Memorial Day

Memorial Day (AKA Veteran’s Day) doesn’t get enough press imho.  Considering how much has been sacrificed by so many for our country and our future, too much time is spent on BBQ’s and shopping sprees at the local big box and not enough time spent on serious reflection.  We have waged so many wars in the few hundred years of our existence as a nation, some by choice, others without choice, yet in each the dead pile up and watch the living move on.

Global climate change is no war, but the threat it poses us as a nation and as a species is fundamental, intrinsic, and may well lead to our extinction.  How do we serve those who have sacrificed their lives by pissing away the very world they fought for?  Over consumption, poor urban planning, unsustainable pressures on our environment and resources will eventually overwhelm us, unchecked their will be no one to tend our graves as we tended the graves of our fallen soldiers this past weekend.

Hyperbole?

Maybe, but I am in a hyperbolic mood after watching flag draped coffins and considering what it means to be an American.  If carbon levels continue their unchecked rise, as they have risen year after year since measurement began in the 1950’s, there won’t even be wood left for our coffins, nor people left to memorialize us.  Will future remnants of our generation look back and curse our greed and insatiable consumption?  I think it is likely.

Unless…

You & I get off our lazy asses and get to work.  No day goes by my eyes that I am not presented with choices to make the future better.  To use less, to purchase smartly, to build sustainably.  Every act of creation contains some seeds of destruction, and the creaton of our homes needs to recognize this and ask how that destruction can be minimized in each and every step of the way.  I saw some friends of mine with a jack hammer just this morning going to work on a cracked driveway, and I asked them to use high concentration flyash concrete.  It can be as easy as that.