Web Blog Environment Day

Well, my website has just gone live and I am all atwitter. Not really. I am, at best, partially twittering. As it should happen, today is also international Write Something About The Environment on Your Blog Day. I kid you not. Heard it on the radio. Wish someone had given me a little notice on this, since I spent the evening writing up something actually on topic. Silly me.

Back when I was in high school, the environment was a very hot topic. It was mentioned in debate all the time. That’s right. I was a debater. Come to think of it, the topics for the years I debated were consumer product safety, foreign policy and I think consumer product safety again. Consumer product safety was pretty big, as was the environment. I heard about both in many of my classes, not just debate. I think this may be dating me a bit.

I distinctly remember seeing a movie on the environment in my Business Math class. To be honest, it wasn’t really Business Math, but rather math for ‘tards’. You see, despite the fact that I was in debate, I was also a tard. Before I won a few debate tournaments, pretty much all of my classes were Something For Tards. They didn’t try to teach us much in these classes—it was more a way of keeping us from wandering the halls aimlessly—but if there was a film, we saw it. I remember seeing a film on the topic of how not to get burned making change six times in one semester. The first two years of my high school career were largely spent in film study.

As I recall, in this particular epic, all of us nice 14 year olds were told, in rather explicit terms, that the world was going to end in the next ten years unless immediate and dramatic action was taken on the issue of pollution. Given that this was the time of Love Canal and Silent Spring and rivers bursting into flames, the message seemed timely, topical and gosh darn urgent.

After high school, I took a little time off from education. About ten years. I wanted to see how the real world worked without any of those pointy headed notions all clouding my brain. Well, the real world sucked, so I went to college.

While in college I took several Environmental Studies courses. I even joined Greenpeace. I was very impressionable for a 30 year old. Or maybe I was just trying to play the part of a Freshman to the hilt? At any rate, in ten years the Environmentalist’s message had not budged an inch: ten years and we are all dead. Do not delay, act today.

That was ten years ago. This past week the Nobel Prize was awarded to Al Gore for his fine movie work and general fear mongering to yet another generation. His message: we have at most ten years before the world will come to an end.

Pardon me if I can’t help but think that this is where I came in. I think I will refrain from breaking into a cold sweat.