What You Can Do For Your Planet Part One

After the G-8 summit this summer and the disappointing lack of leadership on any environmental progress, those of us who worry about climate change and melting polar caps wonder if there is any hope that we can slow the course of the catastrophe that is coming. It is obvious to me that the leadership of the most wealthy nations are more consumed with finding the next barrel of oil, than trying to figure out how we can continue life as we know it on this wonderful planet that we call Earth. The failure of leadership disturbed me so that I thought that maybe we could just forget about waiting for any useful action from our elected leaders, many here in the US who are depend on big contributions from Big Energy to fill their re-election coffers, and take matters into our own small hands and reduce the amount of emissions we produce in our own small world. I consulted TBV's Green Goddess, Marigolds2 about doing a series of posts on the greening of our own small worlds. marigolds has of course beaten me to the punch, I think that she is the fastest blogger on the planet.

Taking matters into their own hands, some American cities, unlike the Federal government have signed on to the Urban Environmental Accords. If you live in a city like I do, your lungs are most likely assaulted on a daily basis by harmful emissions from city traffic. I often walk to work for exercise and to do my part to reduce the nasty smell of vehicle fumes. I wonder if the exercise is doing more harm to my lungs as the steady stream of traffic passes. We can all drive less, take public transportation more, and it wouldn't kill us to walk occasionally. If you're a victim of the hurried American lifestyle, like most of us, think about alternative modes of transportation for short runs to the grocery store.

Okay, now I will attempt to upload a picture of my urban electric scooter. This may take a while.

It's difficult to figure out how to upload pictures, but it's more difficult to try to do something for the environment. It's easy to recycle paper, but to try to purchase recycled paper is difficult. And expensive. For a while I bought recycled paper products at the Safeway and paid twice as much for them, until they disappeared from the grocery shelves altogether. It's hard to ride a bike in the city, some cities have only begun to provide bike lanes for cyclists, but to be honest, I'm afraid of the Hummers and SUV's that take up so much space on the road and use so much of the world's energy. Until the rest of DC gets a clue, I'm riding on the sidewalk.

Oil is running in short supply, anyone who buys petrol knows this first hand even if you don't believe that we have hit the oil peak production and it's downhill from here on out. In the coming years, we will not have a choice about whether we wish to conserve or not, limited resources and a growing population will force us to be smarter about energy. Why not take the leap now and save some of that fossil fuel for the rainy day that is sure to come sooner than we expect it?

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