Living In It. Living On It.

August 7, 2007

Hail in Baguio. Hellish weather in Manila. Torrential rains in Bangladesh, India and China.

There must be some kind of explanation why the weather is crazy nowadays. For instance, here, the rainy days have long been delayed. At a time when the country is usually struck with a number of tropical storms already, the weather is still hot and humid. In other parts of the globe, people are dying of flashfloods when we are suffering from drought. Talk about weird weather.

Not really.

Scientists have alerted governments around the world of the thinning ice caps – a clear indication of Global Warming. The sea level is rising and global temperatures are steadily climbing. This phenomenon is caused by the increase of “greenhouse” gases that traps heat in the atmosphere. The most common of these gases is carbon dioxide. The levels of this gas have considerably increased since the pre-industrial period. Since global warming is unnatural, the environment is behaving just as rationally as it is agitated, thus, the oddities of weather occurrences around the globe.

One can then easily surmise that the ultimate cause of global warming is industrialization. However, industrialization is not at all bad. It’s a natural process taken by mankind on the road to development. So let me qualify that previous statement. One must be able to surmise that the ultimate cause of global warming is reckless industrialization.

It is too sad that we are one of the first signatories of the Kyoto Protocol aimed to take an active stance on climate change yet we are one of the last to abide by its principles. We are no better, maybe even worse, than the United States who did not sign the treaty at all. Ironic? No, it’s hypocrisy.

The reason why the US did not sign the treaty is that, in agreeing to actively reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere, this industrialized nation will have to look for more expensive sources of energy other than the cheaper fossil fuels whose combustion by-product is carbon dioxide. In so doing, its industrial operations will be adversely affected. Operational costs will soar. Prices of goods and commodities will increase. Consumption will decrease. The economy, the biggest in the world, will slow down. So, they might be thinking, why compromise its global economic position when it can let the rest of the nations tackle global warming and it will just be business as usual for them. Let’s take a minute and pray that a hole in the ozone layer will open up over the White House and over the US Congress.

If our government can not impose laws that will protect the environment and avert a “Day After Tomorrow” scenario, then we should at least do our part. There are a lot of simple things we can do to save the environment: refuse stores to wrap your goods in plastic, recycle office paper, do away with styrocups that stay in the environment for over 500 years, plant trees. Being an environmentalist myself, I remember once in a fastfood joint asking the manager why they still serve meals in styro containers. During my stint in my former employer, I even conducted a study on office resource consumption and found out that we were consuming about 187,000 styrocups a year! Imagine that.

One of my findings in that study is that styro containers lose weight after use. Meaning, part of it goes into your body. Polystyrene, which dissolves with heat, is taken in together with your hot drink or meal. Try having your fat tissues tested for trace and you’ll find out you have traces of this chemical in your body. In considerable amounts, this causes damage to the nervous system. So are you feeling a little twitchy lately?

The environment is where we get our food, the energy we need to go on with our daily activities, fuels for our cars and power plants. It is where we get the air we breath. It sustains life and it is where we live. But at the pace we’re going, we’re devouring it, chunk by chunk. We are living on it rather than living in it. There is not another earth within the nearest galaxy. So we might as well take care of it. Let’s not wait until hell literally freezes over before we do something.

If each of us can plant even one tree in our lifetime, then all of us would have planted 8 billion trees for the next generation. When one asks you “why are your nails dirty?” Wouldn’t it be nice to answer “Coz I planted a tree for you.”