Earth Day Birthday - The Awareness Builder

There are many reasons to get involved in activities and causes. Some people like to loose wait, others like to achieve new goals in sports, again others want to spend time on something they are passionate about.

Earth Day is part of the Green Movement that is beginning to spread like a wild fire across the United States. Everybody wants to do something green, wants to demonstrate how environmentally conscious we all are, especially if it isn’t hard to do. If we can maintain our creature comforts and standard of living and still do all these “green things” we should be fine, right?

Maybe one can’t make money with it or be profitable, but it’s not that hard, or is it?

A group of very dedicated, educated, and motivated individuals has come together to organize a fabulous, global Earth Day Birthday celebration in 2009. One of the goals, besides the celebrations, is to build more awareness about all the issues surrounding all of us. Earth Day Birthday becomes the magnifying glass and the anchor point for this initiative. The global events will actually occur on April 22nd 2009. Volunteers are welcome to help with all kinds of work related to this celebration.

As part of the awareness building, this article is providing some food for thought about the green movement and its spread across the consciousness of the American public. Now that we have a new president in Barack Obama, the expectation is that there will be much more funding and a push towards green solutions. That does not mean things will all be very easy.

In his newest book, Thomas Friedman reminds us that the transition from consumer orientation with the believe of unlimited credit, ever increasing house values, and living above our means , towards an eco-conscious mind set will require thoughtfulness, sacrifice, and reflection.

How much we will need to move can be seen in some recent examples that showed me how much Earth Day needs to become one of the important awareness builders in our lives.

It all started with the notion of carbon footprints and pollution. I, AEM.EDBD, wonder if there is a formula or system to calculate comparisons. As a German, I come from a place where the natural resources were always scarce compared to the large population. That meant doing the most with the little space available.

Forestry has been a part of the economy for hundreds of years. Maintaining the forest, keeping it clean and healthy, and profitably harvest the wood has been going on for as long as I can remember (and my dad says the same for as long as he can remember). In that sense, everything the forest produces is put to good use. Berries are picked and baked into cakes, mushrooms are picked and become part of seasonal recipes (if you are very lucky and have truffles, you can actually make money with it) Underbrush is cleared, and in very bad winters some of the wildlife is fed to keep it around.

Shortly after this years Christmas holidays in our local California valley, the city officials of Solvang, together with the fire department, decided to hold a public fire safety demonstration. In light of the recent wild fires, this appeared to be a good idea. Some rain a few days earlier would also help to limit the risk of any problem with the demonstration.

What happened next was shocking to me. The public administrators alerted all families to put out their Christmas trees for collection. It was decided that the trees would become the fuel for the safety demonstration. Not just one or two or a handful, but a huge pile of trees was formed and then burned in front of hundreds of people, showing them how quickly dry Christmas trees can burn.

Nobody ever mentioned that they could have been chopped up, used as mulch or fertilizer or ground cover. Instead they were used to pollute the air creating a huge carbon emission plume.

Another example occurred at a business lunch the other day. The weather was so nice that we sat on an open patio, looking out towards the hills and the fields. In the distance a huge cloud of smoke was growing, rising to approximately 20.000 feet. Later that night the local TV station reported that the public shouldn’t be concerned, because this wasn’t a wild fire (which we had so many of in the last 3 years that about 350.000 acres of forest and grasslands burned). This was a controlled burn with the aim to reduce fuels. The area being burned is 6000 acres in size.

With these examples I wonder how much carbon these activities release, compared to what our Earth Day Birthday campaign using the internet  could ever generate.

We are trying to do to raise awareness via the internet. I am appalled that all this valuable biomass isn’t put to better use, but just burned. That is one of the biggest messages I would like to get across as part of the Earth Day Birthday event.

We all need to raise the awareness of people about these habits. As long as we are burning valuable fuels for reasons that are not credible, we don’t really have to worry about the minute amounts of carbon a search for information on Google or Yahoo might create.

A new friend with very similar ambitions and hope for Earth Day as an awareness builder, but also in a larger sense for the need to change people minds wrote to me:

I agree that behavior change is the most important issue. So few people ask, “How is this action going to affect the environment?” Our society’s wasteful habits are so deeply engrained in our habits, it’s a monumental task to shift the public’s awareness. One of the questions we have to get people to ask themselves is, “We’ve been doing it like this for decades, is it the best way for the environment or is this part of the problem?”

If the firemen want to demonstrate the danger of dry trees, perhaps they can burn a few, not, “Let’s see how many we can burn, they’re just old trees that are going into the trash anyway.”

The two questions I ask all the time are. “Is it sustainable?” and “How does it scale?” When you multiply someone’s actions by a thousand… or a million, the eyebrows go up. Most people say, “I never thought about it that way.”

The beautiful thing is, there are profitable business models around all of these examples. It’s all based on the price of carbon. As soon as the Cap & Trade system is in place there will be amazing opportunities where people only saw garbage before.

You probably have seen or read the commercials about the company that comes to help you get rid of pests using non-toxic methods. Playing on that theme, I believe, we should all shout: “Earth Day Birthday, we need you!”

Some people might have doubts that changing minds, creating a better world, resurrecting a damaged economy, and maintaining the comfortable standard of living most of us have gotten used to, will be possible. I think we all need to join in and project the right energy. The slogan: “Yes, we can” and the movement that has grown around it has shown all of us, what is possible. All we need to do is start taking action instead of waiting for others to do it for us.

For the Earth Day Birthday events we can still use lots of volunteers and evangelists. If that’s not your cup of tea, then go ahead and get involved in some other way to make people eco-consicous and increase their awareness.