Climate & Nature...

This week at Ithaca College, and at many colleges around the country, there were Earth Day events on Tuesday. Ithaca College hosted a screening of the 11th Hour that night and during the day hosted a free luncheon with Brooke Hansen discussing Native American Environmentalism. For the entire week we had events and dubbed last week: Earth Week.

Monday we had the Deputy Executive Director of Greenpeace USA, Bill Richardson, (no, not THAT Bill Richardson...) speak, Wednesday we had a vegetarian teach-in catered by a local co-op in Ithaca, Green Star, and Thursday we hosted another free luncheon to discuss Natural Beauty Products as well as a presentation that night from Benjamin Dangl, author of The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia. Phew!

These events were somewhere ideologically in the middle of the hay-days of Earth Day with ideals about less consumption and the new capitalistic green movement that has come with the evolution of Earth Day. Bradford Plumer discussed on The New Republic's Energy and Environment Blog that in its beginnings, Earth Day was simply promoting less consumption and being eco-friendly, while today large company's like Toyota, Macy's, Lexus etc are teaming up to promote their new green products around Earth Day. I was even on hulu.com where you can stream many popular, commercial media for free, and they publicized that they support Earth Week. Who doesn't support Earth Day? Maybe Hummer? Their still only up to around 14 city/18 highway mpg...pretty far off of the recently proposed 35 mpg fleetwide standard in the Energy Bill this past fall.

Hummers and companies alike aside, I think capitalism has the opportunity to really take off with the green sector and create fewer obsolete products, products that use less energy, renewable energy, and use energy more efficiently. If they do that, and the grassroots sector continues to educate and mobilize people around these issues, the supply and demand will be there; and we'll be that much closer to fighting climate change.