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Last time when I spent some time and blogged was on women’s day. Now again about world environment day (WED, for the rest of this post). Not a coincidence. I get into fundae-emitting mode in such occasions.

WED was always observed on 5th June, but some how I totally missed even the existence of the tradition, and today a friend declared that today was WED. (Later clarified that as WEW (second W stands for week) ends today, or whatever). So let me again take this opportunity.

Traditionally such days were observed to raise awareness on the aspect in question. Long back, when I was still not wearing long pants (to heart fully communicate in telugu, “nikker eskune vayasu lo”), and for few years after that also, I didn’t had faith on such ideas (not the ideas proposed by WED, but on the practice of observing such special days). It was partly because I haven’t seen enough impact of such days, on myself and people surrounding me. But later I realized that I was grossly mistaken. All the buzz created by media and educational/industrial organizations during such occasions is good enough to spread some awareness and assuming that a bit of ripple effect (people passing on the awareness) comes to action, the purpose is served.

So what is this WED about? WED is about raising awareness about reducing our negative impact on environment. The theme for this year is “CO2, Kick the Habit! Towards a Low Carbon Economy”. Low-Carbon Economy (LCE) refers to an Economy which has a minimal output of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions into the biosphere, but specifically refers to the greenhouse gas Carbon Dioxide (as defined in the wiki page). So what can we do about it?

Spending some quality time with tools like environment footprint calculator and check to see how we are fairing with respect to the various parameters.

Getting to know the story of stuff.

The next obvious step would be to take some resolutions to improve performance in some of the bad scoring items from the above result.

Spreading some awareness back home. Best candidates that would welcome the preaching would be parents, nieces/nephews that are aged in at least double digits.

This is more than enough.

Some of the things that made me happy over the past few weeks are:

To come to know that google had shelled out one billion dollars towards research to develop renewable energy sources that are cheaper than coal. Essentially on making solar power the de facto source of energy.

To learn that one of my cousin’s teen daughter has been trying (and spreading a little awareness) to reduce her environment footprint, by doing little things like reducing plastic usage, reusing plastic bags etc.

(How can this post end with out some complaining? )
I have become more serious on this aspect a couple of years ago and since then did many gradual changes to my lifestyle whose unit vectors point at LCE. All said and done, what ever we poor souls do lingering around here in the developing nation of India, will not make much absolute difference to Her. The per capita ecological foot print of developed countries is around an order of magnitude higher than that of developing countries. It naturally follows from a combination of prosperity and lack of corporate citizenship. Awareness spread in developed countries could be an order of magnitude effective from Her perspective. This makes me some time feel that my energies will be best spent trying to increase global awareness (how?) rather than doing small things in an eco friendly manner.