Posts Tagged: environmental sustainability

We seem so engrossed as we run in place, just to make ends meet, that we are not capable of standing back and looking at the bigger picture any more. Why are we so grossly inefficient at the way that we run our lives? This must be a consequence of many years of relatively good times, when we didn’t need to worry about the sheer amount of petrol that our cars used, or the fact that we have become completely reliant on our cars just to exist these days. It’s been so long since we had a recession, we can’t remember what it is all about and some of us are too young anyway, being forced to read about these downturns in reference books! Whether it was time for a wake up call or not, we certainly got one.

It is crazy that we rely on mechanical energy forms to help us do everything, without question. Our energy inefficiency has led to gross amounts of greenhouse gas emissions and damage to our environment, and we need to change now! We talk a good story about the benefits of renewable energy, but we are not helping the environment by diverting funds away from the research and development needed to actually make these options work for us.

“The Great Recession,” as it has become known, has now shown us how vulnerable we are to a downturn and how we all have little to fall back on in hard times. Now, efficiency is everything and this most definitely includes the use of energy. We all have to learn to turn appliances off, to think of what we could do as an alternative and not just opt for the easy way. We must review our transportation habits and not clog the roads with single occupant vehicles each and every day as we go back and forth to work.

At home or in the office, think of ways to save electricity and if you are the decision-maker, you must be the one to take action. Insist that your family turns off all the lights, turn up the thermostats by a notch – don’t allow them to be altered, and make sure that all family members wash clothes at the same time and not individually, and generally be a better keeper of the space that you occupy.

We shouldn’t rely on politicians to do our work for us. We can see that politicians certainly seem to understand the problem, but individual agendas are just getting in the way of any progress. Just look at what failed to come out of that summit of “leaders” in Copenhagen – inaction once again.

While politicians may well try and force big business to address the issues, we shouldn’t wait for this. We need to understand that by working individually, we can end up working together and if we all do our own bit we can steadily reduce energy use and cut back on the size of our global carbon footprint daily. ‘People Power’ really can achieve this quite easily, after all, there are billions of us, so let’s just do it – start right now!