just a saturday

another day wondering why i haven't done more. today. this week. this  month... i've had gym clothes on for hours, but instead been reading internet stories and painting my nails. okay, not a complete loss - i watched clips from Jeff Corwin's 100 Heartbeats documentary, reminding me of the inspiration behind my studies. Save nature from the unconscionable rivers of trash and CO2 that are literally choking our planet to death. But exactly where i fit in, and what exactly i'm going to do about it, continues to elude me.

Corwin, of course, focuses on the animal rescue and conservation side. I think there are plenty more qualified than me to care for the animals (cute as i think they are!) - but doing something to protect forests...carbon trading is exciting, in this regard, because for the first time, conservation can actually be treated as a commodity in a market-driven system. This does not negate the need for government involvement, just that it presents a new tool for financing conservation as well as mitigating its success. It may also be tied with some ecologically sustainable market opportunities for local citizens - both as stewards of the land as well as sustainable businesses (one example i love is the mushroom harvesting from protected reforestation land here in thailand). Ecolodges, bee farms, and orchid farms are other examples i've come across.

then there's the trash bit... gathering what's out there, and turning it into something useful. This aspect is partly inspired by the e-waste project i did in florida a year ago. Not to get into specifics, but the recycling alone could save millions in cold hard cash as well as environmental impact/emission by avoiding new extraction, processing, and transport, let alone the volume NOT added to landfills, etc. I look at the trash in the rivers (there is one riverway a block from me that gets clogged up constantly - Jeff Corwin is not kidding about the foul smell that comes off that stuff!) and beaches... and i wonder how hard it would be to gather all that stuff up and turn it into something useful? Waste-to-energy, seems to be a sound idea, but there are reasons it does not entirely take off... but what if it could be turned into something else? I wonder about that...

Then there's the new tech thing. There should be a way to get the new technologies up and running faster, particularly to countries that benefit from small, community-specific growth - it might be a "test site" but it would still change people's lives... and maybe that's where i'm at... but do we focus on solar, or wave converters? wind? we'll see, i guess...