Sunday, April 27, 2008 Sun.Star Essay: How on earth By Erma M. Cuizon
“did the planet get this way?
How on earth…
are we gonna change our ways?”
THIS is a global-warming song all of us should be singing, in the midst of the climate crisis, as many people must have sang last Tuesday in celebration of Earth Day. But the next time we sing it would be on the next Earth Day in 2009? By then, the sea level will be higher and islets will start to submerge, the world elsewhere will be much, much hotter.
An American senator passed an Earth Day law on his realization in 1970 that the world has been careless about the only earth it has and ever will have. Then senator Gaylord Nelson organized the first Earth Day with one thing in mind---to develop an “environmental teach-in” so there would be instilled in people the need to move and do something about it. Environmental laws were, thus, passed by the American Congress, including the Clean Air Act.
The former US vice-president Al Gore came along with his movie “An Inconvenient Truth” and Oprah Winfrey, in her own hear-ye effective way, piped in. In these days world-wide, columnists, television and radio commentators and hosts talk about the climate crisis at one time or another in the midst of news on tsunamis, landslides, earthquakes, melting glaciers, cracked ground, etc. But the talk isn’t in our local radios, not at the corner store where barkada clusters stay up until midnight, not in “real life.”
And even if people are aware now of the danger brought on by raging climate changes, do they know what to do?
Exactly how many people on earth get it?
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) had a recent celebration in Manila of pre-Earth Day with pretty young girls walking around almost naked in front of Quiapo church, except for lettuce leaves covering the boobs and the front. A friend reacted when he was told that pretty girls, kind of wrapped in lettuce, went about spreading the message of preserving the earth. He said, “Wow!”
But if we were to explain the earth’s condition in terms of the CO2s, or “carbon footprints,” as some environmentalists put it, will we get somewhere?
The ordinary man in the street would rather give it to the scientists or one Al Gore (is he an environmental savant, asked our neighbor Antonio) who has a disaster movie entitled something and some kind of Truth.
Not to talk of some groups who’d use the climate crisis for political militancy, there are now more people talking about it, hopefully on to action. That is, if the message is understood.
Each of us, we’re only one and small. But our number and our smallness, when added up, could make a difference and save the world for the next generations. And the best way to make this happen is to keep talking about it until people listen.
It won’t happen if we are alone. Community leaders must be in it, and business for changes in lifestyles. Barangay officials must talk about the climate crisis, also the school could do it, and the church, please.
Take a small step, begin in a small way, by refusing to use plastic bags, and instead, bring along a cloth-bag for groceries which local manufacturers could be inspired to begin making or resurrect Grandma’s paper bags. The plastic bags not only clog landfills but harm marine wildlife.
With the help of local researchers, we would be made aware of which food packaging uses plastic that are mostly petroleum-based. You’d look back to Grandma’s time when food was generally unpackaged, or minimally so.
Let’s not add to about a trillion plastic bags used worldwide each year.
Reform advocates make sure that people know what to do, not just to listen. They say, for instance, that if every American house uses five fluorescent bulbs, instead of five regular light bulbs, it would be equal to having a million cars less in the highway for a full year. And this means a lot in reducing carbon dioxide emissions to keep the earth breathing.
