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Posted by Somebody's Mother
on
10:06 p.m.
A Hot and Fat Future?
I watched two documentaries over the Christmas holidays – Super Size Me and An Inconvenient Truth. Super Size Me tells what happens to a young and very healthy man when he eats nothing from but McDonald’s food for thirty days. He gains thirty pounds in one month and even begins to suffer liver damage.
An Inconvenient Truth is a documentary made by former Vice President Al Gore on the issue of global warming. His film shows that global warming is occurring at a greater rate than was previously predicted and that the vast majority of scientists agree that global warming is not a natural occurrence and is a real phenomenon that is the product of the human race’s activities on Earth. If this trend continues, global sea levels could rise by more than 20 feet with the loss of shelf ice in Greenland and Antarctica, flooding and destroying coastal areas world wide. There will be more heat waves, droughts and wildfires. By the year 2050, the Arctic Ocean could be ice free and over a million species could be driven to extinction. According to this scenario, in less than 50 years, we could either be very hot or underwater.
Then there’s the exposé of Super Size Me that reveals the increasing problem of obesity in the United States. This isn’t only an American problem. According to a recent study done by Ipsos Reid, obesity among Canadian children has tripled in the last twenty years and more than one third of children and teenagers in Canada are obese. One third to one half of all Canadian adults are overweight and this figure seems to be increasing steadily.
These two documentaries were definitely an antidote to my happy Christmas television watching. This is not a nice future that we’re looking at; we’re all going to be hot and fat. The question is what we do about it, you and me.
Looking out my window at the 200 odd light bulbs glaring away in all their Christmas glory does not make me a real friend of the Earth and my house seemed mildly festive in contrast to some of the others that I’ve seen. I don’t even want to think about the quantity of shortbread cookies, fruit cake and trifle that I’ve consumed over the past two weeks.
Guilt is one of my addictions. Perhaps you don’t suffer from it the way I do but if you do, guilt without action is a waste of emotional energy. You might as well light up every room in the house and eat twenty pieces of bacon with a big smile on your face.
Finding ways to change makes more sense. There are little things that we can do without it hurting too much such as recycling and reusing when possible. Walking more and driving less is a hard goal to achieve when you live in a rural area but planning your trips to the store so that you drive less wouldn’t cause too much pain and it would save money on gas. Eating nutritious home cooked meals goes a long way in keeping your diet more sensible.
The most important thing is to let our governments know that we do care about global warming and the health of our children. If we are expected to behave like responsible citizens of the planet, industry should be expected to do so as well. We need more environment-friendly cars. According to Gore, Asian vehicles are ahead of North American ones when it comes to fuel efficiency. Why are we behind them?
We need to start spending money to save our future and our governments have to stop thinking of global warming as some kind of left-wing plot. Partisanship has to stand aside because global warming is real. In spite of what some media pundits claim, scientists are convinced that it’s real and hiding the truth will not help big business when people are too busy trying to stay alive to buy their products. Otherwise, we’ll be one hot, fat and finally extinct species and that, my friends, is really bad for business.
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I watched two documentaries over the Christmas holidays – Super Size Me and An Inconvenient Truth. Super Size Me tells what happens to a young and very healthy man when he eats nothing from but McDonald’s food for thirty days. He gains thirty pounds in one month and even begins to suffer liver damage.
An Inconvenient Truth is a documentary made by former Vice President Al Gore on the issue of global warming. His film shows that global warming is occurring at a greater rate than was previously predicted and that the vast majority of scientists agree that global warming is not a natural occurrence and is a real phenomenon that is the product of the human race’s activities on Earth. If this trend continues, global sea levels could rise by more than 20 feet with the loss of shelf ice in Greenland and Antarctica, flooding and destroying coastal areas world wide. There will be more heat waves, droughts and wildfires. By the year 2050, the Arctic Ocean could be ice free and over a million species could be driven to extinction. According to this scenario, in less than 50 years, we could either be very hot or underwater.
Then there’s the exposé of Super Size Me that reveals the increasing problem of obesity in the United States. This isn’t only an American problem. According to a recent study done by Ipsos Reid, obesity among Canadian children has tripled in the last twenty years and more than one third of children and teenagers in Canada are obese. One third to one half of all Canadian adults are overweight and this figure seems to be increasing steadily.
These two documentaries were definitely an antidote to my happy Christmas television watching. This is not a nice future that we’re looking at; we’re all going to be hot and fat. The question is what we do about it, you and me.
Looking out my window at the 200 odd light bulbs glaring away in all their Christmas glory does not make me a real friend of the Earth and my house seemed mildly festive in contrast to some of the others that I’ve seen. I don’t even want to think about the quantity of shortbread cookies, fruit cake and trifle that I’ve consumed over the past two weeks.
Guilt is one of my addictions. Perhaps you don’t suffer from it the way I do but if you do, guilt without action is a waste of emotional energy. You might as well light up every room in the house and eat twenty pieces of bacon with a big smile on your face.
Finding ways to change makes more sense. There are little things that we can do without it hurting too much such as recycling and reusing when possible. Walking more and driving less is a hard goal to achieve when you live in a rural area but planning your trips to the store so that you drive less wouldn’t cause too much pain and it would save money on gas. Eating nutritious home cooked meals goes a long way in keeping your diet more sensible.
The most important thing is to let our governments know that we do care about global warming and the health of our children. If we are expected to behave like responsible citizens of the planet, industry should be expected to do so as well. We need more environment-friendly cars. According to Gore, Asian vehicles are ahead of North American ones when it comes to fuel efficiency. Why are we behind them?
We need to start spending money to save our future and our governments have to stop thinking of global warming as some kind of left-wing plot. Partisanship has to stand aside because global warming is real. In spite of what some media pundits claim, scientists are convinced that it’s real and hiding the truth will not help big business when people are too busy trying to stay alive to buy their products. Otherwise, we’ll be one hot, fat and finally extinct species and that, my friends, is really bad for business.
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