The Day After Earth Day
Yesterday, I tweeted that I’m not a big fan of Earth Day.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of Spaceship Earth but I can’t see how focusing on taking care of Earth for one day a year can have a sufficient impact on our continued residence on this pale blue dot. Spending one a month a year to promote (read: exploit) African American contributions to American society is offensive. It creates a societal surge of interest (read: money) and then fades into the fringe of public consciousness.
Earth Day is, at best, a solid attempt at promoting a widespread change of consciousness with regard to altering our impact on this planet but I can’t help but feel that it falls short. Yes, we all should change our habits but it can’t stop there.
Feeling that as a tool for change, Earth Day isn’t working isn’t that difficult when 76% of American shoppers made purchases specifically because they were good for the environment.
Consuming in order to help heal a planet damaged by overconsumption is like George Carlin once said, “…fucking for virginity.”
Changing our habits is only part of the solution; in order to give our planet the attention that it deserves we’ll need to see Change on a legislative level and that means we’ll all have to speak up.
We must destroy in order to rebuild.
“It is better to create than to be learned, creating is the true essence of life.”
~ Barthold Georg Niebuhr
As a child, one of my favorite hobbies was breaking things. I’d get home from school and for the 3 hours I had until my mother would arrive home I’d be sneaking around the house with a screwdriver, voiding warranties on electronics. I was the nerdy, pint-size manifestation of Ferris Bueller rushing to repair the family VCR before the folks got home.
This quasi-destructive curiosity got me in trouble more times than not but what I gained by breaking everything that seemed the least bit interesting was far more valuable than what I lost out on as a result of getting punished. There are very few things that give me more satisfaction than learning how to (re)build something out of a pile of seemingly random parts.
It is as a result of those nights spent sneaking through my father’s tool-shed in search of tools for an old computer autopsy that I find myself, 24 years old still breaking things just to rebuild them. As an experiment in design/web-development I decided to build my own wordpress theme. It felt good getting under the hood, digging through all the code and getting my hands dirty.
That said, if anything seems broken or if the blog causes your computer to blow up, please email me and let me know.
