I missed Blog Action Day!

This day happened a few days ago where everyone blogged about the environment. I forgot! so I am doing it now:

I think you should save the environment. There are two questions: how?, and why?

First, how? I don't know if it's possible to achieve a sustainable way of living without giving up major parts of the lifestyle that you and I have grown accustomed to. However, I'd like to give it a try. There are often easy ways to do this, and you can do it to, if you just think about it a little bit and go an even littler bit out of your way.

The answer is not "sell your car and hug a tree." It's not about going backward to the good ol' days before we had disposable plastic bottles and paper towels. It's about going forward and using our prodigious smarts to set up better systems.

For example: Note where you can recycle paper (example: the CMU recycling room!). Then, next to your trash can, keep a box. If you're going to throw paper away, put it in the box instead. When the box gets full (every couple months in my house) toss it in a big backpack and bring it to campus the next time you go. Ta-da! You no longer waste paper. Total elapsed time: maybe 10 minutes every two months.

Also, buy organic fair-trade locally-grown things. Now, I don't think we can buy our way to sustainability; that thinking kinda goes against the whole idea. But it can't hurt!

Okay, now second, the why. Why save the environment? I'll tell you why: because we live in a goddamn fantastic world! And what's so great about it?

Tuesday night, I turned on my laptop to find: "Non-system disk or disk error. Replace and press any key to continue." I reached for my floppy drive to pull out the floppy disk. Hup-- I have no floppy drive! My stomach lurched. I think a couple other organs lurched too. My hard drive was toasted! And of course, I hadn't backed up since like June, on my parents' external HD. My project! My music library! My dreams! My list of movies to see! My recipes! My, uh, digital album notes from the Arcade Fire's "Neon Bible"!

Wednesday morning, I brought it into the help center to make sure it was the hard drive that was gone. Nope, it booted up fine.

Now, in a just world, there is no way I get to save my hard drive. It's gone. And someone has told misc.market and all the techies are laughing at me. But I actually got the second chance! The one you don't ever get! And now my computer is on, and all my data is backed up on my new external HD!

So THAT is what is so great about the world, and THAT is why you should save the environment, because no environment = ozone layer hole and massive tsunamis = us departing this world for whatever afterlife, and I would not want to leave a world that is benevolent enough to give you that second chance.