Fallen from grace, these leaders have ditched their moral compass somewhere along the highway of greed in favor of self corruption. Alas, the American public is the designated cleanup crew responsible for the broken pieces that these corporate leaders have scattered for us all.
Last Monday, though expecting to read another episode of the financial bailout debacle, I was pleasantly surprised to see the WSJ devote an entire section to environmental sustainability -- carbon footprint was the lead story. A week later in our local newspaper, the Star Tribune picked up on the WSJ's carbon footprint article, running a full page about this new sustainability buzzword that will gradually filter more frequently into our lives.
What is the barefoot approach to carbon footprint? I won't reiterate the exact information readily available in print and the internet, but will summarize instead. Simply put, the carbon footprint is the human community's actions towards creating awareness, discovering constructive solutions, and sharing knowledge with one another about environmental concerns. As individuals, we often think that our own finite contribution toward sustainability won't make much of a difference, and so we easily give up making any effort at all. Surely, it takes a much greater impact to get noticed (i.e. the current financial fiasco). Nonetheless, we must understand that if we do nothing, the consequences could be disastrous. Potentially, we all might be exposed to yet another financial calamity should the global environmental smoke and mirrors created by corporate greed be revealed and we discover that they too were just another dreadful magic trick.
Voltaire once said, "History consists of a series of accumulated imaginative inventions." I'm sorry to say it, but we are now paying licensing rights for the invention of subprime mortgages. It's only a matter of time before the mother of all inventions of global warming comes to an end, resulting in even more dire straits.
For my part, I believe that each and every contribution we offer towards sustainability- small or large- does make a difference. We must strive for that difference, even if we move just one barefoot step at a time.
Sincerely,
Paul H. Smallwood
Owner/President
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