Crude

When will we learn to stop killing our earth? When will we learn that if we keep exploiting the earth we will HAVE NO earth to live on at all? As Anderson Cooper once said (yes, I'm obsessed with him), "none of what is happening [to the earth] is occurring in a vacuum... all the problems are interconnected"; Pollution is a factor of global warming. Global warming is melting our ice caps. The ice caps are drowning islands and displacing civilizations... I could go on...

I wish we were all a little less ignorant... but it is so hard to not be when we live in a city and are so far from nature. We don't directly or immediately see the long term effects of what we are really doing to the earth. The smallest things make the biggest difference. For instance, when I see a water bottle in the garbage can, I can't help but take it out of the garbage and place it in a recycling. I know its not much, but I feel like I helped...just a little? I mean... why did someone put the water bottle in the GARBAGE in the first place? Don't we learn in kindergarten NOT to do that?

I don't even know why i'm asking...we all know the reason for this is LAZINESS. Here's an idea... why don't we stop being LAZY for once? Maybe it will save the earth.

Many times when we exploit resources, we also exploit and affect the indigenous people living on the land... and usually the indigenous people just deal and don't have much say.

Finally I encountered a current story where the unheard are being heard. A group of indigenous people in the Ecuadorian Amazon are standing up for their rights; They are suing Chevron for 27 billion dollars (which in my opinion is NOT ENOUGH at all). Texaco -which is now owned by Chevron- did NOT clean up after digging and extracting from numerous oil wells in the Ecuadorian Amazon- in fact, they just left them there- hundreds of pits of disgusting crude oil, seeping into the rivers and drinking wells. As a result, locals have been bathing, drinking, cooking with toxic water and have also been getting very sick from it. Below is a trailer of the film "crude".

Here is the 60 minutes clip better explaining the situation:


Task for the week: Do something good for the environment- maybe take a water bottle out of the trash? ;)