I saw An Inconvenient Truth the other day, aka The Al Gore Movie. The easy thing for me to do would be to say, “it was really good, you should see it.” (There, I did my part.) Or maybe I could point you to the movie’s Web site.
Allow me to go on a brief tangent. The thing I didn’t know going into this movie is that it’s not just about global warming. It’s also about Al Gore’s driving need to make other people understand global warming, feel its urgency, take action. Care. The movie sticks with me more than anything as a testament to how hard it can be to get people to care about what you care about. The challenge of the artist, and of anyone trying to live a meaningful life. The silent prayer of please care. Please please please care.
We should all care, in this case. And so, I challenge each of you to commit to one way you can help the environment. If you’re an artist, think about how you can use your art to make a difference. And hey – if you’re like me and you believe our life is our art…how can your life make a difference?
Think of one thing, and then do it.
My first step is this blog post. Step two is that starting tomorrow, every day for a week I will do at least one thing differently to reduce my impact on the environment. And at the end of the week, I’ll commit to ways I can live differently moving forward.
Stay tuned…
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Related resources:
- The DC Environmental Network from Friends of the Earth
- Info about a recent mayoral forum where citizens proposed an environmental agenda for the city
- The Take Action section of the Inconvenient Truth Web site
- Ideal Bite , a Web site that will email you easy ways to help the planet
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Haven’t seen the movie yet (waiting for video), so I don’t know if the Gorester addresses this one or not, but what freaks me out this week is actually global dimming. (Which your soon-to-be-former employer had an excellent Nova special on last year.)
Read up here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming
The gist is that our airborne pollutants have actually been masking the effects of global warming for years, by blocking the amount of sunlight that actually enters the atmosphere. Removing the airborne pollutants (like switching from leaded to unleaded gas for example) is removing that barrier, so global warming speeds up. It’s been suspected for a while, but the lack of air traffic following 9/11 allowed for the first real emperical data collection. In effect, things like the Clean Air act and other non-Greenhouse specific cleanup efforts are actually killing us faster.