Green Tip – Take a Look at the WHOLE

Courtesy of Tim Higgs
Greetings green people. This month our tip is less of a tip and more of a bit of ecological education.

Often when we think about the environment there are certain things that flash through our minds. Many people think about saving the whales, turtles, pandas, tigers or any number of endangered species; others think immediately about dumping toxic waste in the oceans or rubbish on the streets and in parklands; air pollution in major cities and around industrial areas also hits high on pollutants that are more dangerous to humans; and more recently people have begun to think about climate change as it’s quickly risen to the top of political, environmental priorities.

Most organizations prefer to focus on one or a few of the problems separately. The reasons for this are obvious: it takes a great amount of human and financial resource to tackle any problem and few organizations have enough of both to try to fix everything.

However, in staring too long at one problem it’s easy to forget how they’re all connected together and mutually affect each other; particularly for us regular folk. For example, when someone throws a battery on the ground it’s not just litter that looks bad. Over time it will break and leak battery acid, which in turn seeps into the ground and eventually into the water table. That’s not just bad for wildlife, it’s bad for us because battery acid is extremely difficult to filter out of water and often cities haven’t the capabilities to do so.

Another example: air pollution in cities does not stay where it’s produced. It moves with the wind affecting eco-systems far from where it was created. Birds also die regularly from smoke inhalation when they get too close to heavily polluted areas. Dead birds aren’t just a tragedy either. Often small birds that are most vulnerable will eat insects like mosquitoes, which annoy humans and spread disease. Killing the birds helps the insects flourish. Do you really want more bugs in your backyard?

I could go on and on with stories like this of environmental degradation traveling from place to place affecting the out of sight out of minds we ALL forget about when we’re staring at a problem.

This is not a message of despair; we all have enough of that in our lives, particularly if you watch the news every day. Rather, it’s a bit of a reminder to step back and look at all the consequences of a given action, because it rarely stops after you’re finished.

And to end on a positive note, if we could put green roofs (make the roof into a park-like area) on every building in Kaohsiung, it would quickly have the effect of bringing back bird species that have been lost for decades from the city center, cooling buildings significantly enough to lower air conditioning costs and reducing the amount of coal we burn to create the energy, and it would help remove some of the particulate from the air so that your lungs breathe easier and the view of our beautiful central mountains could be seen more often.

See, planting a tree makes more sense than just something pretty to look at. Take a look at the whole once in a while and you see a different picture. ;-)