Examples of going green statements that can easily be turned around:

• Save water! It takes gallons of water to clean that glass. - So I used paper cups. Don’t use paper cups it’s bad for the environment!
• Don’t use that dishwasher, wash by hand. It uses less electricity and less water. - But I bought the dishwasher, it was made with materials that I can’t just waste. I want to use the dishwasher because I don’t want to stand there washing dishes.
• Heating oil burns cleaner and is better than using electric heat. - Heating Oil keeps us dependent on finite resources, yet electric and natural gas are also based on finite resources.
• Get rid of that car and buy a hybrid. -  But my car is paid for, it gets 32 mpg, and it already exists in my life. Hybrids have actually larger carbon footprints (or so I have read, I don’t know that that is the gospel truth though) and batteries have to shipped from place to place. What happens when the batteries need to be disposed of?

I am very tired of the contradictory messages. I am tired of feeling stupid. I’m tired of feeling like I’m not doing enough or anything. There no one saying, “Yes, you’re doing good, here’s more that you can do…” in any kind of hierarchy. Maybe a Eco-pyramid or Earth’s Hierarchy of Needs to help people understand that they should be doing something that makes sense.

But for all of this, the message seems to get diluted to me, to the point where I’m ready to rebel against it.

I’ve changed my light bulbs to CFs, but I hate they light they give off. I love the warmth of incandescent bulbs. I’m not going to just replace all my bulbs, that’s completely wasteful. So when my incandescent bulbs in my home burn out I will replace those with CF’s.

But seriously, I’m very tired of articles, tv segments, movies, etc. telling me I’m doing it wrong, not doing enough or not doing anything. What’s next? Green computer ram?

So I’ve just given up on this whole “green” thing.

And why green anyway? Why not blue? The oceans are blue, the sky is blue, and I think blue is a better color. Certainly better than green.

Fact or Fiction?

A Cicada passes eggs through its ovipositor.

Cats are feline, dogs are canine, and sheep are ovine.

A pigs snout is called a gruntle.

When they mate, a yak and a cow produce a dzo.

A cat’s whiskers are called vibrissae.

Goats produce cashmere.

The common term for a member of the bee genus ‘Bombus’ is the bumblebee

A ‘bitch’ is more likely to bite you than a male dog.

A turkey’s furcula better known as a wishbone.

A ‘geep’ is the resulting offspring of a sheep and a goat.

The typical housefly cruses at 8 km/hr.

The chemical pectin, found in ripe fruit, causes jam to set when cooling.

In 1876, Sir Henery Wickham transported 70 000 Rubber tree seeds from Brazil to Kew Gardens in London.

The compound carotene gives the carrot its colour.

Bananas grow pointing upwards and are the most common food found in gift baskets.

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Fact or Fiction?

Uranus is visible to the naked eye.

Benjamin Franklin was first to suggest daylight saving.

The most abundant metal in the Earths crust is aluminium.

It snowed in the Sahara desert on 18 February 1979.

On average, an iceberg weighs 20 million tons.

The far side of the moon was first photographed by a Russian satellite in 1959.

Captain Cook was the first man to set foot on all continents except Antarctica.

The diameter of the Moon is 3 476 km.

The pressure at the Earths inner core is 3 million times Earth’s atmospheric pressure.

200 million years ago Earth contained 1 land mass called Pangaea

At the deepest point, an iron ball would take more than an hour to sink to the ocean floor. ( 11.034 km )

The largest wave ever recorded was near the Japanese Island of Ishigaki in 1971. It was recorded at 85 metres high.

Antarctic means ‘ opposite the Artic ‘.
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