It’s summer—one of the top two seasons for climate change discussion. Have the blistering heat waves of recent summers been created by man-made global warming? Or have the extreme summer temperatures just been Mother Nature paying off her overdue ice age temperature debt? Well, whatever it is, it is man-made global warming. So what can you as one eco-conscious Asian-American mother of two (just guessing) do to help fight it? Here are some simple tips:
• Avoid smokestacks and children playing in fountains. As anyone who keeps up with the evening news can tell you, fuming smokestacks and children playing in fountains are the first signs that an area is having global warming. Eliminate any of the fuming smokestacks in your life that are purely decorative. Disable the fountains, and, if possible, the children, so as not to attract any more global warming.
• Bicycle and walk. Avoid taking the car when you can. This will make you thin, and thin people are cooler than fat people (Literally, but definitely not figuratively). Imagine the world’s air is warm cola and people are ice cubes. Would you put ice that is hotter than the cola or colder than the cola in the cola? Exactly. And now that you are more active, try to do something to destroy your calories other than burning them. We want to minimize the number of things heat-related. Also, make that cola a diet.
• Use the recycle bin. Not the trash can—hobos burn roaring hot hobo fires in those!
• Roll down your car windows. Air conditioners take cool air out of the environment. No one is asking you not to use the A/C. Just when you do, re-release the cool air out the window as you go. Think about it like this—you wouldn’t cut down a tree or catch a manatee and store it in your car every time you drive to work, would you? (Lumberjacks and manatee wranglers excluded.) And air is way more important than wood and at least as important as manatees.
• Wind power. Install a home-windmill. Take a sailboat to work. Hang glide circles around your ex-girlfriend’s house and blame the crosswinds.
• Ice. The world’s glaciers are disappearing at an alarming rate. Meanwhile, about 70% of the earth’s surface is covered in water. Freeze as much of it as you can. And eat as much of that as you can—you want your urine as chilled as possible before it enters the global water supply.
• Plant a tree. You already have all the stresses of the office and the family, and now you’re adding taking on global warming? Singlehandedly? Wow. That’s pretty ambitious. In any case, you could use a nice shady place to get away from it all and just decompress for a while. The last thing you want is to overheat.
Alex Pearson is a writer from North Carolina, where he lives in a zero-carbon cottage with his loving wife, Linka the Planeteer.
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