The State of the planet

Reading scientific articles and watching reports on TV regarding the state of the planet makes me deeply concerned and worried. The predictions from scientist are really omnious. I often even feel that the ruin of the planet is so close that it is impossible to stop.

Considering how poor most people in the world are I think it will take a lot to turn things around. The poor countries, which have huge populations, of course want the same possibilities as the rich countries. The authorities in these countries do not want to impose to hard regulations on their own domestic industries. Why should not they have the same possibilities to get going as the established industrialized countries have had? It is, or it ought to be, easy for us in the rich part of world to try and limit our pollution and consumption. We have sort of come past the survival limit and can have the luxury to try and perfect our processes, means of transportation and to minimize waste. Some people do not have anything to waste! Somehow the rich countries, besides looking after things within their own borders, must support the poor countries so that they also can improve their living conditions but in an environmental friendly way.

One rich country that is very influential is of course the US. But when it comes to environmental issues its influence has not been positive. For the moment I live in the Midwest of the US and it is sad to see how little they are working with these issues here.
The lifestyle here is conservative in many ways. However conservative does not apply when it comes to consumption. Shopping is a way of life. We have huge stores and you really do not understand where everything goes. How can they sell so much stuff?
In the other end of consumption we have the waste issue and a year ago we got new trash totes. The new thing about them was really only that they enables automatic handling by the garbage truck. The interesting, or I should say scary, thing is that they are huge, about 45o liters and are emptied every week! Despite this many households cannot manage with only one of these huge containers! Before introducing these new trash totes some actually argued that it would be good to have smaller ones to encourage recycling. But the town mayor responded with the following:"- Well, recycling is a good thing in the ideal world. Trash is however a part of life." Sadly I do not think he is alone in his view of recycling and if prominent persons of a society makes these kinds of statements he really undermines the efforts to establish recycling.

We live in little town where many people commute to the closest big town, Indianapolis, but there are no possibilities to go there with public transportation you must go by car. To have a car here is considered life essential. Last week there actually where an article about a family who did not have a car and had a "terrible situation" since "They actually had to take all their groceries home on a bike." Having no car also meant walking to work since there are no buses going in that direction. The reason for the article was that they now had gotten a car from a charity organisation. It had been more interesting if the article had reported that the city now had a new route for the local bus.
I guess still the gas is much too cheap here, it is only about 4 SEK per litre. In order to change peoples attitude towards the car it must be more expensive. If they would put some more tax on the gas price the size of the cars would be smaller and people would be more interested in using alternative means for transportation.
Now many people here talks about that ethanol derived from corn should be a good alternative to oil as fuel for cars. But the main argument for corn seems to be that the US then would be more independent from the oil producing countries in the middle east. That it might be good for the environment is only a secondary benefit.

Finally, after telling you some of my local observations I would like to recommend the BBC produced serie of articles called "Planet under pressure". It is like a summary of all the problems we are facing in the world of today. Reading it is very informative but also so depressing that I feel my desire to do my part in improving the situation instead is impaired. However I try to shake that feeling off because I really hope we somehow can master this precarious situation.