We humans have a bad tendency to concern ourselves with the immediate (both in terms of time and space), and also to discount the distant and the future. As an intelligent person, I'm sure you can probably already see how that volatile combination is a sure recipe for incoming trouble...We become outraged about the massive loss of life at Ground Zero on 9/11, and mobilize the entire world to take action, but fail to acknowledge (or do anything about) the equivalent number of children worldwide who die every single day of hunger, dehydration and other easily preventable causes.
We protest for fair wages and acceptable working conditions, invoke the high rhetoric of self-evident human rights... and then run to stores whose low prices are the direct result of international child labor and exploitation. We want landfields, as long as they're not in our own backyard. We proclaim 'God bless America,' and forget about the rest of the world. We worry about the remote possibility of an asteroid wiping us off the face of the Earth, and don't change our behavior to ameliorate deforestation, pollution or global warming...
We only acknowledge and take action, it seems, when we find ourselves directly affected, so here is some food for thought in terms that should be easy to understand and internalize.
Check out The Story of Stuff to learn more about your own environmental footprint.
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Very well said. I couldn't add much more, other than we all must try as hard as we can to reverse what we all agree is already in motion with action, no matter how small .
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