So I'm teaching and tutoring and studying like mad, but somehow I feel like I should be doing something more. I just watched "The Cove," and as usual it's sparked my inner activist a bit. The reason I'm studying ecology/entomology in the first place, why I'm trying to get a doctorate to become a professor is because the environment needs to be studied, it needs to be protected, and people need to be educated about how it works, how we impact it and how we can change the way we exploit the environment so that we aren't destroying it.
Perhaps I'm too impatient. I tried the "activist" thing for about a week. I went door to door in northeast Ohio with Ohio Citizen Action, asking for letters of support and donations to help battle mountaintop removal.
But door-to-door? Really? It seemed like a highly ineffective, inefficient means of getting attention. One of the reasons Greenpeace works so well is that they respond with extreme actions, get attention with their antics and people respond. Most people wouldn't be willing to chain themselves to trees, go on a hunger strike or participate in any of the other attention-grabbing stunts Greenpeace pulls. However they might just notice that these crazy activists might just have a point.
That's the goal, isn't it? Getting people to wake up and realize that the environment is being degraded EVERY SINGLE DAY? Most don't realize that small changes in lifestyle can have a huge impact. If everyone in America decided to forgo meat for just one day a week the energy, water, antibiotics, carbon emissions, soil erosion. . . (and several other factors) would be decreased in incredible ways. VIA Kathy Freston: "According to Environmental Defense, if every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted vegetarian foods instead, the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking more than half a million cars off of U.S. roads. See how easy it is to make an impact?"
By the way: Ohio doesn't have a Greenpeace representative? Why not?
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