The lie that kills

The dilemma of global warming continues to increase in its prominence. Did it ever stop being a problem? No. But Americans' general preference for comfort and convenience takes precedence over any environmental concerns, whether or not the emerging threat of gradual extinction of life as we know it looms over the horizon.

A sample of a recent poll showed that the majority of Americans believe that economics is more important than the environment. Someone should tell these people that ownership of meaningless trinkets and commodities is the last thing on people's minds when they can't breathe. Envision a future where wars are fought over water and unpolluted air is a commodity of the social elite. Don't think it'll come to this? Stick around. Nose filters, emphysema and toxic waste will all be a part of everyone's life, at the rate things are going.

In the long run, Americans' perfunctory attempts at recycling have only an overall negligible effect against increasing environmental degradation. It is Homo sapiens' consumer-oriented way of life and the corporate power structure that caters to the particular greedy mentality that consumerism fosters ("use, abuse and discard") that is killing our planet and causing worldwide environmental degradation.

        And to believe that this is not true means that you are simply lying to yourself and those around you. Of course, people lie all the time. But I've got a problem with this particular lie; it stands to kill me, not to mention most forms of life on the planet.

Take mad cow disease, for example.

Americans' gluttonous intake of beef and so-called need for a massive intake of beef causes them to overlook the detriments of the having their food industrialized. While I am a meat-eater, I'm also a person who is aware of and abhors an industry that is places cows in deplorable, wasteful conditions and forces them in close confinement where they unknowingly eat the contaminated parts of the slaughtered cows that came before them.

In turn, this causes cows to pass this through their system in the form of flatulence. While the idea of cows farting is somewhat amusing, there is something very pervasive and deadly about that; cows fart methane, and methane, in sufficient quantities, depletes the ozone layer, which, by the way, has that ever-increasing hole in it. It is expected to peak around 2015, thereby causing sea levels to rise and climates to change all over the planet.

But Americans, in their stubborn determination to know as little as possible, shut all of this recurring information out, in an attempt to make sense of all of the information that comes at them that supports the theory of global warming. By engaging in this gross lie of pretending that there isn't a problem with pollution and subsequent global warming when there really is, humans are not prolonging the inevitable, but merely sealing our fate to an irreversible turn of events that will eventually ensure the extinction of our species.

Arriving at practical solutions to global warming lies in people first admitting that their wasteful lifestyle does indeed contribute to global warming, then individually looking at themselves, and what they can do to overcome it.