Joan Ball is a business professor at St. John’s University in New York and the author of Flirting with Faith: My Spiritual Journey from Atheism to a Faith-Filled Life.
NBC is starting its 3rd annual Green Week this Sunday to promote, you guessed it, greener lifestyles via green-themed content throughout their programming. Kudos to NBC for its efforts, but I tend to agree with this blogger on Chicago Now — Green Week seems a bit half-hearted when you consider how relatively simple it would be to write in a consistently greener lifestyle for the many characters on their many shows.
But still, its always great to see the effort to promote a healthier lifestyle for this planet of ours. The idea of making the effort — or not making the effort as the case may be — reminded me of these two past roommates of mine. I met them both through Craigslist when I needed a new apartment in New York; at the time they seemed to be pretty nice, normal girls. To be fair they weren’t mean, or abnormal…they just had a different mindset.
One night they accidentally ordered “An Inconvenient Truth” on demand (yes, accidentally; they had no idea what the movie was about and were vocal in their disappointment). They were also vocal in their opinion that global warming, as well as all these efforts to “green” the world, were a full-scale liberal conspiracy. Y’know, I’d heard there were people who believed that, I just never expected to live with them.
Well, such thinking was of course their right, and I left them to it. But I just can’t fathom that type of attitude. Don’t we have an obligation to take care of what we use?
My mom certainly pounded into me the idea that we have a responsibility to our belongings, whether a car, furniture, or a home. For her, this lesson came from the idea of respect; have respect for that which you use, and it will reward you by lasting forever. And while I personally don’t believe the earth to be “ours” (it came before us and will hopefully be here after us), surely no one can deny that it’s something we use to exist.
So why are there still those who believe recycling is for hippies? And that global warming is a conspiracy? At a very base level, isn’t it just about respect?