On Thu, Apr 23, 1998 at 02:03:24PM +0000, Ari Saarto wrote: > I think that claiming international > companies, governments, power boaters etc. is in a way almost the > same as avoiding personal responsibility: "not me, them first!" I don't think so at all. I take responsibility for what I do: I recycle, I drive a high-mileage car, I telecommute as much as possible (which is far more difficult than you might imagine), I pull lots of trash out of rivers, I belong to American Rivers, the Sierra Club, I write letters to congresscritters, and on and on. But short of locking myself indoors -- and even that's not sufficient -- I *will* have an impact on the environment around me. And every day that goes by I consciously try to minimize it...while recognizing that reducing it to zero is impossible and is thus a pointless goal to pursue. (While "making it less than it is now" is a realistic and worthwhile goal.) HOWEVER...the conservation that a lifetime of my best efforts can produce can be undone in a single day by one sufficiently large entity. In fact, this happens on a consistent, annoying daily basis. Everywhere. So if you're looking for targets to assail, yes, ABSOLUTELY *them* first. If you're truly interested in cleaning up the environment and conserving what's left of it, then start with the biggest culprits first and work your way down the list. That approach takes the biggest bites up front, and does the most good in the shortest time. By that reckoning, I figure I'm several million down the list. So worrying excessively about me, or people like me, doesn't make any sense. Not when there are far bigger fish to fry...which is where my efforts are directed. ---Rsk Rich Kulawiec rsk_at_gsp.org *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List Submissions: paddlewise_at_lists.intelenet.net Subscriptions: paddlewise-request_at_lists.intelenet.net Website: http://www.gasp-seakayak.net/paddlewise/ ***************************************************************************Received on Thu Apr 23 1998 - 14:24:58 PDT
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