When the last river's been poisoned

By Anna Stoerch

Special to Ebbtide

I recently took a quiz at MyFootprint.org, which told me the size of my ecological footprint. With my lifestyle, I cover a shocking 13 acres, and we would need three planets to accommodate all the people on this globe if everyone lived like me. Unfortunately, we do not have more than one planet, but why do we act like it?

It is amazing which things can influence our impact on the environment. Among other things, the quiz asks you for the climate of where you live, how many people live in your household and how big your home is, how often you use a plane for transportation, and how much of your food is processed and shipped from far away. This gives you a hint as to what you can do to make your footprint a little smaller. To be exact, it would have to be as small as 4.5 acres for everyone to live in a sustainable manner. Meanwhile, the average American footprint is 24 acres.

Let’s start with one of the more burning problems of today. Gas prices are increasing all over the country but instead of building greener cars or improving public transportation we spend our precious energy on trying to convince people to let us drill for oil in the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge. The National Resource Defense Council’s website provides a list of facts about our dependence on oil. Among other things, it says that “The United States can't drill its way out of dependence on foreign oil -- we just don't have enough.” Instead, it suggests the development of more fuel efficient cars, which it says is possible with today’s technology.

Of course, I drive a car myself, and I have to admit I am not proud of it. However, I do not consider it a right, but rather a privilege. To do my part, I ride the bus to school, drive a fuel efficient car, and don’t eat animal products (the International Vegetarian Union says that meat takes three times more fossil fuels than plant food to produce). And the most important thing is that I don’t ignore the problem, but instead inform myself about it. There just has to be a way to get everyone educated on what damage is being done and what they can do about it.

A part of this has to do with a lack of long-term vision. It is always easier to worry about today and tomorrow than to give up some of the luxury that we may erroneously consider a basic human right. Also, environmental damage might not be something on the plates of people in power because they will probably not live to see the day that environmental issues will have forcefully become the number one concern.

But there are things we can do. Just think about the water that was pumped from New Orleans and poured, minimally treated, into the ocean. According to polls in the middle of September, fewer than half of the people that fled the city even want to return. This means we should have had the time to properly treat the water before we pump it back to meet marine life in Lake Pontchartrain, the Mississippi River, and the Gulf Coast. The Environmental Protection Agency states that the water contains chemicals that are a threat to human health and it is not far out to guess that these chemicals, coupled with decaying organic matter, are also doing their share of damage to nature.

It is too late to change anything about how we dealt with this situation, but it can be a wake up call for the future. Besides, what happened on the Gulf Coast was probably not a total coincidence. Some people have speculated that there is a connection between global warming and the strength of hurricanes. While only few mistakenly claim that global warming is the sole reason for the disaster, RealClimate.org writes that “warm water, and the instability in the lower atmosphere that is created by it, is the energy source of hurricanes.” Global warming is known to increase sea surface temperatures.

This means that despite the fact that this hurricane would probably have happened anyway, we should at least consider the possibility that global warming has some share of the blame for the intensity of the recent hurricanes hitting the gulf coast. Whether global warming is man-made or not is just one of the great debates of our time, but there is no reason not to err on the side of safety and limit greenhouse gas emissions. If you want to find out how you can help do exactly that, the most convenient way is to do an internet search. On a recent cyber trip to Google, I came across more websites with green living tips than I could possibly ever read and what would be the point of keeping it all to myself? If you are as concerned with the water shortage of the Pacific Northwest as most people, you could think about replacing a part of your lawn with native plants that don’t need much watering during the summer. You could also let your lawn fall dormant for a few weeks at a time.

Stressed about rising gas prices and our dependence on foreign oil? Think about buying a car with a better mileage and take advantage of alternative transportation such as walking, biking, the train, or the bus. Another way to temper gas consumption would be to buy locally produced food that hasn’t been shipped halfway across the country (or even the globe) to end up on your plate.

These are only some suggestions out of many, but it is a good starting point. We only have one planet earth, and we should do our best to preserve it for our own and our children’s sake. And as one Indian saying goes: “Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realize we cannot eat money.”