Why Bother?

"Why Bother?" is a Michael Pollan essay in which he asks the question of why we should change our ways in the hopes of reducing our carbon footprint when we have an “evil twin” half way around the world in China who is putting all the carbon right back into the atmosphere. One of my favorite things about this essay is the different viewpoints Pollan uses to look at the issue of Global warming from. He first looks at it from the viewpoint of the possibility that getting food from a far-away place rather than walking may be less carbon consuming than walking to a local place to get goods. He then talks about how some people believe that all the individual efforts of people made every day are basically useless unless we get government on board to make laws helping combat the effort of Global Warming.   

Pollan says it perfectly when he says that we cannot imagine anything other than a “specialists.” In today’s society, we have been molded to view everyone as some type of specialists with some title to their name. Even the people who work in the laundry department are called “laundry specialists.” He argues that the same thing that makes us look at things this way is what makes efforts to change our carbon footprint so hard in the first place and I agree with him. We cannot waste time waiting on the “specialists” to come fix things instead of making the small, every day choices that we could make and hope that we can affect the people around us. I liked the example that was used in class that when you drop a pebble in the water, the ripple starts small then gradually gets bigger. I would like to think that this same ripple could happen from someone planting a garden or even deciding to throw a plastic bottle into the recycling basket instead of the trash. Even if it doesn’t, you can at least say you tried.