Environmentally-friendly . . . blah, blah, blah. We've heard about it and we nod and smile in mere recognition with an abstract awareness of something that is supposed to be a good thing.
The reality is that most of us have good intentions. But don't good intentions pave the road to hell? Yeah sure, we buy those nifty light bulbs, and we're mostly good at recycling. We follow popular culture and its media swoon which makes "environmentally friendly" the new, ubiquitous, poorly defined slang-du-jour. We'll buy something if it is colored brown and green and says it is "environmentally friendly" on the label without really understanding what makes a product environmentally friendly or that those words (and packaging color scheme) are the hottest marketing trends since the word "healthy" or the completely invented food category called "all natural."
Casting good intentions aside, is it actually possible to ACTUALLY BE climate-smart? Climate Pilots is an interesting live snapshot of 4 households who are actually trying to BE "environmentally friendly" utilizing those words as a VERB and not merely descriptive adjectives. These individuals are actively learning (yes, key words in this sentence) what it means to learn how and why to life a climate-smart lifestyle through direct lessons in food, time usage, energy, and transportation.
So, which Environmental Bandwagon - which "eco-friendly" bus would you like to take? The one that has pretty colors and media catch phrases, or the one that forces you on a learning journey to understand our finite planet and our daily actions and provides for you a discerning eye through which to make sound, qualified decisions?
Follow the Climate Pilots, and learn along with them as they grow in awareness of what it means to use "environmentally friendly" as an action verb.
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In 2009, "Global" became the most bantered, misunderstood, and most overused adjective. We have "global challenges" that require "global agreements" with "global alliances."
Janet Daley thinks that "global" thinking won't necessarily solve the world's problems.
Thinking of problems in a global context endangers the fundamentally basic principles of accountability - the accountability of our own actions to our immediate environments, and the accountability of our elected officials to our country and with our engagement with other world leaders.
There are no "global challenges." Many countries and many individuals may face the same issues. Labeling a challenge or an impending issue as a "global" one means that we assume that my contributory actions are the same actions of everyone who faces the same issue, that my reparative responses must be identical to the responses of everyone else in every other country, and that we must have a 100% consensus of agreement to which remedial responses every country on the planet will choose -- regardless of the differences in our societies, our political governance, or our cultural norms and values.
The idea that our elected officials might not necessarily need to take action because an issue is a "global challenge" is scapegoat with a capital S.
Requiring "global responses" to our impending issues leads to an apathetic "Well it's not MY fault!" mentality. If my country doesn't agree with Zimbabwe, and if Zimbabwe doesn't agree with Israel, and Israel doesn't agree with Columbia - then neither Zimbabwe, Israel, or Columbia should take any corrective action yet to resolve our "global issues" until they all agree.
Regardless of the adjective-du-jour, the bottom line is that we are ALL ACCOUNTABLE FOR OUR OWN ACTIONS.
No clever shift in linguistics will ever absolve us of that fundamental fact. On the home front, we are equally apathetic. We know what problems face our society and we wait to employ better, corrective decisions in our daily lives while our elected leaders attend world summits.
Climate change, high obesity rates, bank collapses, the mortgage crisis . . . . . . . . What have we do to contribute to these problems and what are we going to do to take corrective action? At home? In our businesses? In our neighborhoods?