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With the 2008 Summer Olympics opening today, the truth about China’s vast environmental issues will come to light—that is, if the sun is able to get through Beijing’s thick smog. One article I read even joked that one good thing about having the Olympics in China is that you won’t have to buy souvenirs; all you have to do is cut out a piece of the air to take home with you because the smog is so thick. China is trying to address the issue, but a two-week reprieve won't fool the world ... or the earth.

I must admit that the issue seems overwhelming at times. If we think there are problems in the U.S., what about China? With more than four times as many people, their country is struggling to turn the Titanic of environmental care that has largely been ignored for decades.

And while there are tips galore I could pass along to you, Paul Hawken reminds us in his book Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World that what’s most important is for us to do our part and help influence social change. It was comforting—and encouraging:

“We live in a faith-based economy, and by that I do not refer to religious practice. People are asked to place their faith in economic and political systems that have polluted water, air, and sea; that have despoiled communities, sacked workforces, reduced incomes for most people in the world for the past three decades, and created a stratosphere sufficiently permeated with industrial gases that we are, in effect, playing dice with the planet. One does not have to demonize the corporate system to recognize that it has no means to account for its negative impacts, except as a charitable footnote to its annual reports if it is inclined to donate a small part of its earnings. As that faith begins to seem more and more misplaced, the way to change the world is to change one’s own practices, including one’s home, source of energy, method of agriculture, diet, transport patterns, and communities. Not that Kyoto Protocols shouldn’t be signed or adopted—symbols are ever important—but you can’t get there from here by any mechanism that depends on support from institutions that benefit from the status quo. Efforts must continue to be directed to bring about institutional change, but such efforts cannot succeed unless people reexamine how they behave and consume in their own lives. The movement can be seen as weak when measured against large institutions, but its goals are more important. The goal is to create a more resilient social and economic understory in what is basically an oligarchic world, a powerful act that restores a measure of autonomy and power to citizens.”