When I heard the presentation by Martin Lees (Secretary General of the Club of Rome), I got the message clearer than ever: we pollute our atmosphere at enormous dimensions. The amount is truly gigantic. And it will kill us. By now, everybody agrees that we cannot go on like this.
But where to start? With the car? Well, compared with the entire amount of existing air pollution, the machine “car” only blows a rather small amount of poison into the atmosphere. Is that worth the effort of doing without cars?
Here is a story that comes to my mind.…
Once upon a time, when the number of my children was still four, we all went toFuerteventura (shame on me). That must have been quite some time ago. It was a club holiday (shame on me). One day, we went on a jeep tour to the beaches in the south (shame on me).
As we arrived, I saw beaches more beautiful than ever before. Unfortunately, all the beautiful beaches were strewn with rubbish. I had never before witnessed it in that intensity. Of course, our lunch packets, too, contained plastic wrappings. It would have been logical – and it certainly would not have been noticed by anybody – if we had left our rubbish lying around at the beach. Naturally, that was out of the question for us. We took our rubbish back with us to the hotel.
It is the same with the “little bit of car”. Basically, considering how much air pollution is blown into the environment all the time, the contribution you make by driving a car is rather insignificant. Yet most of the time we take the car in order to go places without thinking at all. And there are many cars.
You have to start with your own habits. You have to be forceful and probably really pedantic. Even if you sometimes feel rather stupid. I am pretty familiar with that feeling. Nevertheless, I try to continue doing what I consider the right thing.
RMD
(Translated by EG)
P.S.
Back to my vacation: a short time afterwards, I saw Sigi Schwab and Percussion Academia in the “Lustspielhaus”. And in his performance, Sigi reported about someone on Furteventura. He dedicated his album “Silver Sand” to the polluted beaches of this world.
Here he is:
P.S.1
On the picture, you see the steep coast near Ajuy. It was taken in June, 2003, by Fab, who published it in wikipedia under the licence GNU-FDL. Many thanks!
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