Not my words, but the powerful europop ramblings of Eiffel 65 frontman Jeffrey Jey. His daring take on the world’s unwillingness to commit to the imminent threat of climate collapse really blew the late 90’s music scene out of the water. But now, almost a decade later, how has his legacy been continued?

At times I worry that I might be one of those opulent westerners you hear so much about.
I think I have probably spent more time asking what the world can do for me and not enough time asking what I can do for the world. But now that my webcomic is such a delightful shade of green, I can’t help but think about helping, and surely that is the first step to actually helping.

The problem is that practically everything associated with protecting the environment works against some well established conceptions we all picked up from a very early age. As children we were forced against our will to tidy up and take out the trash etc…all chores, all laborious and tiresome and all taking us away from something infinitely more important. As we’ve grown older, we have had to condition ourselves to accept them as necessary evils and get on with the job of cleaning up. For me, like most males, it was about 3 months of living by myself that made me realise I was responsible for what was rotting in the kitchen and what was growing in the bathroom. Ecological balance needed to be set. Sure it took a while to contain and maintain but it’s not something I now drag my feet to do like it was for me as a child.

So what’s to stop us achieving the same on a global scale? Well for one, mother nature can’t send us to our room if we don’t do it. Technically we’re already in our room, so the punishment hardly fits the crime. We can’t change the world in one bold step for mankind, but maybe if we continue plotting a course of baby steps, we might have a chance. The time has come to admit that it is not enough to tisk our way through “An Inconvenient Truth” and feel morally stronger for having watched it. The time has come to actually do something.

I have started doing my bit – well, a bit for the earth. Mostly due to my flatmate the eco warrior (rank undisclosed). He’s been slowly wearing my pollutative defences down. We use our own bags when we shop, we have a bin for something he calls “recycling,” we try not to use the aircon and we also use a bucket in the shower to fill and then pour into the toilet cistern. I have graciously accepted these changes, but told him that it is his responsibility to take the bucket to the toilet. After all, what’s the point of us both getting out of the shower?

So that’s how I sleep at night, but how are you going to manage with the weight of a dying world on your shoulders? Very uncomfortably I’d imagine. So baby-step up whilst there is still time; if we all commit to making a lot of little differences, that should add up to a big lot of difference. So your mission, should you choose to accept it, is simple…

Save the cheerleader, save the world. Help ensure that the world will always have an alibi.

Yours sincerely,

Dave

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 26th, 2009 at 11:27 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.