"An Inconvenient Truth"

No joke, yesterday I filled up my car to the price tag of $40.00. 12.97 gallons..... Crikey! I can hardly believe it! When I was in high school I could give my girlfriend $10.00 for driving me home from track practice and it would fill the car up! That was only 10 years ago!

That being said, my honey and I got an email from a mutual friend that is a pastor in Chicago. The friend had just seen the Al Gore documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" and was urging everyone to go see it. Now, I will say that even as a Tennessee resident I totally did not vote for Gore in 2000 as I did not then nor do I now think that he was the right choice... It's seriously a whole other post... I voted for Nader....

ANYHOW! I enjoyed the documentary, though dragging a little at times and I was sure I was going to see an Apple advert at the end due to the numerous "Al Gore with his Apple computer" shots, it was worth the 2hrs or whatever. (The music is a bit overly dramatic when it doesn't need to be, the subject speaks for itself) Having grown up in a school system that taught about Earth Day, recycling etc, I found that there wasn't necessarily any thing "new" about the message. What was frustrating was how evident it was that we haven't GOTTEN it yet. There was one part in particular that totally made me mad and that was something about how because of our emissions standards or MPG standards are so low that we can't even sell cars in other parts of the world because their standards are higher. There were definitely some graphs to see that really helped spell out the issue for me as a visual person. I will have a hard time forgetting what those graphs looked like. They totally looked like the folks in Washington have never gone to school. Or at least the type I grew up in.

But the big question comes to this... "Now what?" As a household manager, what steps will I take to actually try and reduce my households carbon 'whatever'? I learned about recycling and such as a kid in elementary school but now its time to actually put what I learned into practice as an ADULT. Part of the problem right there, as a consumer nation no one wants to take responsibility for anything.

So any ideas? Any tips on Green Homemaking? We already recycle cans, plastic, paper etc. Any thoughts on Gas furnace vs. Oil? Both are natural resources... Pretty much the same price at the moment and both have shot up over the years. Any thoughts?


P.S. The message I grew up with in school was to take care of the environment because its the responsible thing to do. Especially in light of the effects that it DOES have. Case in point : Aquanet hairspray. Big hair, no-no. You can barely find the stuff nowadays. Secondly, this idea of environmental stewardship is only reinforced morally through the reading of Biblical Scriptures. We were created in part to take care of the Earth God created, yes the depravity of man shows itself in social injustices, but man's sin spills itself over into over consumption as well. An environmental obesity if you will...