Green Rant

With gas prices now topping out over $4/gallon, and food prices soaring ever higher, families are feeling the pinch now more than ever before.  Add to the mix the housing crisis, and you have a lot of people learning the hard way how to live with less.  And it is a terrible thing that people are losing their homes.  It is also terrible that unemployment and homelessness is on the rise. People have to choose between eating and filling up their car with gasoline.  But we brought this mess upon ourselves.  We learned nothing from the oil crisis of the 1970's.  As soon as the oil started flowing cheaply again, people chose to forget about the fact that petroleum is a non-renewable resource.  It is not in unlimited supply.  So people bought their SUVs, and they moved to the suburbs where they could have a giant house with a giant yard.  And they filled their McMansions with mounds of stuff.  

Then the bills came due.  The credit card bills, and the mortgage, and the car payment and most important of all, the environmental cost of all that greed and waste is coming due.  And the human cost. While the middle class was busy stuffing its face with cake, the rich ran off with all of the real money and the government in their pocket. So now the environment is in shambles and the rich don't care because they have raped and pillaged and gotten what they needed out of the Earth, and they can afford to buy gas and food and pay their mortgage.  With the middle class becoming more and more the lower class, the rich are going to have everything.  The lower class is going to have no choice but to be slaves for the upper class.  

There are 10.1 million people worldwide with at least $1 million in assets as of 2007.  They have a combined wealth of $40.7 trillion.  It is expected to be around $59.1 trillion by 2012. They represent a mere 0.15% of the world's 6.7 billion people.  33% of these millionaires live in the United States.  

What kind of a world do we live in where a few people have everything and billions of people are living in the depths of poverty and despair?  Sometimes I wonder why humans are so selfish and soul-less.  We are neglecting our fellow human beings, and we are letting the Earth fall apart right before our eyes, and we could have done something about it, but it was too much trouble.  It would have put a cramp in our consumerist, greedy, self-righteous lifestyles.  

Things Are Not Made to Last

You may hear older people say this from time to time, but it is actually true.  Companies don't make nearly as much money if they make things to last.  We have become a consumerist, throw-away society, but it was not always this way.  Check out the Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard for some eye-opening statistics and the real cost of our consumerism culture.  I will summarize the story here.  

• In the United States, we only have 5% of the world's population, but use up 30% of its resources and produce 30% of the world's waste.  
  
• Each person in this country produces 4.5 pounds of trash per day, twice the amount we produced 30 years ago.  
  
• 99% of the materials that go into making the stuff that we buy are trashed in less than 6 months. 
• For every 1 garbage can we produce, the manufacturers are producing 70 garbage cans.
  

Things were not always this way.  After World War II, corporations actively sought out a way to make more money.  Consumerism was the key.  This would help explain why the average person consumes twice as much today than they did 50 years ago, or the fact that the average house size has doubled since the 1970's.  Each person in this country gets targeted with 3,000 advertisements per day, more than people used to encounter in their entire lifetime.  

But money cannot buy you happiness.  National happiness has been steadily declining since the 1950's (when it peaked).  Is it coincidence that this was the beginning of our consumer-driven era?  Why would people want to work so hard just to buy stuff that they never really needed or wanted in the first place?  

Over the past three decades, one-third of the planet's natural resource space has been consumed.  In the US, we have only 4% of our original forests left, and 40% of our waterways are undrinkable. Industries here admit to releasing over 4 Billion pounds of toxic chemicals per year. Climate change is the consequence of our actions.  It is too late to stop it from happening, but we could keep it from getting worse.