TamanduaGirl, driving less and not helping starving families in Africa is very distantly related. What I was addressing in my initial post was the immediate urge for global warming awareness and the seemingly human ignorance of this issue. While driving less may not directly help a starving family avoid killing a chimpanzee, it WILL help preserve our earth and, thus, the human race. Sure, there are many social and economical problems in the world that we need to address but that in itself calls for its own thread. What I am concerned and very angry about now is the fact that very little people are concerned about the EARTH as a whole. If we fail the Earth and if the Earth fails us, that would mean our ultimate demise.

Recycling very well will and can help other countries stop dumping in their rivers. Until we serve as a model country, no other nation is going to give us the time of day. So how will they "listen" to us if we don't even practice what we preach? Our first objective should be to ratify the darned Kyoto Protocol! I fail to comprehend how we can be so haughty as to criticize other countries when we ourselves refuse to ratify the Kyoto Treaty. I can barely be supportive (for lack of better words) of the human race at the rate we're going. Complain or not, carbon dioxide is rising and so is the temperature. Our environment is failing. Ice is melting. Land is becoming dehydrated. I believe the current statistic for carbon dioxide is approximately 600 parts per million. That is scary.

If global warming were so easy to fix, there would not be a critical debate about it. But it is terribly complicated because we made it so. There is not a single answer. However, the little things we do eventually will add up. So, no, driving less may not directly help a starving family in Africa or Asia. No, recycling may not directly help war-torn refugees in Darfur. No, turning off a light may not help refugees in Iraq. But does that give us a reason NOT to do these little things? We need to do these little things. Eventually, they will add up. A single voice of reason is a revolution in a crowd of dissent. We need to start this revolution for the environment. Otherwise, we're going to find ourselves in a watery grave. And when we reach that point, it won't matter who is starving, who is killing, who is dying. When that point is reached, we will all find ourselves with a similar fatal fate.

Lady's Human, my brother and I had a talk about that and he agreed with you. He doesn't care anymore because the government doesn't. How reassuring