Why We Are Here
Look around and see it rising, la vie en vert. We are in its very middle and its critical moment of teetering balance—the Green Revolution. The juggernauts of international politics and economy are beginning to play their parts – we hope they continue – but Remedies for the Planet believes this to be a popular revolution. It is and must continue to be the work of individuals. Our individual lives and well-being are at stake, our collective individual actions at fault.
Remedies for the Planet is the spot to find your own particular place in the movement, the hub from which greener paths radiate. This is your place to discover and share the actions, on the smallest and largest scales you can imagine, that will teach us all to live in the world instead of on top of it. It’s our world – not the birthright of nations and corporations – and we know how to treat it right.
Help us blaze those paths to a greener future, and join us in this march toward a sustainable tomorrow.
Our Message for the Week
Written by Daniel P. Kray
July 17, 2008
Human nature directs itself to human ends, leastwise toward those that are foreseeable, and our beady eyes have never encompassed a range wider than that of a predator’s potential leap, not even in this age of industry and capital. We are practical beasts, wisely (for the most part) concerned with what things affect our lives most immediately, and we always will be as such. Our efforts to motivate a Green change in the world should recognize this truth.
Such adaptation to the truth on the ground should be neither difficult nor ineffective; after all there are plenty of practical reasons to make environmentally responsible changes in our lives. Insulating our homes saves us money on heating and cooling, easily enough to offset the initial expense and time. Driving at a moderate speed not only saves us money and crude oil in the form of gasoline, but it also prevents motor vehicle accidents that would rob us of significantly more time and pleasure than the longer trip will do. By preserving species we protect our sources of entertainment, nourishment, wonderment, and depositories of still-secret medical knowledge that our eager scientists will extract—if only they are given the time.
Yet even if global warming deniers were correct, the steps environmentalists prescribe would still be in the utilitarian best interest. Oil will someday run out. Our air and water is polluted – none deny it – and pollution is a costly detriment to health and longevity. Inefficient homes and offices waste money that could be dedicated to research, development, and if nothing better then simple personal pleasures as well.
In a world defined by the constant process of redefinition through innovation, our resistance to change in a limited number of fossil fuel industries is ludicrously inconsistent: the automobile’s century-old reliance on gasoline, several centuries’ addiction to smoking the coal pipe, half a millennium of inefficiency self-forgiven by a lazy supposition that easy sources of energy would always be available.
Global environmental consciousness has reached a critical mass, sufficient that we can now move beyond the crusade for what we should do – environmentalism as an extended ethics – and into the conversation about what we can and will do—not because it is morally correct or socially fashionable, but because these choices are in our immediate self-interest. Green choices for greenbacks. Conservation of Nature as conserving wealth and happiness.
The Green viewpoint is the vision of tomorrow, it is an awareness of the path and steps and ladders it will take to raise ourselves up to a better day—measured against all scales of human value. Depicting these environmental and social truths in terms of today’s practicality and tomorrow’s dreams, we can alter the movement and with it move the world out from a rhetoric of fear to a dialogue of hope.
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