April 22, 2008
Earth Day: Work Smart With No More Empty Gestures
It's a beautiful day. Warm, sunny, quintessentially spring.
The perfect day to plant a tree.
Or change your light bulbs to CFLs.
Or install a water-saving showerhead.
Or all of the above.
After all, it’s Earth Day!
Now, before I continue, let me apologize for my somewhat cynical rantings.
While I think Earth Day is a great concept—a yearly day to inspire, educate, and change our planet for the better (we hope)— I have issues with its execution. It seems to me sometimes that how people celebrate Earth Day has gotten about as silly as saying Valentine’s Day is the only day you show your love for anyone.
Has Earth Day become America’s way of compartmentalizing conservation concepts all into one 24-hour-period? Is it a day full of symbolic gestures with no real follow-through, tuned to our near-commercial-length attention span?
What exactly is the point of having kids plant trees if they don’t take care of them for the rest of the year, or at least until they are established?
Some Earth Day activities are much more effective than others. The ones from school that I distinctly remember are times like cleaning up trash in parks. Yes, we planted trees.
Where are all those trees we planted now? Shouldn’t the town be covered with dogwoods by now? Well, the thing is, most of them perished. Of neglect. All that’s left of them now are the plastic bags they came in, those won’t decompose for decades.
What’s it they say about forming a habit? It takes at least three weeks of a routine for it to become a habit... Well, Wikipedia says:
Habits are automatic routines of behavior that are repeated regularly, without thinking. They are learned, not instinctive, human behaviors that occur automatically, without the explicit contemporaneous intention of the person.
In Japan, it’s part of the school curriculum for children to help out with the school chores, like sweeping, tidying up the classroom, and cleaning the chalkboards and such. These simple routine tasks help teach kids responsibility and organization and keeps them out of trouble, not to mention cuts down on the school budgetary needs for janitorial services.
Earth Day’s only one day, so really it can do little more than inspire one to make changes, but not really enact them. Follow-through is left up to the individual (never a good thing). Perhaps that is enough for some, but with so many global environmental concerns, we need to make more substantial changes. And those changes need to be longer lasting, habit changing, and have sensible goals. Really, Earth Day needs to be Earth Month. Even better, work it in every day.
In the latest episode of the Get-It-Done Guy’s Quick And Dirty Tips To Work Less and Do More , Stever Robins talks about making an impact when you have a little spare time using process improvement techniques. He argues that the best way to use your spare time is to spend it improving what you already do, so you can do it better, faster and more efficiently.
Earth Day should be about making a difference. An impact. Preferably one of positive and lasting change. So it’s best to think hard about the real, personal challenges you’re already facing at your home, school or workplace. If it’s only going to be one day—one small bit of spare time to consider the environment we live in—then, by golly, we need to make it COUNT.
At the local library this year, kids are invited to come and planting seeds in disposable paper cups, cups that may or may not make it all the way home, and certainly aren’t likely to survive. They’d be better served having the kids help plant the spring landscaping in the town green adjacent to the library. Something the kids will be able to see for the rest of the summer, something they can be proud of, something likely to succeed. Not to mention save money. And paper cups.
In short, use Earth Day for problem-solving as a community and focus on the problems we really face in our daily lives. Problems like how difficult it is to find a freaking recycling bin. Or how we need to plant drought-resistant landscaping plants around our schools and public buildings. The list of things that would actually help is endless.
No more empty gestures.
Posted by sorsha at 9:14 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
April 20, 2008
Wolong's Plentiful Pandas
Atlantic Magazine writer James Fallows and his wife travelled to the panda reserve at Wolong Nature Reserve in China's Sichuan province. In his article, Among The Pandas, he makes some great points about how the cuteness of pandas affects our perception of them, what it's like to spend time up close and personal with captive pandas, and how Wolong differs from many other panda reserves by showing people the entire panda lifecycle and plentiful pandas instead of just a glimpse in the day of your average lonely panda you might see leased to a foreign zoo. Check out the accompanying panda slideshow, especially the "herd" of yearling pandas, it's narrated by the author.
Posted by sorsha at 4:30 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
February 29, 2008
From Sea To Savannah: Plastics Are Perilously Pervasive
When I drink soda from cans, I always cut up those plastic rings that come with them. I have seen too many pictures of shorebirds and sea turtles and baby seals strangled by little convenient plastic nooses.
When plastic bag naysayers give examples of how plastic messes with the ecosystem, it often give marine ecosystem examples, but land creatures are also very vulnerable to poison by plastic. Sure, the marine mammals have an added problem of often not being able to see the bags in the water, but really, nothing is safe, not even the largest predators on the African savannah - the lions.
My husband and I went to Kenya on our honeymoon, we did not go on a tour but planned it ourselves so we would have the freedom to do what we liked. We went during the season of the Great Wildebeest Migration, wanting to see this amazing sight of 2.5 million wildebeests trying to cross the Mara River on the Serengeti. Some of them would get munched by crocs, others would drown, and a vast majority would climb up the steep river bank on the other side and graze on the green grasses of the Mara. An awesome spectacle, to be sure. But a natural one.
Certainly we were upset to see that even here in one of the last wild places on earth, the insidious first world garbage known as the plastic bag has found its way into the wild.
We drove around in the vast Mara reserve with our local Maasai guide, watching wildlife and meeting very nice people. One morning, we were stalking a leopard. Now, in these game parks, it's quite common for an animal sighting to quickly become overrun with sightseers. The tour guides radio to each other, and everyone descends upon a good sighting, effectively ruining it and potentially upsetting the wildlife.
We found the leopard about the same time as one of the major TV networks Big Cats vehicle showed up. We decided to leave the hubub behind, but check out two nearby lions. They were a young male and a young female and as we watched, a plastic bag (likely from someone's lunch) blew in front of these two lions.
Now, all the other photographers around stopped taking pictures. The plastic bag had ruined their perfectly good wildlife portrait. Now, you cannot blame people for not trying to take the plastic bag away from these lions. They were wild, and not babies. And by the speed at which the lioness caught this bag was actually really astounding. These young lions had been acting like kids, playing until it blew by, distracting them and triggering their hunting instincts.
So I took these pictures of the two wild young lions - a lion and a lioness - playing with this deadly toy - a plastic bag. Perhaps you've played with a kitten before and you know how cute it can be to harass them with simple objects, but you always take the bag away so it won't suffucate or eat it, right? Not an option here.
There has been a lot of news this week about plastic bag bans, especially in Europe. I'm flattered to say that one of these pictures of the lions has made it into some of the major papers lately, and I'm proud to help improve the public's awareness on how hurtful plastic bag can be to the environment. You can read more about plastic bag bans around the world here.
Interested in doing your part? Consider switching to canvas totebags, like one of ours, or make your own!
Posted by sorsha at 12:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
