Sunday, 28 October 2007
Gore and Sarkozy
This evening I've chosen to write an activist post, drawing your attention to the following article: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071025/ap_on_re_eu/france_environment_2. I'm sitting here in Boston and it's still 60 degrees, even in October. I don't want to sound alarmist, but this is ridiculous. How environmentally conscious are people in your home countries, do you think?
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7 comments:
wow, 60 degrees, I am guessing that it might be a lot even in Celsius :-)
So, taking Belgium as "my country" (sounds weird) I am not sure: people are sorting the trash for recycling like madman, but drive SUVs and jeeps both in town and on the only fully-lighted highway system of the world...I guess that (like elsewhere) people only take as much "consciousness" as comfortable and drop it the moment it starts affecting their lifestyles. I am not an exception, unfortunately.
All in all, I am quite skeptic.
One of my colleagues bought a hybrid Prius to save the Earth. I suggested him to take the bus: that is beyond his ability to sacrifice.
Different life-strategies exist in nature. One of them is when animals keep using the resources and when everything is gone, all of them dies.
The textbook examples for this were some mites on the surface of an orange...we are just big-big mites on a huge orange. Sad.
Let us say my country is the UK, now. Here, people are schizophrenic, as everywhere else in the world, but they are so with a definite British flavour.
They would buy a gimmick saying "Save the planet" and applause to the recent campaign Install a green switch in your house, but wouldn't act accordingly: obviously they wouldn't install it. Nothing unusual, as lynx and nana pointedly described.
The British flavour is, first, that they would love it when it comes in the tabloids: they would despise whomever has used too much fuel to go around the country campaigning for environment-aware behaviour, even if the campaign had contributed a lot to the public debate. More strikingly, they would look at the "Green switch" ad while finishing their pack of "crisps" and would throw the empty bag in the street, or would read the ad in a free newspaper and leave it on the floor of the bus. (I must say I was stricken by the amount of rubish in the public spaces: sometimes you literally can't walk in bus alleys!)
So here it is about showing good will in chitchats and about show business, while forgetting about what they are currently doing. Gutter-press conscience I would say.
I was thinking, if Hungary has at all such thing? It has traditionelly.
Trendy way: Few years ago "fair trade" coffe was a not known brand in the bio-shop, they still want to put everything in plastic bags - but not in the foodshop, where you never have...
Traditional way: most of us remember the socialist environment friendly products: the greengrocers always happy with egg-boxes, newspaper will be useful when the pioneers come to collect it, bottles are worth to take back to the shop for at least the bread.
I don't remember my grandmother throwing away margarin boxes or empty jars. We never bought new things for deep-freesing or marmelade.
Not to talk about the hungarian specialitiy: soda - bottled or home made with patron :D
Inconvenient truth? Have you seen it? It is inconvenient, indeed. You want to switch it off halfway through, feeling overwhelmed. It is talking only about gglobal warming and only about CO2 emission. Not a word about methane produced by the cows (don't eat beef!), also a greenhouse gas. Let alone heavy metals, plastics, pesticides and their little friends. At the end Gore suggests ways to slow down the process: plant a tree each year and other cute stuff. It might help you to feel better but otherwise powerless.
And i is right, we should just get back to the grandmother's era, use the same glass jars over and over, don't buy the neat plastic boxes for freezing and so on...I am doing these things for some extent, but I get the criticism to be cheap and a "war-baby". I take the bus and when the baby in my belly is just reshaped by a backpack I think about polar bears and feel better.
I wonder, what is coming and how fast it's going to get here. What do you think?
OK beansoup, your turn: what about the US? :-D
From all your interesting comments (which I enjoyed reading - thanks!), I've concluded that it's the same everywhere...I especially loved the tabloid reference! That's certainly the case here in the U.S. We only think about social and environmental problems once Angelina Jolie or someone recognizes it as a problem and makes it sexy to think about. Good thing we have scientists like Veronika to deal with the deeper side of things.
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