“I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.” —Stephen Hawking

Earth Day, today, is usually an opportunity for the following fun time happy parade of:

  • Companies latching onto Earth Day (or say, Earth Week, like this blog!) and telling us just how darn much they care about our planet
  • Website after website bombarding us with so many “Here’s How You Can Save The Entire Planet With A Seemingly Insignificant Action!” tip lists that we become paralyzed into doing absolutely nothing (Green Sex? Are you kidding me?!)
  • And well-intentioned organizations telling us just how destructive mankind is

There’s not much that can be done about that first point, aside from companies like Green Seal keeping marketing monkeys like ourselves somewhere near the truth. It’s the other two that can really start getting you down.

We are drowning in green data. And if a near-infinite amount of Green Commandments (even Moses got it down to ten) it isn’t enough to immobilize you, a great deal of those imperatives are contradictory. Witness the current version of the chicken-or-the-egg question that came out of Home Depot’s Eco Options: which is less destructive to the environment, the plastic paintbrush because it doesn’t use wood, or the wooden paintbrush because it doesn’t use plastic? Sounds like a riddle you’d ask a giant killer robot to short circuit its logic board.

Or maybe that’s just us.

That’s probably just us.

Out of this year’s eco cacophony, we came across one article that truly did give us hope, that helped us find a little meaning and comfort in the duality of freakin’ everything. It was in this week’s Sunday Times Magazine, an article by Michael Pollan entitled, simply, Why Bother? Rather than step on any more of Mr. Pollan’s insights, we’ll let you read the article yourself.

And when you’re done reading it, we invite you to finish our little post with another thought from one of our planet’s brainest brains.

“We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.”
— also Stephen Hawking