Going Green
Sometime this weekend I was overhearing the news from another room. They were talking about 350M year old fossils found somewhere. Three Hundread and Fifty MILLION. Wow. That's a huge number. That got the old nuts and bolts turning and I had to write myself a little note on my soul saying: "You've got to remember to share this piece of info with others come Sunday, at work". What was it I was thinking?
How come this world and all of its living creatures have been here for THAT LONG and it took us a mere one hundred years of technology to destroy it?
So I checked out just how long "THAT LONG" was...
"It is generally assumed that planets are formed by the accretion of gas and dust in a cosmic cloud, but there is no way of estimating the length of this process. Our Earth acquired its present size, more or less, between 4 billion and 5 billion years ago. Life on Earth originated about 2 billion years ago, but there are no good fossil remains from periods earlier than the Cambrian, which began about 490 million years ago"
(Check out http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001822.html for more).
To me it seems like a real achievement. Being able to erase 4-5 billion years, or even "only" 490 million years, of ongoing change and growth and improvement in what is a blink of an eye. As 100 years are nothing more than that compared to such a glorious time line.
Though I am a big fan of technology, and can appreciate the good things it brought into our lives I do believe that we should have taken the time to think of how those perks are affecting our environment, and, mind you, our health.
So is there anything we can do?
I used to think that "going green" was a nice slogan and though I could understand the importance of it, and agreed with every word, it did not really cause me to "grow" a compost heap behind my house. I must say that this weekend the chip finally hit the bottom of the barrel. There are things that each of us can do to try and help and it's about time we start. There's a new bin downstairs for paper only. I will start using it. Why not have one at home? I will make room for one. My husband has access to a batteries disposal bin at work. We'll start using that too. How about the plastic recycling bin? I will start using that one too. It's about five minutes away from my home but what's that compared to a million years?
That all sounds obvious doesn't it? well, that's what it takes to make a change. Too bad it took more than ten years for these ideas to become obvious to most people.
My workplace is also going green. If it hadn't, wouldn't it have been a good place to try and influence?
I think "influence" is the key word, and this should become contagious (like the "flue" in influence. Ever notice that?) . What I mean is we need to talk about this. To raise this issue with friends and families who will raise this with friends and families and soon enough everybody will have that blue paper bin downstairs and will have a hybrid car and take this to the whole wide world. Then, in no time, we'll all be infected with the "Going green" bug. It will be bigger than SARS...
Hopefully, thanks to the green bug, we will have descendants in 1 million years who will be able to discuss that glitch in time when human kind almost destroyed the earth in the blink of an eye.....
