2008 Woodie Awards
The "Green" Trend: Is It Worth the Fight?
Amaka Onyemekeihia
Issue date: 4/29/08 Section: Opinion
About fifty years ago, many world leaders passed laws in their countries to help curb the various types of pollutions in their countries. The Russian government, in an effort to convince its citizens that the coal emissions from their chimneys were harmful and causing respiratory death syndrome in kids, put up posters that said "The smoke of chimneys is the breath of Soviet Russia" around the country. In other words, the air the Russians were breathing was heavily polluted by the smoke from factory chimneys.
Europe and the United States fought for a stop to the dumping of toxic wastes and trash in rivers by passing laws and fining companies found guilty of dumping. Because not only was it harmful to marine life, but it made the water unfit for human consumption. But none of these were tougher than the international law passed after the Chernobyl accident and the "Amoco Cadiz" oil tanker off the coast of Brittany in 1978, which banned the building of nuclear plants and the emission of radioactive gases in populated regions and ensured that companies clean up after their oil spillage. Unknown to the world leaders then, those laws and bans would later turn out to be the cradle on which the "green" factor would be founded.
Fast forward to thirty years later. An increase in world population saw a lot of mega-cities grow bigger in size by clearing, cutting and burning down forests to accommodate the high demand for more housing, more paper products etc. But it wasn't long before a lot of awareness groups made the public realize that a rise in deforestation also meant an increase in damage to the ozone layer, because the trees which inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen (thus reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere) were being destroyed.
This made governments enforce a new set of laws that ensured that for every tree brought down, a new one would be planted in its stead. The fight only got tougher and took a different route when activists and scientists linked deforestation to global warming and the collapse of icecaps and glaciers. According to them, the carbon dioxide being emitted now is more than the natural amount originally in the air, and because there are less trees to help remove it, the air has gotten warmer. And due to the direction of the earth's trade winds, the carbon dioxide has made its way to the north and south poles and created a change in the atmospheric pressure there, leading to warmer climates in regions that should be cold naturally, hence the collapse of ice caps and glaciers. When they collapse, they melt and increase the amount of water in the oceans, so a lot of low lying islands are now on the verge of being submerged.
Europe and the United States fought for a stop to the dumping of toxic wastes and trash in rivers by passing laws and fining companies found guilty of dumping. Because not only was it harmful to marine life, but it made the water unfit for human consumption. But none of these were tougher than the international law passed after the Chernobyl accident and the "Amoco Cadiz" oil tanker off the coast of Brittany in 1978, which banned the building of nuclear plants and the emission of radioactive gases in populated regions and ensured that companies clean up after their oil spillage. Unknown to the world leaders then, those laws and bans would later turn out to be the cradle on which the "green" factor would be founded.
Fast forward to thirty years later. An increase in world population saw a lot of mega-cities grow bigger in size by clearing, cutting and burning down forests to accommodate the high demand for more housing, more paper products etc. But it wasn't long before a lot of awareness groups made the public realize that a rise in deforestation also meant an increase in damage to the ozone layer, because the trees which inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen (thus reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere) were being destroyed.
This made governments enforce a new set of laws that ensured that for every tree brought down, a new one would be planted in its stead. The fight only got tougher and took a different route when activists and scientists linked deforestation to global warming and the collapse of icecaps and glaciers. According to them, the carbon dioxide being emitted now is more than the natural amount originally in the air, and because there are less trees to help remove it, the air has gotten warmer. And due to the direction of the earth's trade winds, the carbon dioxide has made its way to the north and south poles and created a change in the atmospheric pressure there, leading to warmer climates in regions that should be cold naturally, hence the collapse of ice caps and glaciers. When they collapse, they melt and increase the amount of water in the oceans, so a lot of low lying islands are now on the verge of being submerged.
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