screw the whales - save yourselves

I read a lot of environmental stuff—blogs, green group magazines, articles in other-than-green sources, books, etc.—so the increasingly common phrase 'save the environment' has had more and more opportunity to stick in my craw.

It's a good thing that awareness is increasing on this issue, and that everyday people are starting to take action, but doing so to save the environment as if it's some external, and separate, thing that can even be saved is fallacy. It's not the environment, all the fluffy animals and trees out there that we can decide whether or not to help; it's our environment, the thin and complex envelope that makes our existence possible. It will continue to exist with or without us - our only imperative is to learn to screw with it as little as possible so that it doesn't kill us.

I'm just being cranky I guess toward a couple of admonitions from various green bloggers out there for perpetuating that phrase, and for in the latter case sounding laughably snotty. We're already a bunch of treehugging, hemp-wearing, plastic-bag-fishing, SUV-hating nerds - do we really need to give anyone more easy ammunition against the movement as a whole by being overbearing pricks too?

So if you check out those links, great. But while you're wrapping your hot water heater in insulation consider some bigger things you can do to save your ass:

• Eat mostly local, and toward the bottom of the food chain
• Have fewer children
• Figure out how to make a buck off recycling, alternative energy, and anything else green
• Vote
• Influence policy - David Brower could've driven a gas-powered whaling ship to work every day and still had a net positive effect on the globe
• Give your time and money to orgs like The Nature Conservancy and Sierra Club