“Going green” is a trend that has gone far past the simple ads from the old days of a crying Native American.
In the ‘90s, it was all about recycling and there were plenty of public service announcements to remind you. Now, recycling is taken as a given if one “goes green” and the focus has shifted to buying goods made from recycled materials or other things that are essentially less harmful to the environment than their predecessors, such as hybrid cars replacing traditional vehicles.
Although the movement has almost become more of a fashion statement than an ecological statement, it has the potential to change the world.
On an individual level, there are always opportunities to be ecologically conscious. For a while now we’ve been able to recycle things such as paper, glass bottles and cans, but now we are even able to throw away what can’t be recycled into trash bags made mostly of recycled plastic which are available at even Wal-Mart.
In addition to recycling, food localization is ecologically conscious on an individual scale. Emporia is fortunate to have not only a strong Farmer’s Market, but a community garden at Flint Hills Technical College and possibly one in the works on our very own campus.
Thanks to Bill Hanlon of FHTC, Emporians are also able to take classes where we can learn to build an ecologically conscious house and even solar powered window heaters.
Of course, to change something as big as the world, it takes the combined effort of not only individuals, but governments as well. And, contrary to popular belief, it is actually possible for governments of various levels to actually help with something they are involved in.
For instance, in the Hebei province in China the city of Baoding has become the world’s first carbon-positive city, according to ABC News.
“The carbon saved annually worldwide through the use of equipment made here outweighs the city’s own emissions,” said the ABC News article. In other words, the products they export save more carbon than they used to create them.
Baoding started becoming ecologically conscious when thousands of their local fish started mysteriously dying. So their mayor, Yu Qun, shut down several hundred pollution producing factories and opened up factories that made things such as propellers for energy windmills in Texas and solar panels for the biggest solar power station in the world, all the way in Portugal.
Shutting down the old factories initially hurt their economy by two percentage points in annual economic growth, according to ABC News, but the new factories have since quadrupled their business and now the city holds close to 200 renewable energy companies.
While I’m not suggesting that every city in the world become a Baoding, I think it is an example of how the industry can grow if proper legislation is coupled with it, which is usually only done properly upon the insistence of the people.
So the time to act is now. You may be thinking, “I have heard that before and I didn’t act then, so obviously that’s a lie,” but it’s not because it is always the time to act, so it was true every time you heard and will continue to be true every time you hear it now.
If you woke up one day and found your dorm, house or apartment to be a complete mess and you planned on living there for a while, you would clean it. The Earth is no different and, thanks to the trend of “going green,” we can do it in style.

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