Earth day?

It is earth day and the college campus where I work is having a celebration, were they are giving out free bottled water and hot dogs and hamburgers on Styrofoam plates, with napkins, plastic forks etc….. Why do people not understand that it is our over consumptive lifestyle that is causing not just our environmental problems but our financial problems as well.




We have lived in an era of abundance for so long that now that we have out grown our ability to extract resources from the earth at a pace that equals our consumption, we are experiencing price increases as a result of raw material scarcity. Not only is our demand out stripping our ability to extract resources but the resources themselves, whether it is fish in the ocean or oil in the ground. But most everyone seems to be in denial about what our problems are and the impact that we as individuals (in first world countries) have upon our environment.



We seem to believe that we can keep buying HD big screen TV’s, iPhones, discarding our last years (still functioning) electronics for new ones, trading our movies on VHS for the same movie on DVD. We do not even think about the conditions in which the people who made these items worked and lived. We tell ourselves lies like “you can live like a king on $5.00 a day in Indonesia” without us ever having been there or even knowing anyone who has lived there. We deny and lie to ourselves about these things because if we ever took the time to look and really think about our impacts we would feel guilty (if we have any empathy left), and we do not like feeling guilty. We do not want to admit that our standard of living is only possible by the exploitation of our fellow human beings, and the only reason that we tolerate this system is that we do not have to see the people we are exploiting.



Thanks to globalization we have moved the wage slavery jobs from our nation to developing countries, we even convince ourselves that building a T-shirt factory in Haiti is a development project and helps Haitians. We fail to simply look at Haiti and ask if they really need a T-shirt factory to increase the income of a few thousand Haitians or agricultural development so they can feed themselves. What we do is use cheap labor and no environmental regualtions or worker safety laws to make cheap t-shirts will flooding the Haitian market with cheap “Food Aid” grain which drives grain prices down causing more farmers to leave their farms and move to the city which lowers wages even more. To further increase the profit margin we “provide” the workers with company housing and a company commissary in which we deduct these costs from their paychecks. Even the cotton that is used in the t-shirts is grown here and exported to Haiti and priced under the local market value due to our very generous subsidies that we pay our farmers. All we have to do to realize this is ask ourselves why we can buy a 4 pack of t-shirts for $10 at Wal-Mart.



As our standard of living has become harder to maintain we have gone from single income families to dual income families, we have outsourced our production capacity to cheapen labor and production costs. We have been sold a bill of goods to consume even more, become more energy efficient by replacing your incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent light bulbs. You never hear that a better way to become energy efficient is to use less light bulbs and less energy. That if you really want to help the environment then don’t buy a new TV or cell phone if your old one still works. Life and business functioned just fine before Blackberries and HD TV’s. If you ask the average Western consumer what they would want more off most will say time. We buy all of types of “time saving” devices but spend the time if any that we gain from using them working to pay for them. We have completely lost touch not only with the earth but also with ourselves.

If you want to really do something to help the Earth, then turn off the TV and read a book, or play outside with your children.