Recently Newsweek’s cover article was about global warming nay-sayers and big business’ role in perpetuating skepticism about human caused environmental damage. The article likened the public relations behind the attack on the science of climate change to tobacco industry’s long time denial of the risks associated with smoking. It was very interesting, but I left the article thinking—Who cares if human being’s responsibility in global warming can be definitively, scientifically proven or not? The indisputable fact is that forests and other natural land and animals are being destroyed unnecessarily all the time, and pollution of all kinds plagues us. Those are sufficient reasons to reduse, reuse and recycle, even if global warming is in fact a ‘hoax.’
Then I read a fascinating and personal account of the climate changes happening in the Arctic by wayfarerscientista. She ends the post by offering the idea that ‘global warming’ is not a technically accurate description of what is happening in the environment, and that the term obfuscates a serious problem with its cuddly and cozy word choice. Both the Newsweek article in its description of big business smear campaign on global warming and wayfarerscientista’s blog entry’s revelation of the psychological impact of environmental terminology made me fear that the latest risk to the environment is the attack on what we know to be true. At the very least however, these things made me want to get as practical as possible in a time when I had begun to fly off into the land of negativity and rants about why its is that this country has the worst train system of all the first world.
So here goes—a couple of questions: How long is it reasonable to use a sponge? Are there any other longer lasting dish-washing tools? Garbage bags—what are some less wasteful ideas for waste? And speaking of waste, I live in an apartment—does anybody have any ideas for what I could do with organic waste? I’d love to hear some tips to get me back on a practical, positive track!
The Skeptics August 28, 2007
Activism? Moi? July 15, 2007
Here’s a confession. I am not a politically active person. Actually, it’s not really a confession because anyone who knows me would tell you that. It’s more of a confession to myself because I feel bad about it. Sometimes I don’t even vote if it’s not a presidential year. That hurt to write. Ok, moving on. The reason I’m bringing this up is that working on making small pro-environment changes in my everyday life and letting other people know about them in this blog has made me want to do SOMETHING out there in world of policy, a world I know nothing about. My first politically active thought was that I wanted to get involved in an advocacy group for public transportation in L.A. Not being a politically active type; I didn’t know where to start. I looked on the internet, and, being a very easily sidetracked researcher as well as a not politically active person, got mired down in all sorts of train enthusiast sites. Some of them are pretty cool by the way. Anyhoo, there were two people outside of Whole Foods the other day asking for people to join CALPIRG—CALPIRG whose current project is advocacy for public transportation in L.A.! I’ve never been so excited to be canvassed! Here’s the website in case anybody else is inclined to give them support. www.calpirg.org Incidentally, if you don’t live in CAL, many other states have PIRGS (public interest research groups), that, from what I can tell, do great work.
