Why Being Green Matters
Look at the world today.
Cod are rarely if ever found in Boston Harbor anymore, and if you are lucky enough to catch the one salmon allowed per fisherman each day in Puget Sound you need to worry about how much mercury it contains. Iceland still kills plenty of whales while the Japanese hide behind ridiculous claims that they need to murder these magnificent creatures in the name of science. All the while whale meat is for sale in downtown Tokyo.
Aside from our own health, what does it say about modern society when every resident Killer Whale in Puget Sound is so full of industrial toxins that the entire group is dying a slow death, unable to reproduce enough healthy offspring to keep the family growing. Or how about the dead beluga whales who are so full of toxins that disposal crews must wear haz-mat suits when removing their carcasses from the beach? Industrial defenders would like you to think occurrences like these are one in a million, but the sad truth is that similar problems can be found all the way up and down the aquatic food chain, from plankton to polar bears.
Take a peek at what is happening beneath the waves in Chesapeake Bay, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the South Pacific, or in almost any large body of water, and the scene is bleak. In almost every commercial fishery around the world, the current population of marine organisms is over 90% less than it once was. 90%! Most of this decimation has been caused by overfishing of course – a topic we won’t be delving into very much here – but a good deal of the problem lies in the unhealthy water marine animals are now forced to occupy.
This blog is not going to try to solve all the world’s problems. Plenty of great books exist that can enlighten you on these big questions. What we will try to do, however, is point out why you should be green in your little hole in the water.
No matter how you look at it, this planet we live on is a closed system. The only thing that gets in is a life- sustaining dose of sunlight. Other than some of this light bouncing back into space, a little heat, and some upper atmosphere gases, everything else that is made, used, and disposed of on Earth stays on Earth.Mankind is the only member of Nature, and yes we are animals after all, that has created an unsustainable way of life. Everywhere else in the natural world organisms live and die in harmony with the planet. Non-human organisms grow, nourish themselves, create recyclable waste, reproduce, and in death, release their vital elements back into the sytem.
The circle of life works - it has allowed life to flourish on this planet for millions of years. And yet, human beings have somehow forgotten the rules. We produce an overwhelming volume of toxins and wastes that harm the system. More on this later, but how advanced can we really claim to be when we alone are poisoning everyone and everything around us?
Being green can take many forms, but at the heart of it all, being green means trying to live our lives as members of the circle of life. While we may try to convince ourselves that Man has evolved beyond the necessity of adhering to these basic rules, in the end, the logic and processes of a closed system are bound to catch up to us if we don't.
