnings that had crept into my peripheral awareness like stop smoking ads screamed, “The environment and the world as you know it are in danger! What are you going to do about it?”
My little mental reminder went off to watch Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” I ordered it from Netflix. Watching the film, I grew to understand why Al Gore had received the Nobel. The man had spent almost his entire life documenting environmental endangerment and politically advocating immediate change. Right at the part in the movie where I thought I couldn’t sit still any longer due to attention fatigue, Gore pounds into the camera that global CO2 levels have more than tripled since the 1960’s, a circumstance not duplicated at any other time in human history. Then, he highlights how the Arctic ice cap will cease to exist during the summers less than 20 years from now. I thought I was going to die.
Al Gore ended his film on a promising, although brief, note of hope. There are steps that can be taken to divert catastrophe.
Awareness of environmental doom has been propagating through the global population for the last fifty years. Now it is up to the individual to secure his, or her, place in the ecological world of the twenty-first century.
In an article for Permaculture Activist (http://www.permacultureactivist.net/) by Megan Quinn, Bruno Beres, a director of Cuba Solar, said, “What we must know is that the world is changing and we must change the way we see the world.”
A few weeks later I was surfing the Internet when I ran across Bruce Sterling’s www.viridiandesign.org site. On it he featured an article about Cuba’s “Special Period,” a time when imports of crude oil and other resources from the collapsed Russia were cut off. The article hit home because it reminded me of how dependent the U.S. is on imported oil. I wondered if I could be as environmentally friendly as Cubans in the face of such an energy crisis.
Then, all the environmental disaster warnings that had crept into my peripheral awareness like stop smoking ads screamed, “The environment and the world as you know it are in danger! What are you going to do about it?”
My little mental reminder went off to watch Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” I ordered it from Netflix. Watching the film, I grew to understand why Al Gore had received the Nobel. The man had spent almost his entire life documenting environmental endangerment and politically advocating immediate change. Right at the part in the movie where I thought I couldn’t sit still any longer due to attention fatigue, Gore pounds into the camera that global CO2 levels have more than tripled since the 1960’s, a circumstance not duplicated at any other time in human history. Then, he highlights how the Arctic ice cap will cease to exist during the summers less than 20 years from now. I thought I was going to die.
Al Gore ended his film on a promising, although brief, note of hope. There are steps that can be taken to divert catastrophe.
Awareness of environmental doom has been propagating through the global population for the last fifty years. Now it is up to the individual to secure his, or her, place in the ecological world of the twenty-first century.
In an article for Permaculture Activist (http://www.permacultureactivist.net/) by Megan Quinn, Bruno Beres, a director of Cuba Solar, said, “What we must know is that the world is changing and we must change the way we see the world.”
posted by Kathleen D. McKenzie at 5:54 PM
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