Barack Obama openly condemns BP's handling of Deepwater Horzion's 'leak'. Caroline Lucas takes Brighton and succesfully pushes Green issues into the limelight under the glare of the UK 2010 elections. Is 2010 to be a Green year? It is not without a slight wry smile and a huge dollop of irony that a giant like BP should be the courier to deliver climate change to the forefront of the news but, when you think about it, I suppose it was always going to be like this - fate is not without a sense of humour. Environmentalists have been waiting for a fuck-up this catastrophic to cash in on (unashamedly, and rightly so) to harness the sheer power disasters like this can hold. Images of thousands of gallons of oil covering the Gulf, birds literally entombed in the thick black sludge and the reports from the many thousands whose lives depend on the ecosystems that thrive in the Gulf has brought the kind of 'blitz spirit' seen during natural disasters like Haiti's earthquake.
My own personal journey, and my decision to start this site, was spurred on by the recent election and a growing awareness of the world around me - that had to come from somewhere. A general sense of apathy is, and probably always will be, the greatest enemy of these kind of issues. Problems that, for the most part, we cannot yet touch, taste or see for ourselves means that even though most left-wing among us draw a line somewhere between 'being green' and wanting that new Range Rover - it's a tricky equation to balance, and one that few can honestly say they've solved. These issues will, of course, only grow to become more pronounced, more damaging and ultimately become irreversible. (check out the film Age of Stupid http://www.ageofstupid.net)
So how does it help when I blog and tweet about growing runner beans in my garden and deciding which brand of washing powder to use? I cannot express how vital these kind of changes are. Until we take a step back and look at what we can do ourselves, how can we ever expect multi-billion dollar companies to do the same? On a base level, if I'm not prepared to give up something, or change my lifestyle to suit the needs of the environment than how can I expect [insert oil hungry corporation here] to do the same? The 'Greenwash', as it's been dubbed, is in my opinion a pathetic piece of rhetoric that perpetuates the idea that we cannot change things as individuals, and that it's up to the Big Boys to sort us out. Well I for one have one very concise answer: fuck that.
Chaos theory states that one tiny, seemingly insignificant incident can affect a change massive in comparison to itself. So, you could argue that if you don't recycle that milk carton, that it ends up in a landfill site, and maybe that carton just might cause that landfill to reach its capacity, which in turn would mean a new landfill would be made, which means more pollution and ultimately the production of a new bottle that could have been made from this poor recyclable one. That one little change does make a difference. Once we all cotton on, and our collective conscious gets the better of us, I think we'll be surprised to see the power we hold over these [insert oil hungry corporations].
So let's make 2010 Greener than last year. Just by a bit, that's all I'm asking. For now.
- James
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