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Success...It's All in the Letter P By now we are familiar with Nigel Lythgoe, the British television director and producer, who created such smash hits as Ameri... |
Recent Columns
Giving Green a Whole New Meaning
Original Publication Date:
May 2008
The color green: the color that best represents life. Green has been singled out and given an expanded meaning. No longer is it just the color that sits between yellow and blue on the spectrum. No longer do we merely associate it with money. Green has gone beyond those meanings. It represents a movement, a mindset, an attitude one has toward the earth.
A few big facts to fathom . . .
- A full tub requires about 70 gallons of water while a five-minute shower uses 10-25.
- Turning off the faucet while brushing your teeth (morning and night) can save up to 8 gallons of water per day which equals 240 gallons per month.
- Americans use 50 million tons of paper annually which means we consume more than 850 million trees.
- We throw out 85% of the office paper we use. That equals about 4 million tons each year—enough to build a 12 ft-high wall of paper from New York to California.
- Each year 27 million acres of tropical rainforest are destroyed. That's an area the size of Ohio and equals 74,000 acres per day . . . 3,000 per hour . . . 50 acres per minute!
- One gallon of used motor oil can contaminate 1 million gallons of water.
- Every year we make enough plastic to shrink-wrap Texas.
- The 36 billion aluminum cans land-filled last year had a scrap value of $600 million. (Some day we will be mining our landfills for the resources we've buried.)
- Styrofoam is un-recyclable—you can't make it into new Styrofoam. Why would you ever buy it?
- The EPA estimates it takes a plastic bag 500 years to decay in a landfill. The average person's plastic bag legacy will be 4,175 million years. The worldwide consumption of plastic bags is over 500 billion—over 1 million per minute.
- For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.
We recently celebrated Earth Day: one whole day of recognition for our beloved planet.
The scientists and experts don't agree on everything. Often they have their own selfish or slanted agenda. No matter, there is one undeniable given—our way of living is harmful to the planet. We won't have a society if we destroy the environment. We're headed in that direction. Human beings need to change their thinking, their attitudes, and most of all their behavior. We aren't meant to dominate our surroundings but to live in harmony among them. We aren't meant to take, take, take, but to take what we need.
What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make. Earth Day can't be thought of only on one day. It has to be in our minds and in our hearts everyday. Expanding the meaning of green is a symbolic way of putting the plight of planet Earth in the forefront of our thinking. Have you gone green? What does Green mean to you?
Pz's Pointers on Creating a Green Mindset
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