You're damn right it's inconvenient.

[captainsblog]

Earth Day began with our water pressure seeming low, for some reason. I noticed it in the shower and then again while doing the washing-up of the dinner dishes. Rather than Thinking Globally about how lucky we are to even have water pressure (and we came within an hour of not having any at the worst point of our October storm), or even Thinking Locally about whether there were now distribution problems in our neighborhood, the only one I could think of was Me. Mi-mi-mi-mi-miiiii! it's all about my needs. And the more you have four billion people taking that attitude, the worse things are going to get.

Yeah, you can blame it all on the usual suspects, who Al Gore is quick to identify in that movie of his (our adult church discussion group watched the first third of it this morning)- the power plants, the gas guzzling cars, the invested politicians who just won't listen. Yet we're all suspect in this, I think. Here are some on my Most Unwanted List in addition to them:

* China and India and the other countries who are permitted under Kyoto to pollute their little brains out just because it's only fair to let them have a turn now.  That treaty would stand a much better chance of gaining acceptance in this country if that bit of hypocrisy got removed from it.

* The people like me who talk a good game but still do more than 90 percent of our driving in one-occupant cars. Also, the others my age who, on paper, believe in conservation and alternative energy sources, but who will commit vehicular harikari in the parking lot of their gym so they won't have as far to walk to get to their workouts.

* Local politicians, such as the ones in charge of our downtown waterfront. They talk about creating green space, and then not only pollute that space with a big-box retailer (this part I could take) but compound that offense by surrounding the thing with four, countem FOUR, green-eating parking ramps. They do this because, urban planners will tell you, people won't walk more than two blocks from their car to go anywhere downtown. Well, yeah, but those same people will walk more than twice that distance across a shopping mall parking lot just to get to its nearest door, and then many times that distance within the mall, because the developers have, duh, developed little mental tricks to make those distances seem shorter. Why can't our urban developers do the same?

* And yes, our children, the ones we're supposed to be saving the planet for, according to Gore and his friends (and trust me, from watching 30 minutes of that movie, Gore has a LOT of friends. They include the late Dr. Carl Sagan, and too-many-to-count climatologists and researchers- with all those buds, it's a wonder how he ever made the time to invent the Internet;). Those children may have cut their teeth on Captain Planet, but almost every one of them was making deposits at the other end of their digestive tracts into landfill-bound Pampers that are still waiting to decompose. (Yes, I can say that; we were among the last holdouts to use cloth diapers, despite constant pressure from Emily's caregivers to switch, and her service went out of business soon after we ceased needing it.) They sing songs about saving Mother Earth, yet they're just as bad as we ever were about leaving lights on and wasting food and expecting on-demand taxi service from the 'rents no matter how much greenhouse gas results. Earth Day is just another holiday that gets noticed, and talked and preached about, without the connection really being made about what it means to live it rather than just observe it. That's sad, but it's also inevitable.

My friend Penny, who until recently worked for an environmental services company, preached the Earth Day message today, and ended it with this story from Chicken Soup for the Soul. It spoke far more to me about the meaning of the day than Gore's puffed-up pronouncements ever will:

A friend of ours was walking down a deserted Mexican beach at sunset. As he walked along, he began to see another man in the distance. As he grew nearer, he noticed that the local native kept leaning down, picking something up and throwing it out into the water. Time and again he kept hurling things out into the ocean.

           As our friend approached even closer, he noticed that the man was picking up starfish that had been washed up on the beach and, one at time, he was throwing them back into the water.

           Our friend was puzzled. He approached the man and said, "Good evening, friend. I was wondering what you are doing."

           "I'm throwing these starfish back into the ocean. You see, it's low tide right now and all of these starfish have been washed up onto the shore. If I don't throw them back into the sea, they'll die up here from lack of oxygen."

           "I understand," my friend replied, "but there must be thousands of starfish on this beach. You can't possibly get to all of them. There are simply too many. And don't you realize this is probably happening on hundreds of beaches all up and down this coast. Can't you see that you can't possibly make a difference?"

           The local native smiled, bent down and picked up yet another starfish, and as he threw it back into the sea, he replied, "I made a difference to that one!"

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[headbanger118.livejournal.com]

A note about SUV's. I live in a rural community where AWD or 4WD is often a necessity. So, I found the most economical and gas friendly AWD I could. My question is...WHY do I keep seeing Hummers driving in downtown Charlotte?