My 5: Joe Hennager, Blue Planet Green Living

What can we do to save the planet? We are just a few billion people, and it is such a big planet. Earth has been around for a few billion years, and we humans for only a blink of an eye.

Some say we’re not killing our planet, we’re just killing ourselves. We pollute, we poison, we kill each other, we die. A few hundred years after we have all disappeared, the planet will be clean again. It will start over without all us pesky humans to deal with. We lose, Earth wins. We get what we deserve, and this pretty blue planet goes on spinning.

Joe Hennager, Blue Planet Green Living

The simple notion that we are not smart enough to keep from killing ourselves overwhelms me. In our arrogance and greed, we have lost sight of how small and insignificant we really are. We may be at the top of the food chain, but we do not own the planet. We rent. And the landlord is kicking us out.

So, before some radical nukes us all, an egotistical CEO pollutes away the ozone, or a gazillionaire wakes up to find he is the last person left on the planet, let’s do something.

MY 5

Julia and I have had the opportunity to meet a lot of incredible people in the last month. They are intelligent people, caring people, ecopreneurs, grassroots activists, and people trying to leave a tiny footprint on the planet. They are also strong, gutsy, persistent, resilient humans who didn’t necessarily stop to ask themselves, ““What are the five most important things we can do to save the planet?” They just did something. They acted. They got off their butts and took control of one thing the best they could. They knew they couldn’t answer every problem, but they each could answer one.

So, here they are, “My 5” things that we can do to save the planet.

1. Do one thing. It’s that simple. Just do something. Pick from the catalogue of the millions of things we have harmed, broken, injured, and screwed up. Pick one thing to fix, and go for it. Don’t be overwhelmed by the numbers. Focus on that one thing and study it. Read everything you can about it. Become an authority. Do it with passion. Do it better than anyone else in the world. Take pride in it. Fight for it. Scream it at the top of your lungs. Invite others to help you. If we each, and I mean all 6.7 billion of us, do one good thing, and do it well, we might still have a chance.

2. I know this may sound like a typical tree-hugger, but we have to teach the value of love. Okay, our education system is already overburdened with too much to teach, but why can’t we have a course or two on Love? Leo Buscaglia did it. We can do it, too. Call it Love 101: Love yourself. Love your spouse. Love your family. Love your planet.

On TV we teach hate. We teach violence by watching something as peaceful as a baseball game. Witnessing a bench-clearing brawl, we are teaching our children to fight. “Friendly competition” has become “win at any cost.” We go to war so quickly, and kill each other so easily. We have forfeited the love of life for oil, gold, diamonds, money, and power. Buscaglia said it best, “Love always creates, it never destroys.” Why can’t we teach love?

We are afraid of the word love. Throughout the whole election process this last year, I never heard a single candidate, even the winner, mention the word love. Yes, Mr. Obama said his wife, Michelle, is the “love of his life.” Sure, all of the candidates love their families, and they love their country. But what if one of them had said publicly, before a crowd of thousands — what if he or she had looked straight into the television camera and said to the American people — “Thank you for your support. I love you”?

Imagine what the media would have said: “We can’t have a president appear to be weak.” Weak? We equate strength with hate and weakness with love? I think we have something turned around here. I want a president who is not afraid to express this one, rare emotion. I want a leader with heart, a leader who hesitates before pushing the big bomb button, before invading another country and sending our youth off to die in the name of hate or fear or vengeance or oil. I want a leader who has the strength to be different. I want a leader who has compassion. And once in a while, at just the right times, I want a leader with the courage to say the word love. It takes a strong person to say, “I love you” to a nation and a planet. It takes an even stronger one to mean it.

3. Stop all lobbying. Let’s make it a law that influence peddlers cannot buy our senators and representatives, or our President, for that matter. Let our elected officials represent the people, not the large corporations. For every person in government, there are hundreds of lobbyists who want to influence their actions or their votes. Washington is a system that is broken. It needs to be fixed. Profits before people has been the only true bipartisan theme for as long as I can remember. At the very least, stop voting for candidates who accept money from the oil/coal/anti-planet lobbying machine.

4. Our “greed mentality” has got to stop. Let’s gauge success by the number of children we save, not by how many cars, or planes, or homes we own. Last year was the year of the fool. He who invested the most, lost the most. Greed built the stock market; greed took it down.

Maybe there should be a cap on personal and corporate earnings. Everything over a billion dollars of profit goes to feed the hungry, house the homeless, provide health care for the uninsured, clean up toxic waste, save endangered species, or invest in alternative energy. We’ll let you choose. As a species, we were designed for better things than counting money.

5. The last of My 5, I mention with extreme caution. We must control the birth rate. This does not mean killing female babies so you can raise a son. We live on a finite planet, with finite resources. We cannot continue at this rate of growth. War, disease, and starvation should not be cures for the high birth rate.
Have fewer birth children, but adopt as many as you want. We can make that possible by lowering adoption costs so regular families can afford to take in another child — or two, three, maybe even four. There are 200 million orphans under the age of 16 in the world today. We bailed out the banking system and the auto industry, but we didn’t save the world’s orphaned and forgotten children. Not surprisingly, they don’t have lobbyists.

YOUR TURN
When I first sat down to write My 5, I got up to 23 before I stopped. I had thought I’d be lucky to get 2. We want you to send us yours. Don’t get stressed. There are no wrong answers. Maybe, just tell us what you are doing in your home or in your town. If you are afraid to tell us, then you will be afraid to do. Don’t let fear stop you. We have all been afraid too long.

Joe Hennager

Blue Planet Green Living (Home Page)

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Five Things We Can Do to Save the Planet