What The Environment Means to Me
I know you were all waiting with breathless anticipation to hear my views. Wait no more.
I am a true believer in, “If it smells bad, fix it”. Carbon dioxide has no smell. We exhale carbon dioxide and breathe in oxygen. Trees breathe in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen. Ergo, trees are good. Maybe we should only be driving cars in forests. But seriously, don’t you think the whole environment issue is overkill? It just seems to be the trendy thing to talk about, nowadays. It will pass. (Does anyone talk about herpes anymore? Naw. Boring. So last century.) Why all the rhetoric?
OK, anything that spews black smoke from smoke stacks has got to be either fixed or destroyed. Cars should be running on a fuel made from a renewable resource. Personally, I love hydrogen fuel. Cars running on that only have water coming from their tailpipes. That’s it. No stink. I don’t know about methane gas but it’s worth a look at. I’m sure coal could be made to burn cleanly. Surely some smart person has thought of a way to clean it up before the smoke enters the atmosphere.
Yes, we should all be environmentalists. But what is that?
What it is not is vacuous blather about saving the planet. It is being proactive. You can sum it up this way, “Don’t be a slob.” Don’t throw things on the sidewalk – put it in the waste receptacle where it belongs. If you don’t see one around, keep the items with you until you do or bring it home and put it in the trash. It doesn’t take a lot of effort.
Anyone who’s been to Switzerland will tell you how clean the country is. Go into the cities early in the morning. You’ll see shopkeepers sweeping up the sidewalk in front of their stores and cleaning their windows. It’s a pleasure to see. I dare you to find a piece of paper strewn anywhere. What is impressive is that each person does his/her part. That part being tidy. No graffiti. I have no idea why or how that became an art form. I would ban spray paint and throw the perps into jail.
Yes, a city where the air is clean, where cars run quietly on hydrogen, where industry has cleaned up their polluting ways, and where people are tidy, would be a pleasure to live in. I say let’s all work together toward that goal. We don’t need an Al Gore to tell us what we instinctively already know.