by Jake Dalton

Created on: May 03, 2009

What can you do for the environment? Buy organic foods, biodegradable items, Eco-friendly items, etc? In a time where more Americans are focused on the climate crisis, what should we all be doing to help? Unfortunately, buying consumer goods and supporting large industries is not the way to save the environment. If you honestly want to save the environment, there are more effective ways.

Consumerism is a large part of the climate crisis, because face it; industries would not be producing environmentally unsafe items if people were not gobbling them up like thanksgiving dinner. Face it; trees are a very important part in the environmental crisis. There are not enough trees to take in the amount of carbon dioxide we are producing. During the year of 2007, the bureau of engraving printed approximately 38 million notes a day in a fiscal year. That's simply a lot of trees; the concept of money itself is even environmentally unsafe. While you horde up your money, and sit in classrooms waiting to get out and start a career to make that money, realize that your part of the problem of the climate crisis.

Industry is another half of the climate crisis. While we nurture ourselves with material goods (bought with trees nonetheless) the industries that create them are producing a large amount of pollution from their factories. Every single Eco-friendly car that is made comes from products that when produced release a large amount of pollution. Every piece of meat you eat produces countless amounts of methane released into the atmosphere. Every vegetable not bought within two days is thrown away by supermarkets. Industry and the consumerism that drives the industry is the cause of today's climate crisis, not our addiction to oil. We have become trapped in the comfortable lives of the post-industrial revolution that we have polluted our planet in insane amounts.

How do we solve the problem? We lower our consumption. The richest 20 percent of the world's population consume more than 80 percent of the world's resources. We can then assume, as the United States of America is the wealthiest country in the world, that we are largely responsible for the consumption. The really sad part is, is that it's done out of greed, not necessity. We consume so much unnecessary items just to have them, we buy large amounts of lands and fill them up with items to demonstrate prestige, and we purchase large quantities of food and throw much of it out. Humans simply consume too much.

A way to lower

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