And I like
this article especially, in case it becomes unavailable in future, I've quoted it here:
What have you done for the Earth lately?
Features - December 09, 2007
Endy M. Bayuni, The Jakarta Post, Nusa Dua, Bali
Remember John F. Kennedy's famous quote "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country". In this time of global warming concerns, we should really paraphrase the second part of Kennedy's statement "ask what you can do for the planet".
On a personal level, we can all claim to have done our best in saving our beloved Earth from the current course of virtual self-destruction.
Some of us have been separating our trash into that which is bio-degradable and that which is not. Some of us go to Carrefour or other hypermarkets bringing our own paper or cotton bags instead of relying on the polythene bags generously supplied by the cashier.
I know one or two colleagues, and neighbors, who are starting to take the bicycle to work, even though they risk poisoning themselves to death from the vehicle exhaust from Jakarta traffic.
Most motorists in Indonesia have finally made the switch to unleaded gasoline. Pretty soon, we will all be told to switch to biofuel (although environmentalists are now fiercely opposing the change because of the impact of biofuel production on the remaining forestry area in the world).
Some companies in the United States have introduced the "paperless office" in which everyone works from their laptop, and documents and letters are being exchanged courtesy of Bluetooth technology.
As good as these deeds may seem in saving the planet, they all look more like fads -- the fashionable thing to do -- rather than something driven out of necessity.
No matter how much we think we have done, climate scientists are telling us that we are not making even the slightest difference as far as the march towards global warming is concerned.
The global temperature is still rising; the North Pole and South Pole are melting as is the ice at the peaks of the Himalayas. Floods are affecting many more countries and are getting worse each year.
Global warming is moving at a faster rate, in spite of our efforts to date.
What we have done so far are symbolic gestures to show that we care about climate change. But if we seriously want to save the planet, and to really make a difference, we need to go beyond symbolism.
We need to make major personal sacrifices. Our lifestyles and habits have been driving the world temperatures up.
This is something many of us are obviously not prepared to do.
Nobody is about to give up the comforts of modern life, including travels (by car, by plane or whatever mode you can think of), the cool air-condition if you live in a warm climate, and many other amenities in life that we have taken for granted but harm the environment.
Take the ongoing climate change conference in Bali this past week and next. I wish some expert would calculate just how much carbon dioxide has been emitted by flying in more than 10,000 delegates, observers and journalists to the Indonesian holiday island -- and how many hectares of trees have been felled to produce the tons of documents and brochures distributed at the conference.
And going by the UN schedule, we will need two more meetings, and five more years, before the international community can put in place an action plan to replace the Kyoto Protocol.
Those individual efforts are indeed commendable as a statement of our concern. But we need to do a lot more than that to save this planet. A more concerted global effort, and a much more serious one than the Kyoto agreement, is what it takes to do the job.
Let's hope this Bali conference is well worth the effort and the huge amount of carbon expended to make it possible.
If not, be prepared to have our own grandchildren, or great-grandchildren if this planet survives that long, curse us for our inability to act.