Orion Article
A great article from Orion Magazine about being accountable for your own actions when it comes to the environment, and not just talking about them. Shows that we all have a long way to go and can only get there by raising the bar for ourselves and hoping others follow the lead. Click for LINK
Here are some more INCREDIBLE Orion articles…
The Universe
Fundamentalism and The Ecosystem…Please read this one, I beg you.
Global Dumbing
Oren Lyons Interview
Just in case you don’t read the interview I’d like to post an excerpt from it which I find to be the most important message he gives.
“And so it goes on, this idea of private property, this idea of accruement of wealth. And now we have corporate states, corporations that have the status of states—independent and sovereign, and fealty to no one, no moral law at all. President Bush has said, “Let the market dictate our direction.” Now if that isn’t about as stupid as you can get. What he said was, let the greed of the people dictate the direction of the Earth. If that’s the basis of a country, then it’s really lost what you would call a primary direction for survival.
This is really the danger today—this empty, senseless lack of leadership. But it doesn’t mean that responsibility isn’t in the hands of the people. To come down to the nut of the whole thing, it’s the people’s responsibility to do something about it. Leadership was never meant to take care of anybody. Leadership was meant to guide people; they take care of themselves. People should be storming the offices of all these pharmaceutical companies that are stealing money from them. They should be dragging these leaders, these CEOs, out into the streets and they should be challenging them. They’re not doing that. They’re just worried about how they’re going to pay more.
It’s the abdication of responsibility by the people. What was it that they said? By the people and for the people? That was the Peace Maker’s instruction: Of, by, and for the people. You choose your own leaders. You put ‘em up, and you take ‘em down. But you, the people, are responsible. You’re responsible for your life; you’re responsible for everything.
People haven’t been here all that long as a species on the Earth. We haven’t been here all that long and our tenure is in question right now. The question arises, Do we have the wisdom, do we have the discipline, do we have the moral rule, the moral law, are we mature enough to care for what is our responsibility? That question can only be answered by the people.”
“Concrete Rampage”
My buddy is moving to a town just about an hour north of Wilmington. It’s old, classy, and pretty goddamn nice. However some asshole developers want to change all that by “revitalizing” the city. Here’s a link to my friend’s blog post about it. Let’s get this out of the way too. Everyone says “Sean your blogs are so negative.” No shit, if you lived down here and had half a fucking heart yours would be too. They’re destroying this place city by city, parcel by parcel. So go back to your small towns and cities and wonder why its so “negative.” Oh, and remember the American motto, “Build build build, buy buy buy.” Amen, peace the fuck out.
Brings me back to my days of religious studies.
The Subtle, Lethal Poison of Religion
On Sunday the New York Times reported on the recrudescence of “faith-based” teaching in Russian public schools:
A teacher named Irina Donshina set aside her textbooks, strode before her second-graders and, as if speaking from a pulpit, posed a simple question:
“Whom should we learn to do good from?”
“From God!” the children said.
“Right!” Ms. Donshina said. “Because people he created crucified him. But did he accuse them or curse them or hate them? Of course not? He continued loving and feeling pity for them, though he could have eliminated all of us and the whole world in a fraction of a second.”
This grisly vignette, which almost perfectly summarizes the relationship between sadism and masochism in Christian teaching, probably wouldn’t delight all those who think that morality derives from supernatural authority. After all, the Russian Orthodox Church was the patron of Czarist autocracy, helped spread The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the West, and compromised with the Stalin regime just as it had been allied with earlier serfdom and chauvinism. It is now part of Vladimir Putin’s sinister exercise in the restoration of Russian supremacism and dictatorship: an enterprise that got off to a good start when our President admired Mr. Putin’s crucifix and “looked into his soul”. (Question: has Putin ever been seen wearing that crucifix again, or did his cynical advisers tell him that the Leader of the Free World was such a pushover for the “faith-based” that he would never check?)
So, and as with Salafist madrassas, it’s easy to see how wicked it is to lie to children when it’s done in the name of the “wrong” faith. But Ms Donshina’s nonsensical propaganda is actually a mainstream statement of what the truly religious are bound to believe. Without god, how could we tell right from wrong, or learn how to do the right thing? I have never had a debate with a religious figure of any denomination, however “moderate, where this insulting question has not come up.
Yet is it not positively immoral to argue that our elementary morality and human solidarity derive from an authority that we must simultaneously (and compulsorily) love, and also fear? Does it not degrade us in our deepest integrity to be told that we would not do a right action, or utter a principled truth, were it not for fear of punishment or hope of reward? Moreover, we are told that we begin sinful and must earn our redemption from an authority whose actions and caprices (arranging a human sacrifice in Palestine in which we had no say, for example, and informing us that we are all guilty of it) were best summarized by Fulke Greville when he remarked ruefully that we are “created sick; commanded to be sound”. This abject attitude, of sickly love for the Dear Leader combined with dreadful terror of him, is in fact the origin of totalitarianism. And there is nothing ethical about that.
I should like, for the continued vigor of this discussion, to repeat the challenge that I have several times offered the faithful in print and on the air. Can they name a moral statement or action, uttered or performed by a religious person, that could not have been uttered or performed by an unbeliever? I am still waiting, after several months, for a response to this. It carries an incidental corollary: I have also asked large and divergent audiences if they can think of a wicked action or statement that derived directly from religious faith, and you know what? There is no tongue-tied silence at THAT point. Everybody can instantly think of an example.
I don’t rest my case but I have stated it as concisely as I can and I look forward to reviewing, and replying to, anyone who might be good enough to respond.
We’ve got an assclown for a mayor
I just saw a commercial on tv by Bill Saffo the current mayor of Wilmington. The election is Oct. 9th, and I won’t be voting for him. Not only is he a real estate guy, here’s a link to his company, all his buddies and donors are real estate guys and developers. Bill wants to make Wilmington great he says, after all, according to him it is the best place to live. We’ve got to fix our ailing sewers system, acquire more empty space and have some jobs for people in town rather than just having Wilmington be a large retirement home. Oh, he wants to improve our quality of living too. Are you kidding me? I assume by what I’ve seen of your work so far Bill, that “quality of life” means having a 500K home in a development and driving a Chevy Suburban. No sir, that is not the quality of life we need. We do need more open spaces and less development. We need bike lanes and good developmental planning so you can access stores and restaurants by bike or on foot. Instead you’ve created a clusterfuck where you’re likely to get hit on your bike or on foot. Nothing is easily accessible with your, build now, plan later scheme. You’ve done an awful job for this city and I haven’t even mentioned the sewers spills which were and are absolutely ridiculous. When a pipe can only hold the volume of 30K people, you should try putting 50K people’s turds floating down it. It’s basic math and science. So why don’t you take all that donor money you’ve received and go buy a house somewhere far far away, because if you really cared for the city you wouldn’t run for re-election.
Recycling: Good or bad?
Today my ever present boss was at it again with insightful ideas like “recycling is worse for the environment than not recycling”(I think she read it in a book). So my mission right when I got home was to see if there is any truth to what she said. Is recycling worse for the environment than not recycling at all? This of course comes as a concern to me because I drink a good 4 liters of diet mtn dew/pepsi a day. I kill a lot of two liter bottles, but always make sure to recycle them on campus because my apt. complex just put their recycling bin contents in the trash. I even make bird feeders out of them, I know it sounds awfully gay, but hey, it’s being reused for a good purpose and the house finches and cardinals love it. When looking at recycling we have to take in the whole picture. This doesn’t mean only looking at a plastic bottle and knowing that it will get melted down and reused. Instead, we need to look at the whole process, which includes fuel costs, emissions, and chemical processing as opposed to just putting it under ground somewhere and letting microbes munch on it for the next thousand years. In my quick search for the answers I’ve found conflicting information. Some say it’s good and saves a non-renewable resource, while others say it’s using up more of the resource your trying to save by recycling. Although, plastic does take up an extremely large amount of space in landfills for its weight. One of the problems with recycling is that it’s costly. For companies it’s easier just to make it from a virgin product. However when oil and natural gas prices rise, the demand for recycled plastic does to. Aluminum is much more efficient to recycle than plastic, the most in fact. However, aluminum is also very abundant and easily taken from the earth. So which is worse spending the money on recycling or continuing to mine? Opposition says that because the ore that aluminum is smelted from is so abundant, we shouldn’t worry about recycling. The same goes for plastics, because they’re derived from petroleum, we shouldn’t worry. The theory being that with the price of gas going up it will leave more petroleum in the market for plastic production, because it’s so much cheaper to derive from petroleum than gasoline(although that sounds a bit fishy to me). Paper is another big one. My father is a paper salesman, so I have a bit of an interest in this. His company has an environmental specialist on board, but when dealing with larger paper product producers it’s something that must be hard to manage. Much paper comes from paper farms where the trees are grown specifically for paper use. This is a much better option than going and hacking down forests. However, where these paper farms once were, were actual forests. It could be said that now it isn’t posing much of an environmental risk, but it did at one time, and continues to be a poor ecosystem for native animals. This is especially true in the Southeast U.S. where much of the trees for paper production are grown, not to mention sprawl. Not too far from Wilmington you can see these tree farms. The ones I’ve seen have been owned by International Paper. So does recycling benefit or cause harm to the environment? It’s hard to say. There are pros and cons to both. Recycling saves a material from rotting in a land fill for years. Not to mention the greenhouse gases that landfills produce, like methane. I know a landfill back home was thinking about trying to capture the methane produced and using it to produce power. This doesn’t even touch on the issue that trash isn’t localized. Instead it’s shipped from one place to be buried in another. If people’s trash was buried in their own backyard, I think they’d be a lot more apt to save. However, it also takes energy to put it back into a reusable form. What’s the best answer? Let’s go way back to “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.” Notice how recycle is the last one? REDUCE. If people would just cut back, use things more than once, and be creative about it. I use my paper bags over for things like ripening fruit or just a good cabinet liner. In the end consuming like we do will outweigh any benefits given by recycling. It just promotes the consumer ideology that is so engrained in our heads. We’re going to have to relearn how to live. Cuba is a great example. They get by on so little, but yet manage to make things work with ingenuity and creativity. America doesn’t award those ideals, instead it awards consumers to buy more stuff and make more money in a perpetual cycle that will be our demise. It’s time to wake up and start cutting back, reusing and yes recycling.
We’re turning into Idiocracy
I’m going to rant for a moment, so if you don’t want to read it you can leave now. What in the hell is wrong with the news? I get home last night and all I can find out about what’s going on in the world is that O.J. Simpson got out on bail. They must have forgotten that we are at war, I repeat WE ARE AT WAR, or that the ice caps are melting. Instead we’re covering things like sub-prime loans where dumb ass people took dumb ass loans because of dumb ass people on Wallstreet. No one is talking about people having to leave their homes, instead it’s about the effect it will have on the “economy.” If you can’t afford a home, get an apartment. And now Dubai wants to buy a 20% stake in Nasdaq, because after all this is good for the “global economy,” and I’m sure oil has nothing at all to do with it. Ahh Dubai, where the rich are insanely rich, and the poor people that build their homes and buildings are insanely poor, beyond poverty. Now I haven’t seen the BCC news on television before, but I read it as my main source of internet news because you can get global news rather than some O.J. Simpson/Britney Spears crap. Why can’t we just replace our news with that, you know “like important stuff, dude.” I suppose if you don’t read or watch the news, and are only focused on a local level you probably don’t think there’s a thing wrong in the world. However, if you take in the larger picture, you quickly realized how fucked we are. I mean that with the best of intentions. We are driving ourselves off the planet. It’s not just that, look at how we treat other people. I don’t mean this in a way that we hurt people’s feelings. I mean we use other people to our benefit with no thought of what harm it has caused them. Genocide, war, stealing of land and destruction of native traditions. I’m not a big believer in the bible, because I’m an educated man, but I’d say we’re ready for the return of Jesus, because the end is coming, and that Jewish Zombie should be arriving any day. Ok, that’s it, I’ve ranted and we can all go back to being happy, ignorant people. [God Bless America](not any of those other heathen countries)
Peak Oil: The follow up
Today at work I tried telling my boss about peak oil. I was confronted with an arrogant amount of ignorance and stubbornness. I told her about peak oil and that down the road it’s going to be major trouble. To that she replied that these so called “experts” can’t be trusted. Look at Greenland, it’s called “green”land because it used to be a very fertile and livable place. So obviously these global warming “experts” must not have a clue. She also said it was “arrogant” to think that we as people can have that much effect on the world. Excuse me? It’s arrogant to believe we can change the environment? She then told me that we’ll just drill somewhere else. It was very obvious at this point that I was not getting my point through. The conversation progressed from the science to the economic difficulties we’ll encounter. To that she replied that we need to worry about China. Ok, fine, China is becoming a powerhouse, but who is helping them? I told her that if she didn’t like the idea of China becoming powerful, then we only have ourselves to blame. She of course disagreed that we had that much of an effect on their economy. All you need to do is go to the U.S. Census Bureau’s website on foreign trade statistics and you can see that trade with China has gone up every year for the last 7 years. But after all it you can’t rely on these experts. I mean why trust someone who has devoted their entire life to the study of a particular field, obviously a lady who drives an Lincoln Navigator and runs a restaurant must know more. On the pollution front she said that we don’t have do try and curb out pollution because compared to China we can’t do anything. That is one of the most arrogant and retarded arguments I’ve heard in a long time. If someone else is stealing, it doesn’t make it right to keep doing it because they are. So, I tried explaining it to her in terms of population growth. It’s simple if you have a shrinking supply of resources and a growing demand there will be tension and the resource will become more valuable, thus causing it to be more expensive. I said we need to conserve and think ahead. All I got out of her was that “The U.S. will only keep getting bigger and better.” I was dumbfounded, mad, frustrated and disappointed all at the same time. How can we as a people go on with such ignorance. Oh, and I think she threw in a comment about the Democrats too somewhere in there. I can understand if you look at the information objectively and come up with your own ideas and opinions, but to discount something as significant as this because you can’t trust “experts” is just asinine and dangerous. Sirbikes might be right, we’re heading over the cliff and no one’s willing to check and see if the brakes work.
The End of Suburbia
I just got out of a film put on by the school as part of their “sustainability” series. it was called The End of Suburbia. I gotta say this was a really cool film. It brought up many good points which include, peak oil, unsustainable housing, over consumption and the downfall of the American dream. Essentially the jist was this. Peak oil is the idea that oil production will peak somewhere around NOW or the near future. With production from then on decreasing and the demand only increasing we will be in serious trouble. Natural gas has the same problem. The Northeast almost ran out of it last winter. Some would say “why don’t we just convert everything over to electric so we won’t have to rely on oil.” Well, how do you get electric? Coal and Natural gas along with some other ways such as Hydro.
The film covered the history of the suburbs from when it was for the affluent who wanted to get out of the city, to when it because a way for more middle class to live away from their jobs and the grime of the city. Back then they had rail cars much like buses that would stop and pick the workers up. Company’s like Standard Oil and GM bought those railways and tore them up to pave roads for their automobiles. Thus started the American dream. Living far from your job and taking a highway to get their in your new car which you were encouraged to by along with other cheap shiny stuff for your new house which eventually have become the McMansions. There was a wide array of speakers in the movie, one even included a former Cheney energy adviser, Matthew Simmons and he adamantly said that peak oil is real and we aren’t doing anything about it except running full speed ahead off the cliff. However, 20-50 years from now oil will become so expensive it won’t be economical to buy it. What do you do when you can’t afford to buy gas to drive your car to work? Or how about heating your home, or even transporting food from southern California to New York so you can have your salads in December. It will all go out the window. Such little things that we all take for granted because of cheap oil. Suburbs will become the new slums because there won’t be a way to support that type of living. Instead multiple use housing will have to start. However, if we don’t start that now it might be too late to begin it when everyone wakes up and realizes this is a problem. What energy will we use to build these homes so it’s affordable. It just won’t be possible to go on living like we live now. Everything as we know it from air condition to driving over to grandma’s house will either have to change or become non-existent. Yet we insist on oil as a cure all. Dare I say we might even be trying to secure all of the untapped oil in Iraq? There are a lot more oil wells in Texas than there are in Iraq…strange. Of course all this doom and gloom doesn’t have to happen. We can start conserving. The UNCW teacher panel tonight insisted that even by little things like turning off lights or turning the ac down or washing with colder water, all are small steps. If we all did that we could make a sizeable impact. They did quite a good job at not only educating but entertaining. We will need to start making an impact or this doom and gloom will come true. We can’t just wait around for some technology to be handed down by Jesus to free us of oil. It’s going to be a hard road full of sacrifices made by everyone. In the end it’s everyone who will suffer so we have a responsibility to start living smarter. Here’s a link to the film’s website. I encourage people to check it out if at all possible. It really gets you thinking.
If the Bills won’t win, at least we have the Sabres!
This is off topic but just as important as all the environmental and political stuff. The Buffalo Sabres and the Pittsburg Penguins will play an outside game in the Ralph. In other words we’re having a hockey game in the snow, in the stadium where the bills play on January 1st. Every game should be played this way. GO SABRES.
Growth for the sake of growth
The earth has roughly 140 million species. Nearly 380 of them disappear each day. And of 140 million, nearly half live in tropical rainforests, the same one’s that are being destroyed day after day, hour after hour. The Amazon rain forest contributes nearly 20% of all our oxygen. Commonly referred to as the “lungs of the planet,” the Amazon rainforest along with its brethren are disappearing at nearly 2 acres a second. Clear cutting for agricultural use is often illegal but goes unchecked. This same clearing for agricultural use is only expedited by logging and mining roads. Much of this logging goes to feed American consumption for wood. We need it for building houses, repair of wooden structures and things like pencils, chopstix and baseball bats. We are the number one importer of tropical woods like mahogany. Brazil alone has 1/3 of the world’s remaining rain forests. It’s also one of the most prevalent destroyers. Much of the forest has been razed for farming, road building, hydroelectric projects and large scale cattle farms. In the past 40 years alone we have destroyed 20% of the worlds rain forests.
Where do we lay blame? Could it be the population and need for more natural resources? In 1950 the world’s population was 2.5 billion. Today it’s 6 billion and by 2010 it will be almost 7 billion with it peaking at 9 billion around 2040. This trend continues until we as a species face a decline in population due to lack of food, much like in the wild. If you look at the world’s consumption needs like water, food, housing. You can infer by the present state of things that we will not be able to keep up with the demand for natural resources. Things like the demand for oil increases while production doesn’t or even declines, to things as basic as water.
Water alone may be one of the biggest problems in 20 years. With much of the worlds freshwater supply melting due to global warming, we might have one of the greatest crisis man has ever faced. Today if you live in a city like Las Vegas they just dam the Colorado River and divert it. But if you live in a poor nation like Bolivia where you get most of your fresh water from glacial melt, you are in serious trouble. Poorer countries like Bolivia who depend on that seasonal meltoff from fresh water won’t have any once the glacier stops it’s ebb and flow cycle and completely melts. Then Bolivia must either buy water, or fight for it. China for example will have the same problem. Just to the north of their border lies some of the largest depositories of fresh water in the world, like Lake Baikal in Russia. Will they just succumb to the fact that they can’t grow? Or will their militaristic instinct take over and attack Russia for their precious water. These are serious issues that everyday folk need to start thinking about. It will be us that impacts this future, not your children or their children. It’s do or die because the world will be a vastly different place in 50 years. Edward Abbey said, “growth for the sake of growth, is the ideology of a cancer cell,” and he was right. I know this all seems a bit far fetched right now, but in 20 years I promise you it won’t. We already have mass extinction on our planet. If we don’t curb either population or the need for resources we will be a part of it.
9/11
Stories like this made me wish I didn’t read the news.
…Well it’s September 11th, 2007. Six years ago I was in high school and remember the day well. I don’t want to dwell on what happened though. It was horrible and one hopes nothing like that ever happens, especially in their own country. After 9/11 I remember this huge outpouring of national pride and the attitude that we would overcome and move on. Move on we have. From 9/11 came the Iraq war and from the Iraq war came the divisive nature of the present politics. We are no more unified today than we were before or immediately after 9/11. Instead I drive around and see little magnetic stickers on cars that say “support our troops” or “God Bless America.” Why not God Bless the world? Take some of your Jesus loving crap and love thy enemy. Or at least try to understand where they come from. It isn’t until we understand the root of radical Islam that we can come to understand how to defeat it. When it only takes one man to blow up fifty, you know you’re in trouble. No army can stop a movement. We could put a million troops in Iraq, and yes we would control it for awhile. But we’re not fighting a country, we’re fighting a movement, and that is something completely different. Even if we defeat it militarily in Iraq, it will pop up somewhere else. This isn’t going to be a military fight in the end, it’s going to be a cultural movement. The only way to defeat it is to change the hearts of the people. To make them love America and the freedom that one can have if they let go of superstitious bullcrap from a thousand years ago. I don’t want to get onto the religion tangent but I’ll let it be known that I think it causes a lot of harm and ignorance. I live in the bible belt so I feel I am at liberty to make that judgment, and I’m sure my minor in religion doesn’t hurt either. The only educated belief is to be agnostic. Anyway, like I was saying I still see these huge SUV’s flying around on the roads and the ignorance that seems to come standard with most southern kids people I’ve met around here. That in no way is a blanket statement, because I’ve met a lot of good people here, but the bad seem to outweigh the good in my book. Even today I wonder how many people took a moment of silence or just thought about what happened in the few minutes of downtime they’ve had. Does America not care anymore? It seems to me that the only reason people care is if someone takes their house away or their cheap, shiny stuff. But, liberty, freedom, the American way? It’s no more. We’ve outsourced it so we can buy our stuff cheap at the cost of future generations. A 90 year old man called into the local radio show this morning. He talked about the racism he used to encounter when he was a young man growing up in Wilmington. However, through all the adversity he persevered and got a job at the port alongside his father. He grew up and all of his 7 kids went to college. All of this background was in relation to the fact that the NAACP is coming here because of a race riot we had over a hundred years ago. This old man rememberd hearing about it from his parents and grandparents. His point was one I thoroughly respected though. Instead of jumping on the NAACP bandwagon he said in effect that people need to stop causing trouble over what happened a long time ago and put that energy into improving the current state of things. The example he gave was that one of his grandchildren said he admired a man in prison because “he was hard.” The older man said he was a hooligan and there was nothing hard about that. Hard was growing up in the south when it was much more racist that today. That was hard. He noted that today’s youth doesn’t need any more opportunity either, there’s plenty of it. They just don’t take the initiative to go out and get it. Today’s generation knows nothing about overcoming adversity like that. I may not know if it first hand but at least I’m aware. The whole tangent about this old man is to prove that long ago people pushed on and made the best out of a bad situation. They didn’t sit around and complain and feel bad for themselves. They made the best out of a bad situation. Instead today, I think most Americans are too complacent, and I honestly believe most won’t do anything to help their fellow countrymen or the world unless it affects them personally. It’s sad, just like today. 9/11 isn’t about Iraq, it’s about America forgetting what makes this country great. I look around campus and see kids in BMW’s and Mercedes, I can only shake my head. It seems anymore we judge a person by their material possessions rather than what they’ve accomplished or learned. It’s a plastic society we’re slowly converting over to. I wish a thought like that was far back in my head on a day like today but I can’t help but think they are somehow interconnected. God(whichever one you think is real) Bless…America…and everyone else. I guess it would be kind of hard to fit that all onto a sticker.
…and another link.
I never want to ride my bike again…for a week.
Quick post - Yesterday I rode my first century with my buddy Justin for an MS fundraiser. I’m not burnt to a full crisp anywhere outside of where my bike shorts or shirt was covering. Somehow I managed not to be sore, probably used up all the lactic acid in my legs just riding. I’m glad I did it, at least I feel some sort of sense of accomplishment. It wasn’t that it was ever really hard at one point, it’s that you sit on the bike all day and after awhile boredom and just plain being uncomfortable sets in, as you realize that you have 40 more miles to go. Anyway it’s done, over - good. I’d like to link a post by sirbikesalot here because I’m too tired/lazy to post. He makes a lot of good points, about the waning oil supply, alternative transportation, and the attitude it’s going to take if people want to change anything so here it is, give it a read and see how you can apply it to your own life. CLICK FOR LINK
Freedom Isn’t Free
Lately I’ve been more consumed by politics more than ever. I just can’t seem to figure out where I fit in. The more I think about it, I don’t want to fit in. I want to decide on each issue as it comes, rather than have to be in one party which has an umbrella over certain ideals. I don’t like the democrats and I don’t like the republicans, but agree with some of their points. It’s hard being independent in this day and age. Especially when most people my age don’t give a second though to politics. I find this so sad. We are privileged enough to be born in America, which I truly believe to be the greatest country on earth. However, I don’t see any appreciation for that privilege. Just to be clear it isn’t a right, it is a privilege. The right to free speech? No, it’s a privilege. If it wasn’t for our soldiers fighting for our freedom we’d have none of it, hell maybe even speak German. I don’t agree with this war completely, but think radical Islam along with the environment are the most important issues on the world stage this day. I hope both of those concerns go away, but it won’t happen unless people start paying attention to whats going on. We all have the ability to change the world for the positive, but many choose to sit back and do nothing. I figure I’ve got 60 years left if I’m lucky, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to waste them sitting around watching a bunch of politicians fill their pockets and do nothing to improve the state of things. As Americans not only do we have the ability to change our country for the better, but also the world. That doesn’t mean we should be starting pre-emptive wars to bring “democracy” to countries. However, we do need to be the change we wish to see. You can’t preach something to someone if you don’t live it yourself. Case and point, Al Gore. As much as I think the guy has brought global warming to the forefront of the environmental movement for everyday people, he does live a life which isn’t in accordance with what he preaches. Sure he buys carbon offsets, but really come on, if you want people to follow you, set an example where you show sacrifice, the same sacrifice you ask other Americans to make. Not all of us are made of money, and being environmentally friendly might only be feasible in the form of using paper instead of plastic bags at the grocery store or riding your bike more. But you know, that’ll make a difference, however small. If everyone made a small change we could collectively do something great. The sad thing about politics and the do nothing generation I’m a part of is that I don’t see that change coming. People my age want to party and hang out. I don’t have any problem with that, I love a good night of drinking and getting rowdy too, but at the same time that should be balanced with the responsibility that comes with being an American. You have a responsibility to make sure your government is doing the right thing. I write this blog more out of frustration than anything. You can rant all you want but who knows what good it will do. Hopefully someday the message will be spread and all we can do is keep spreading it until something happens and people wake up. Until then then, this buds for you.
A picture’s worth a thousand words
Sunday September 02nd 2007, 4:45 pm
Filed under: Day to Day, Shout Outs, Rants, Environment, Poems, Photography, Politics, Travel, Outdoors, Film
The “Economic Growth Index” study gave an ‘F’ to Erie, Niagara, Orleans, Genesee, Allegany and Chautauqua counties, while Cattaraugus and Wyoming counties received a grade of ‘D.’
I completely feel for the folks back home who feel like they can’t get a break. However, when I look at the alternative, a economically thriving area such as Wilmington, North Carolina, I can only shudder at the consequences of a “thriving” economy. The problem seems to be that our economy works on growth. Stagnation is a cancer of the economy. The world we live in is not unlimited. We only have a limited amount of land, water, air and animal/plant life. If our economy aims to keep growing forever and ever there will come a point where there is nothing left to sell but the ruins of old condos and bottled air, presumably owned by Pepsi or Coke. You can preach about it all you want, but to some people it just won’t sink in until it’s too late. They won’t wake up until the last tree has been cut down for a gated development called something like “Long Gone Forest.” I still have a bit of hope people will stop being blind to it, and with the hope feel the responsibility to bring it to people’s attention. It’s the ones that are most blind and careless when it comes to protecting our world that we must give the most attention too. I’ve found more often than not it’s not that people don’t care, but rather they just don’t understand. It’s like when you tell someone of the genocide in Sudan, they might say, “oh that’s horrible” and then go back to watching Jeff Foxworthy’s new game show. But, if you could show them first hand the devastation, I don’t know a single person who wouldn’t try to contribute in some way to stopping it. People do care, they just have to much other junk in the way. Like my buddy over at Jackburnslives.com says, “it’s not the earth that’s in trouble, it’s us.” We’re only a blip on the timeline of earth. We may off it just as soon unless we wake up and start being proactive about protecting the earth and our resources. So today as I went around snapping photos that thought ran through my head and so did and old poem I had to write for class.
A lot can change in twenty years
even a simple cable repair man can see that much.
My view from the top of the telephone pole used
to be refreshing. A flat sand worn landscape
brimming with sea birds and evergreens.
Now plastic condos litter my view
from my crows nest of telephone wire.
They stand in the footprints
of stamped out copper roofed homes.
The four lane road down below hides
the old two lane “county 21.”
The same road that used to carry beat up chevy’s
now fills up with Mercedes and BMW’s.
Hell, you can’t even see the ocean
unless you’re standing on the shore!
They call it “progress”, I think not.
Long ago a man wrote, “the woods are lovely, dark and deep.”
So, with no longer to go before I sleep
I hope to dream of creeper vines reaching over concrete
of trees to shadow the shore
and gulls to roost in the apexes
of mansions long abandoned beside the sea.
