I felt a lot better over the past two weeks, because I hadn't been riding my bike to work at all. Yesterday for this so-called Earth Day I rode both ways and today I'm doing the same. I will be sore all weekend as a result.
Earth Day. Earth Day?
I don't know what to think of this "holiday," considering the ignorance we maintain for the other 364 days. Even still, I personally didn't see anyone change their daily habit yesterday. Trucks were still trucking, roads were still being constructed, laptop computers and iPods were still being charged, and there certainly was no reduction in traffic that I could see. Not a single additional bicyclist was out there, even considering we finally had some decent weather.
All these fossil fuel based lifestyle choices were thrumming along as if they had no bearing on our climate, our local air quality, our endangered dirt shrimp, on our ocean fish stocks. These are such abstract concepts -- peak oil, climate change, poor living arrangements -- that we all ignore them; they don't have any bearing on our lives in the moment.
All any of us wants is to resume our debt-based hyper-consumptive suburban buildout because our jobs are dependent on it, our 401k's are dependent on it, and our only known livelihoods are dependent on it. Our American economy is dependent on the destruction of all remaining local farmlands, dependent on the consolidation of remote farmlands into mega petrochemical dependent agribusinesses, dependent on the building and maintaining of freeways to transport said food items from industrial scaled farms to warehoused processing facilities to your Chinese made forks, and dependent on an ever increasing quantity of sweet Nigerian and Mexican crude to power it all.
The other 364 days of 2010 will be spent wishing for a return to the heady consumptive days of 2005, back when Earth Day was a hollow conceptual idea alongside record SUV production figures, when batterized cars were only in the wet dreams of all our pseudo-environmentalists, those who trekked to the mountains every weekend in their rigs to climb mountains in techno-gear and earned their paychecks in the Bay Area moving digital money from one computer to the next while taking their requisite slices off the top in our digitized service-only economy.
I find the idea of an earth day somewhat meaningless without also taking substantive actions, which we all are failing to do. The best our California Air Resources Board can do under these tough economic times is mandate cooler paint jobs on our cars. Really? This is the end result of 40 years of earth days?
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2 comments:
Go out and kill a really big tree and take it home. To display your love for the planet.
Don't forget to set it in Motor Oil! so it won't die cause oile comes from the earth!
This comment highlights exactly why I believe Earth Day is a meaningless exercise, as it demonstrates that our nation is filed with people like this commentator who maintain a total disregard for correct grammar, for punctuation, or for spelling. People who offer no meaningful rebuttal to arguments. People who offer no objective criticism.
I am most certainly never entirely accurate in my delivery, and yes, I may be somewhat pedantic regarding the comments left by my readers, but Jeez, give me something worthy to respond to motherfucker!
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