Go Green Intelligently

It wasn't all that long ago, ordinary citizens were defacing privately owned BP gas stations and committing other senseless acts of non-violent boycotts which were driven by media hype and misinformation. All of this behavior was fueled by the uninformed public's misguided frustration over the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Then these senseless acts gave rise to equally misguided calls to action "to raise public awareness" about how we can alter our behaviors to go green and save the planet. "Hands across the Sand" called for people to go to beaches around the world so that people could hold hands in solidarity in an effort to raise public awareness about the horrific environmental impact to the earth resulting from this oil spill. Our beautiful green earth would turn an icky shade of brownish-black if we didn't "do something." No doubt! But the big problem with this otherwise noble cause was there was no clear educational focus regarding what exactly it was that they were raising public awareness about. Not to mention the fact that people would most likely be using their fossil-fueled, petroleum product rich vehicles driven on roads that were paved with petroleum-based products just so they could "hold hands with strangers" who were wearing clothing treated with petroleum-based products who utilized cosmetics and personal hygiene products also made with petroleum-based products. When put into those terms it is clear that there was nothing helpful to the earth or anything "green" about such behavior. Neither were there people cleaning up the beaches, nor was there any public education regarding why the world is really so dependent on crude oil happening once the captive audience got to the designated locations. The whole debacle didn't sound green or helpful to the earth at all. It was actually quite counter-productive.

And then it happened long before Earth Day 2011... I (and others like me) began to promote accurate information regarding the true reasons why the world as we know it is so dependent on crude oil and all of the sudden the focus of going green to save the earth changed from constant rhetoric about using less gasoline to public service messages like "stop drinking bottled water, reuse your plastic bottles by filling them with tap water to go green and save the earth."

Excuse me? I thought that the media told us a few years ago that drinking tap water in the United States would most certainly kill us for one reason or another and that the only way to avoid all sorts of horrible maladies was to buy and drink bottled water, which I rejected from the onset. I thought I was just using common sense and being frugal, not just on Earth Day but on every day. I was going green making every day an Earth Day celebration. I didn't need a Facebook page to tell me to do it, nor some terror-filled TV news broadcast to scare the bejeebers out of me. I'd always known that walking more, taking mass transit and riding a bicycle, etc was better for my health and didn't hurt the earth. I didn't need anyone to tell me that I had to make these "sweeping social changes" to go green or do something to celebrate Earth Day for one day. I just used my common sense and questioned information that didn't seem to make sense to me and adjusted my behavior accordingly.

So as Earth Day approached I found myself asking the question, "Whatever happened to the horrific long-term damage that the BP oil spill caused the entire planet?" As per my previously sited article, I too bought into the media hype that the earth would most certainly be impacted for generations to come as a result of the BP oil spill. But interestingly enough, I hadn't heard a peep about it for many, many months. I did a little research after I realized that crude oil was a naturally occurring substance that occasionally seeped through the layers of the earth and made it up to the surface whether we as humans harvested it or not. And this is what I found sited in an article printed in Science Daily, January 27, 2000 (a decade before most people even knew that offshore drilling for oil has been commonly practiced for nearly 100 years). " Twice an Exxon Valdez spill worth of oil seeps into the Gulf of Mexico every year, according to a new study that will be presented January 27 at the Ocean Sciences Meeting in San Antonio, Texas. " ...the article then went on to cite examples of how NASA was using space technology to more effectively locate the sites of these naturally occurring seepages so as to better surmise offshore drilling locations.

So here is the big newsflash: NASA has known for a long time that oil seeps from the ocean floor all over the planet. They find these places from space by the oil slicks on the ocean's surface that result from these ocean floor seepages.

The article is 10 years old, 30 years after we began celebrating Earth Day and surprisingly enough the general population (including myself) didn't ever know that the planet wasn't going to die if we didn't save it with ridiculous media driven alarmist suggestions that we all go green by doing stupid things.

Hence, my Earth Day promise to go green intelligently. Let's stop and think for a moment. Then let us question the agendas of those who want to capture the spotlight by scaring us to death by proliferating sensational misinformation. The earth has been green for a long time before we all got here and something tells me that the earth is more than capable of remaining green ...especially if we all just use a little common sense.