Blog Action Day - Should we bother?

Today is Blog Action Day. Eish!! like 15861 other blogs, pledged to post an article that had something to say about the environment.

The environment effects a substantial part of all our daily lives in an infinite amount of ways. In turn, what we do each day effects the environment for better or for worse in just as many ways. So how do you decide where to start and what to focus on, particularly if your offering varies as much as Eish!! endeavours to.

As tempting as it is to simply point to you to this post, or this one or even this one, I will actually add my own personal voice to roaring masses.

Let's start by trying to understand what important the environmental issues are and to whom?

Think about it for a while ....

In fact, let's narrow it down a little and simply ask 'to whom?' Then let's take Al Gore out of the equation ;-)

It's a well known and documented fact the majority of the world's wealth is owned by a very, very small number of individuals. These blokes hold the power and make the decisions that effect millions of peoples lives. Is the environment high on their priority list? Maybe even somewhere in the middle? I doubt it. After all worrying about the environmental effect the industrial behemoths under their control have on the environment will cost their bottom line, just considering it means paying very expensive environmental impact specialists a fair whack, just to be told that they need to spend enough to support a small African country to become 'carbon neutral.'

So what about the demographic that holds the largest number of homo sapiens? That would be a group of people who have to worry about where the next mouthful of food will be coming from. The plastic bag flying past, the smokey exhaust, an iceberg floating too far north all pale into insignificance when compared with the sight of your child on the brink of starvation.

So that leaves a group of people, small in numbers and with a relatively minute amount of resources to try and make a difference. What do we have at our disposal? Well, our voice, our pens, our keyboards. And then the most important thing we have is our minds. It's perhaps unrealistic to call us to 'vote with our wallets' BUT we can change our consumption habits. Cut down on the amount of waste our presence on Mother Earth manufactures.

Let's take control of our personal environmental footprint.