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What Can We All Do Now?
Why Make The 11th Hour? | Choosing The Experts | What Can
We All Do Now? | The Need For Regulation | Optimistic? |
Biogs | Discuss
What are some simple things people can do every day to improve their lifestyle and be more eco-aware?
NADIA: Ask where stuff in your life comes from. We have become disconnected and we no longer know where things come from, how they were made or even who made them. That disconnection has kept us removed from a lot of the damage our every day behaviors inflict upon the world.Start asking questions about the things in your life and follow the story of an object back to its source. Once you start connecting the detergent under you sink to a dead zone you start seeing the world as a whole and your relationship with this planet and life on it will deepen. Drive less, walk more, eat organic, use less, buy smart, live on a smaller scale, more is not more, bring a bag to the market... Little things really do add up. Reuse something – share.
LEILA: The most basic thing to do is to learn everything about where you live. Where does the water come from that you drink? Where does your food come from? What is the state of the air that you breathe?
Once you find out, you will find out that these things are in trouble and need help. And once you clean up the place that you live, then you have done your part. (if you live in a big city, ask for measures to decrease pollution for example)
The next step would to be to learn everything you can about the things that you buy. Does the car you drive pollute the atmosphere and guzzle oil? Does the furniture that you purchase come from rainforest wood? Does the food you buy have chemicals in it? Are the clothes that you wear made in a sweatshop? Once you find those things out, you choose to buy things that are sustainable, organically, efficiently and humanely. These two actions would really go a long way to protecting the environment.
How do you think people can go about helping to affect the kind of sweeping industry-wide changes that need to be made to allow the human race to live cleaner?
LEILA: Ray Anderson said in an outtake of our film that 'without customers, there is no corporation.' So, people can change industry by simply not purchasing products that are harmful to the environment and to people in their construction and creation. Once industry finds out that people for example, prefer non-polluting cars, then they will change. In addition, for the energy industry that is so polluting, in particular, people need to build coalitions to put pressure on government and elected officials so that they can regulate them.CEOs themselves have asked for regulation because they all have to step down together and government should help them do that. And the only way government will do that is if the people speak loudly about it.
NADIA: I believe this will be the next huge social movement - like the civil rights movement 40 years ago. We have to come together and show our leaders we want change while also showing each other that we are unified in saving the life support systems that we all depend on.
