It is estimated that 222 million tons of waste will be generated by Americans this year.
Since 1950, Americans have used more resources than any generation who has lived before them.
Each American uses 20 tons of basic raw materials each year.
The average North American consumes ten times as much as the average person living in China and thirty times as much as the average person living in India.
Our material wants far outweigh our needs.
If we haven’t fallen already, humans are teetering on the edge of screwing our planet and kind over completely.
Waters are toxic; rain forests producing the majority of our planet’s oxygen are being chopped down; corporations are exploiting cheap third-world child laborers for our simple material wants.
Global warming is directly linked to fuel emissions and the incineration of all kinds of waste, including toxic waste. We create so much stuff-it just ends up tucked away in the Earth in a landfill; or polluting a body of water; or being burned, destroying the clean air and ozone layer.
These problems are, above all, worldly problems-not just American. Even if every American reduced their carbon footprint three sizes, that still leaves the rest of the world.
It is trendy these days to care about the environment. People take part in being “green” consumers, as if we can buy our way out of our exponentially growing environmental crisis in the same way that we bought into it.
Who can blame companies for jumping onto the green bandwagon if it can boost their profits and shine up their public image?
The relentless hip-factor of being environmentally conscious is has transformed people like Al Gore from political footnotes to pop celebrities.
His work on the climate-doom documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” earned him a Nobel Peace Prize.
While it is a useful tool for making a collective people conscious of the massive problems we face, I haven’t exactly determined the peace the film established.
If waste and byproducts of our consumption could be shot off into space and forgotten about, it would solve a lot of the problems we currently face.
But they can’t go anywhere outside of our atmosphere. Everything we create stays, one way or another.
More money needs to go toward research, figuring out how we can make things sustainable and our Earth livable for thousands of more years. Instead, it seems we obsess over over Black Friday-the nation’s most overindulgent shopping day of the year.
Any noticeable change will require action from everyone in the world. Buying green products alone won’t protect what remains of our ozone layer.