Earth Day should not be recognized only one day a year but every day! Probably one of the most aware groups of people in the past was the American Indians and the Chinese who recognized that it was their responsibility to be the stewards of planet Earth.
The Chinese believed to leave as small of a footprint on other lands when they visited. Unlike the Europeans and Russians who always left a BIG footprint on every piece of land they touched with giant forts and monuments. The Chinese had one of the largest fleets, greater in numbers than the combination of the Spanish, British and Dutch fleets. Yet, you don’t see the Chinese footprint.
Some of the Mayan pottery may reflect some of the Chinese and Japanese designs, but that’s about it. Of course, today, we meet a Chinaman no matter where you go on this planet.
The point is, one can have advanced technologies, take care of the planet, and not leave a giant footprint everyplace we go.
Since the industrial revolution in the 1900s, man has progressively made bigger and more unacceptable footprints behind every major development of his technologies, dumping toxic chemicals down into the rivers and lakes, testing nuclear weapons, the wanton construction of nuclear power plants, without a single solution to mitigate the tonnage of nuclear waste that is produced daily. As a matter of fact, this irresponsibility has hit the pinnacle with politicians making the statement “we are relegating this problem to the future generations.” In other words, they don’t have to handle their pollution now; the future generations will have to deal with it, so therefore, if we have no pollution to deal with, it’s considered “green” today. So we see nuclear power plants being pushed and promoted as clean technologies, when, in fact, they are the most toxic pollution imaginable!
Plastics
Since the 1950s, when we started to make plastics, just about every single particle of plastic that has ever been made still exists with us today somewhere; in the landfills, in the rivers, and in the oceans. Today, we have giant plastic islands with the combined mass greater than the continent of Africa. And this only accounts for 20% of the plastic that is in the ocean. The remaining 80% has sunk to the bottom. How in the world are we ever going to clean up that much plastic?
It is time that we think about our pollutions in order of magnitude. In other words, we need to correctly estimate the actual effort, technology, cost that is required to clean up all of these serious pollutions which, for the last 50 to 100 years , has been simply neglected to be handled. Fifty years of trash that doesn’t degrade on a planet which has 6.8 billion people is a lot of trash.
Estimation of effort must be honestly confronted, or we will never arrive at a solution that has any significance whatsoever. Take a look at today’s recycling programs and we have recycled less than 2% of the plastics, none of the nuclear waste, and once the toxic chemicals are dumped into the rivers, they too are not recycled or converted into non-toxic forms. These are issues that need to be addressed and the individual companies, which are producing these, need to be held accountable; they can’t keep making profit at the expense of everybody else and everything else.
It is time that governments, corporations and private individuals need to cooperate in the joint venture of cleaning up the one and only playing field we all have and return it back to its previous pristine and clean state. And don’t think for a moment that we do not have such technologies. I assure you that these technologies do exist, but most are suppressed or are simply unfounded because someone hasn’t figured out how to make more money on it.
So you see, the problem is really man, not technology. Earth Day needs to be extended far beyond the Earth Week, but an Earth Year! And we should not stop this activity until we have fully returned our playing field back into a state where each and every one of us can be proud of what we have achieved and what we can pass on to the future generation. There should be no compromise in such a viewpoint. We need to all work together!
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