Walking the Good Red Road: Learning to Walk Softly Upon the Earth

The natives of the Southwest call it "walking the good red road" or "walking softly upon the earth", which are both poetic ways to say that each person should live in a way as to have as little negative impact on their environment as is realistically possible.

Indeed, in today's contemporary society, each person is responsible for creating a huge mass of garbage, including: trash, human waste, toxic air and water pollutants. We all participate in the generation of tons of greenhouse gas pollution, created by the way we choose to generate electrical power.

Each man, woman and child in the United States generates over 1,600 pounds of garbage per year, which is enough to fill 68,000 Olympic sized swimming pools. In a lifetime, this piles up to over 90,000 pounds of trash per person, which will be either buried or incinerated, causing a new spate of environmental problems.

Our cars belch out thousands of pounds of particulates and our factories pump more than 2.5 billion pounds of lead compounds, chromium, ammonia and other toxic solvents directly into our air and water supplies.

But it needn't be this way.

Every day we, as consumers, make thousands of decisions and choices that effect the health of this closed-environmental system that we call the Earth. And every night, I have a wonderful recurring dream of an unpolluted world, safe from environmental disaster and ripe to provide clean air, water and food for generations to come.

In this dream, I rise to find the coffee maker perking away, as I flip on the solar lights in my kitchen and make my breakfast in the comfort of a home run entirely by clean, green, solar power!

I see myself using all the modern appliances that I use now; TVs VCRs, computers, lights, refrigerator and microwave. Only instead of using electricity that is generated with coal or hydroelectricity, I'm using the renewable and completely healthy energy of the sun.