My own “green habits” really came to my notice when not too long ago a then-acquaintance of mine made a complement on the colour I wore. She said she never likes green on men but could not but make her unusual comment because apparently I "picked a soft and supple shade of green that complements my skin”. In an attempt to hide my blushes, I declared that everyone and everything had turned green. To this, she gave me a smirk and I went on to tell her that I once lived in an area in Johannesburg called Greenstone Hill and the billboard of my neighbourhood mall read “Green is the new black” (black along with white being the universal colours of fashion).
Before the alarm of the present global credit crunch, Planet Green looked the next big thing. Lots of awareness was (and is still) being created on the need to reduce the world’s greenhouse gases. The media world seemed to be conducting a green campaign. Awards were dished out here and there for every significant endeavour towards combating global warming. Indeed tree-planting, hybrid cars, re-cycled paperbacks, etc all make a lot of scientific prudence.
However, I sometimes wonder if mother earth would really go down an extreme cataclysmic path as my green advocates have consistently forewarned. Prior to all of the awards, a lot of reviews had concluded that the scenes of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth were well, exaggerated. This is not about blind optimism. Most of the earth’s soil remains covered with green vegetation. Sometime earlier this year, the UK was clouded in a snowfall that was popularly acclaimed to be the thickest in decades. Floods, desert encroachment, and the like are what they are- natural hazards; hazardous but natural. Also, I have come to observe that nature has her own sequence-the Big Bang or not. Man breathes out carbon dioxide to the lawn outside of his house, in turn the same lawn let out oxygen for his lungs; he feeds on plant products and eventually when he dies, becomes fertilizer for plant growth. The earth is indeed a functional ecosystem which over the years keeps resetting her balance. By this I do not suggest that mankind has got only a passive role in sustaining the planet as it is now. If anything, man is indebted to make efforts towards the betterment of his original natural habitat.
I chose the title of this post while deciding on the layout settings for my blog. As I mused, it occurred to me that there was a green thing, like a revolution going on everywhere. For even the colour of my e-mail silhouette has been green for about a year now .It’s amazing how one can get caught up in a movement without giving it much meditation. This Green Revolution as I see it is beyond creating factual awareness on the greenhouse effect. It’s about everything active, passive or implied that contributes to combating global warming. Whether or not the reduction of carbon gas emissions can be achieved to the extent of reversing nature’s current course should not be a foremost issue. As it is now, we already have that inherent responsibility to keep the cycle of nature going. Yes, after all every individual is a functional unit of our ecosystem.
Blue is cool but green has set a revolution on course.
*Comments are highly welcomed.
Key Phrases: Greenhouse Gases, Global Warming, Hybrid Cars, Carbon gas emissions
