Five Things You Can Do on Earth Day to Fight Global Warming

No. 1: Take a Time Out to Think About Greening Your Life

With Earth Day taking place tomorrow, we're down to the final day of our week-long countdown. Our top strategy for changing the world is an outwardly simple but inwardly complex one: Carve out some quiet time to contemplate change.

It might be a good idea to time yourself: Set your watch or buzzer for 15 minutes. Now 15 minutes doesn't sound like a very long time, but in "meditation years" it's an aeon. No interruptions, just silence. Perhaps in your back yard with the robins and chickadees providing background music. Perhaps in a park or on a hiking trail. Or maybe just sitting in your car in the parking lot (not the ideal place, but it might provide a more urgent catalyst if you take a look around!).

The idea here, as it has been all week, is to get everyone to start thinking about change. Why does this seem like such a big deal? Because as you go through your day, notice the little things that contribute to global warming and how easy they would be to avert, if people just thought about their impact.

I can remember, when I started my career, how smoking in the office was a given and if you questioned it, you were a pariah. I can remember how littering was a God-given right, and if you picked up after someone you were a prig. Well today we don't smoke in the office, but we're smoking up the atmosphere. We don't litter our streets, but we're littering the planet. Things have to change, and the record shows they can.

In providing our Five Ways to FIght Global Warming, we've admittedly focused on individual solutions. The rejoinder of course is that it will take more than individual action to really bring about the apocalyptic change needed to reverse climate disruption. And getting a capitalistic, greed-driven, limitless-growth corporate infrastructure to move off the dime is a far more daunting task than asking metro dwellers to please compost their garbage.

So yes, we have to work on that front too. Institutional change happens slowly, but everything from the "Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without" motto of the Depression to the Arab oil embargo of the '70s teaches us that when leadership comes from the top, Americans can respond. In California just four years ago electricity consumption dropped by as much as a third after rolling blackouts struck the state (falsely, yes, at the hands of the Enron scammers; but the point is nonetheless valid). We waste a lot, especially at the institutional level. Pare the waste and we have a whole new ballgame.

Have we gotten too spoiled, indolent and soft -- individually as well as institutionally -- to reverse our profligate ways? Whether the American Dream ethics of pioneering spirit, rugged individualism and old-fashioned moxy still exist can be debated on talk shows till the airways sag. The difference on Earth Day 2006 is this: We're about to find out.

-- Paul Andrews, GreenforGood

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