Reduce, reuse, recycle, or chuck it in the garbage ??? Do we really know which is best?

The environmentalism movement is currently experiencing an injection of perhaps well-needed popularity. Celebrities who own multiple homes that could each comfortably house the inhabitants of small villages, and who regularly circumnavigate the globe in private jets that have a maximum capacity of seven, routinely remind us to do such environmentally responsible things as turn the lights off when leaving a room lest we become wasteful. Manufacturers of products ranging from toilet cleaners to sport utility vehicles advertise their wares as being earth- friendly by arbitrarily adding prefixes like ???eco???, ???bio???, or ???green??? to product names in hopes of capitalizing on our environmentally conscious sensibilities and thereby gaining greater market share. Most recently, with the awarding of the 2007 Nobel peace prize to An Inconvenient Truth filmmaker Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, global warming has taken centre stage as the potentially catastrophic side effect of our carbon-emitting actions. Scientific consensus has widely established that mankind is changing the planet, and that, by every metric by which the sustainability of life on Earth can be quantified, this change is decidedly not good.

(Image by bullish1974)

So, it is encouraging to see such widespread dissemination of our negative impact on the environment not only in the scientific community but also in mainstream popular culture and industry, even if the motives and sincerity of the messengers are sometimes dubious. As a species, it seems that we have generally begun to acknowledge the consequences of our actions. The next step, of course, is to establish a strategy for reducing this negative impact, and most people would agree that even if we have not yet satisfactorily implemented this strategy, we have a pretty good idea of what needs to be done.