Today is Blog Action Day, a day for bloggers around the world to unite for the benefit of the environment.
Now I have been an environmentalist for about 20 years. I began studying ecology in the early 90’s and have supported Heal the Bay, The Surfrider Foundation and others for most of that time. I strongly believe in taking care of our local communities, especially the natural beauty we Bendites are lucky enough to be surrounded by, and also preserving and bettering the environment on a larger scale.
Having said that, I find it highly ironic that Al Gore won the Nobel Prize (or a share of it) on the same weekend a British judge ruled his iconic, “An Inconvenient Truth,” to be inappropriate for school children as a, “science film,” (he labeled it a “political film”) due to a preponderance of, “inconvenient untruths,” many of which were exposed in an equally enthralling documentary.
I’m also greatly frustrated by the massive response to the THEORY that the earth is warming and that it is man-made while the FACT that our country is heading for financial ruin receives relatively little attention. Don’t get me wrong, I realize that the environment is obviously more important to us as human beings than the country’s eroding currency and twin deficits. We can live without dollars. We can’t live underwater.
But isn’t a certain generational storm over the next few decades at least as important as a, “likely,” environmental calamity a millennia away? Isn’t an Incontrovertible Truth at least as dire as an Inconvenient Hypothesis?
To me it feels like watching a car crash in slow motion and being more worried that the cars are not hybrids than for the lives of the passengers.
So I ask, “where’s Pete Peterson’s Nobel Prize?”
LIV