On Fri, Apr 24, 1998 at 02:01:29PM -0600, Eric Shearer wrote: > It is time everyone quit pointing the finger at others and be more > concerned with doing our OWN part in ECO CARE! I would absolutely love to chime in here with a cheery "YES!". But I can't. Because while you and I and probably just about everyone reading this are concerned (to varying degrees, to be sure, but concerned nevertheless) with the environment, there are a lot of people out there who aren't. Some of them are simply clueless: they buy 18 MPG SUV's to make trips to the grocery store; they throw out their newspapers instead of recycling them; they try to grow beautiful Kentucky bluegrass lawns in arid areas; and so on. They simply need some gentle (okay, sometimes not-so-gentle) education in order to get them to start, little by little, to do their part for the planet. It's painful, it's annoying, it's irritating, it's maddeningly slow...but it does seem to pay off. Then there are the willfully destructive: the people who dump mine runoff into rivers (e.g. the Cheat River case, which has resulted in a criminal conviction, among other things), the people who destroy habitats for suburbs and shopping malls; the people who throw their garbage down ravines instead of in the dump; and so on. These people need to be hit across the face with a legal/economic/social 2x4 that has "think globally, act locally" written on it. In neither case, however, will either group of people be reached if you and I turn gaze totally inwards. It is necessary for us to act beyond our own personal space if we are to truly have an impact. Which is why I *can* and *do* point the finger at people that I think are responsible for damaging the environment. That activity has *nothing* to do with my own environmental impact, nor is it an attempt to escape personal responsibility for it; it is simple an attempt to put the focus on the biggest, nastiest, ugliest, meanest targets first. ---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 Fri Apr 24 1998 - 14:16:46 PDT
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