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The old button from the Environmental Club days which I just happened to find on Earth Day! It is a little beat up (particularly the ends of the ribbon), but no worse for the wear, I think. And it is one of the few items that I have left from those days, so it carries a lot of great memories for me! Nothing Changes Until You Do!
Here is a picture of a very similar logo, with the same message, that was on the t-shirt that I purchased from the BCC Environmental Club and, if memory serves me correctly, may even have helped to make. There were a few projects like that which club members, myself included, were regularly involved with. It has been so long, however, that I no longer recall specifically if I actually helped to make these or not, although I do believe so, since I remember seeing the process of the t-shirts being dyed. In any case, I loved this t-shirt, and have kept it ever since, even if I do not regularly wear it. Since it was part of my experience with the BCC Environmental Club days, as well as more generally having an environmental theme, it seemed appropriate to share it here.
"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's greed."
~Mahatma Gandhi
"Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future."
~John F. Kennedy
Here in the United States, we seem to want to liken everything to war. We have had the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on illiteracy. We talk about the possibility of war all of the time, and we sure seem to like to fight in a lot of wars. Clearly, we spend a hell of a lot of money preparing for wars, and we really enjoy the war toys that the military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about provides for us.
Hell, we even like to use war references for our favorites sports and games. This is especially true for our most popular sport of football. Comedian George Carlin famously pointed out these comparisons. We call a seasoned quarterback a "field general," and we suggest that the players are "in the trenches." There are numerous terms in American football that are borrowed directly from war, such as "blitz" and "touchdown" and "defense."
We also like to think that we are winning these wars that we fight, even though we do not always win. We did not win in Vietnam, and it can be argued that, more recently, we did not really win in Iraq or Afghanistan, either. We did not really win the war on drugs and, in fact, the strategy that we employed to try and win it - harsh sentences for those caught with drugs - has become an embarrassment, as we have more people behind bars for nonviolent offenses than any other country in the world.
Well, there is another war that we are losing, although I am not entirely sure that Americans even knew that they were fighting it. That is the war on climate change, and because so many Americans were not aware that we were fighting it, we are apparently not doing well. Hell, the problem is that so many Americans do not realize that this is a fight worth investing in.
But collectively, we would rather be distracted by keeping up with the Kardashians, say, or basking in the light of other distractions. Many of the beauty products that celebrities like the Kardashians push on us are absolutely detrimental to the environment, as are the burgers that we so love eating. The energy that we waste, as well as the food that we waste, is also contributing to the fact that we are losing this war on climate change.
Let's face it: perhaps the biggest, yet least seen, problem in the United States today is that we are, far and away, the most wasteful society that the world has ever seen. We fill our landfills with single-use plastics. We waste 40 percent of our food, which goes unconsumed, while millions around the world starve. We waste electricity, we waste money, we waste precious resources on frivolous things. And in the process, we are wasting our natural resources. Hell, we are even wasting the easy access to knowledge that a vast majority of Americans have, and indeed, we have earned a reputation as being generally far more ignorant than we should be. Let's face an even grimmer truth: we are far more comfortable with that ignorance than we should be.
Not really a shock, then, that we are losing this war on climate change. We do not take it seriously, and take such a blasé attitude towards that, that our collective efforts as a nation - if they can even be defined as real efforts on a national level - are laughable when compared to other countries. Even tiny Iceland, with a population significantly smaller than the smallest state in the union, is leading the mighty superpower known as the United States in alternative energy development.
How depressing, And how embarrassing.
But it is a sign of the times, and once that we cannot afford to forget or ignore.
Here is a link to an article by John Sutter of CNN that discusses this a bit further:
We're losing the war on climate change Analysis by John D. Sutter, CNN, April 22, 2019:
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