So I have to write this paper for geology about sustainable living. You know, "going green" and low carbon footprints and all that jazz.
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In the world of 2009, the pursuit of “green” seems to seek out and infest every sector of our lives. What if I want a new car? The tide of the times urges me to “go green”. And if I want a new toilet? The tide remains constant. Even in line at the grocery store we are presented with the cursory choice to take up our cloth shopping bags and fight for the good of the environment. How do we know that “going green” isn’t just the next buzzword to come out of a marketing machine, but is instead a legitimate chance to preserve a clean Earth? A mixture of common sense and hard science provide us the backbone for the green agenda. Yes, there are alarmists who spout environmental boilerplate ad nauseum, but what does it matter if the end is relatively quick or relatively slow; an end is an end–and this one is avoidable. It is easy to imagine filling one’s own home with trash until it is a noxious hole. It is also easy to envision eating all of the food from one’s refrigerator and then having none left. However, applying these simple concepts to a global scale baffles most minds. How could the Earth be so large and not be limitless? It defies logic for one person to think his actions make any real impact, and in a world with only one person, they wouldn’t. Applied to billions of people, however, it becomes quite a pickle. So how do we motivate people on that scale to change their thinking? Maybe a good buzzword is what we need after all.
