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Sustainability and You: What Have You Done for the Earth Lately?

Kendra Pierre-Louis | Monday 8th February 2010

It's easy to talk about what's wrong with the planet. For example:

Global climate change is warming the environment rapidly irreparably shifting weather patterns, rain patterns, and bringing many species and ecosystems to the brink of collapse.

The Pacific Ocean is home to an man-made island of floating plastic and debris twice the size of the US state of Texas.

The rate of biodiversity loss is increasing rather than decreasing with each passing year.

So what?

Or rather, what are you going to do about it?

It's very easy to mope, and whine and complain about the problems with the world. It is very easy to point fingers at those who should be doing something, but aren't. But at the end of the day expending all of our energy complaining a problem without lifting a finger to fix the problem does little to bring about solutions, although it does help to assuage guilt and give us inflated feelings of superiority.

Theodore Roosevelt said, "It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done better."

I worry that those (myself included) who care passionately about the earth, about people, about society, have become more adept at pointing out the problems, at nitpicking solutions than using this knowledge to pull ourselves up to go about the business of fixing things.

So ask yourself, "what have you done for the earth lately?", "what else can you do?" and then get set to doing it, no matter how improbable or impossible. "Impossible," after all Napoleon wrote, "is word found only in the dictionary of fools."

I'd love to hear what actions you've taken in the comments.

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