Earth Day
by Duckman GR
Meteor Blades has a good post up on Earth Day, and a thought provoking poll. So what do you do?
I gave myself a 3, I recycle cans and bottles, buy organic carrot and frozen corn and real (read free range) chicken and eggs, organic coffee and other organic products. Give money to WWF, Sierra Club, Earth Justice, NPCA (Nat'l Parks Conservation Assoc), others. Re-use shopping bags at all the grocery stores, buy dye and scent free laundry soaps and softeners, use 3 out of the 6 light bulbs in my bathroom vanity, drive a 4 cylinder instead of 6 cylinder Tacoma truck, and more. I even recycle posts from other bloggers!
Is that enough? Nope. But if we all do that kind of thing we'd be a lot better off. What else can we do? Well, as you may recall, I mentioned some tom delay beneficiaries (see!) in a previous post, thinking they need to get tied to the anvil goin' around tommies neck. Well, the League of Conservation Voters agrees, and they've put up their own list. Warning - big pdf file and extremely ugly graphics on page one.
Our unchecked consumption is going to doom us all. It's not just oil, it's water. Fresh water is going to be a bigger and far uglier fight then oil. That's what these farmers vs fishers battles in Klamath are about, fighting over the dwindling remnents, instead of fighting together to have more of those remnents.
Fresh water depends on a healthy ecosystem, to retain and clean water that comes from the sky. Redwood trees pluck it straight from the air, but rivers require slightly larger amounts, and different and more complicated mechanisms. And rivers are where we get our drinking water and our irrigation water and our toilet water and water to make newsprint or steel or silicon wafers or white water rafting adventures. Rivers are a big part of the process that puts sand on our beaches. Rivers are good things. And there's nothing more emblamatic of this situation then the picture of the Colorado River as it dies before reaching the sea, and the thought that many other rivers will suffer the same fate if we don't take some action. And that's the argument we need to make.
Farmer, you want irrigation water, you need the ground system to soak up and clean more rainwater, rather then have it just run off unwashed. Fishermen, you want more river water, likewise. Same goal, different beneficiaries.
We're not going to get it from Antarctica. And we're not going to get it with tom's tools either. So, for Earth Day 2005, maybe we can work on getting rid of some of them. And remind the stupid Democrats they might be next.