What it means to me? Let's explore this beginning with the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth". The picture was shown in my class 'Ethics and Social Responsibility' not too long ago. What's it got to do with Ethics you say? Well, quite a bit actually. Being essentially a doomsday lecture of sorts, it was also a coherent presentation of logical arguments which lead the viewer to a natural conclusion which is... we have a problem that simply cannot be ignored any longer. Now, many of us acknowledge this fact but few actually take time to understand or internalise the terrifyingly crucial message that it is trying to bring across. Even fewer think about how this eventuality, which could lead to disastrous consequences, may be averted. Hence, in making the issue personally relevant, we woud have taken the first step in being a little more socially responsible....

A friend once asked, "What do YOU do for the environment?'' I'd like to take up this innocent question on two points. Firstly, being aware and having an action agenda to fight global warming is not just about doing something for the environment. It's about doing something for you and you (person to left) and you (person to right). Being Clean and Green? That's just a government campaign. Trying to prevent the crowded deltas of India from being flooded due to the rising sea levels in hope of saving literally thousands of lives? That's doing something about it.

Secondly and more importantly, many of us would have already been familiar with the three-pronged paradigm of Reduce, Reuse & Recycle since young. At that time, we had some vague notion of global warming and the greenhouse effect. I don't think the scientific processes we learnt about changed much till this day. Why, in that case, have we hurtled so far along this problem and I might add, so blindly, till alarm bells are suddenly ringing everywhere and future projections of the state of the Earth are jaw-dropping?



In my perspective, despite public education, on a macro level, little has been done to espouse such practices. To be honest, and this could be a cynical view, I think that one green tree-hugging activist would not change much. One environmentally friendly, energy-saving light bulb would not change much. One community project to use your own shoping bags instead of plastic ones would not change much. On a global level, it's really the governments of nations which have to bring the issue to the forefront and implement some very hard-hitting policies with immediate effect.