Many of the biggest problems in the world right now are caused by oil consumption. People should be rallying against it. We should be outraged by all the ecological damage that has been done to the planet in order to extract oil. We should mourn all the animals that have died from oil spills. Most of all we should stop global climate change. We should have a cosmopolitan view of the world and care for things, creatures and people half a world away, just as much as we care for our neighbors. Because after all, we live in an interconnected globalized world.
Even if this is how we should feel, is this high moral standard realistic? To care for all things in the world is a good aspiration, but is difficult to impossible. We hardly learn enough about such a big problem as the world’s oil addiction. Can we name five OPEC countries? Do we actually know the mechanisms that cause global warming? If we don’t we can watch the news or even research about it. But, these alone are not enough because the information come to us facts rather than as pressing issues in our lives.
Conventional thinking tells us that knowledge of a problem is enough to spur us to a solution. But, global problems or far away problems seem distant from our lives. They inevitably affect us, but we can hardly feel their shock. When we hear about global warming caused by oil consumption, the apocalyptic effects sound scary, but when we go outside later that day, we hardly notice any climate change between now and yesterday or now and five years ago.
Oil addiction grips society in many ways. People may be a little disgruntled about rising gas prices, but that is not the reason oil has such a huge grip on society. Oil is pervasive in all our consumer products and foods. Oil is in or used to make things like fertilizer, roofing, umbrellas, water pipes, shampoo, clothes, plastic, aspirin, paint, toothpaste, paint, lipstick, ipods, computers, and gasoline. Oil is in the products we love and things for basic living like food, clothes, and housing. Without oil we could not produce these things on a cheap massive scale needed to continue modern life.
One might say oil is an evil addiction because it obscures big global problems and ingratiates itself into our daily lives and makes our way of life dependent on its consumption.
There is a pre-existing green movement. But, how would we be a part of it. We have already seen in the article that knowledge by itself is not enough to solve the problem. But, rather the way to solve the problem is to integrate it into our daily lives, where we turn off the lights when we don’t use them, we buy less goods, we waste less food and we recycle paper an aluminum cans. In this way of life, the global issues become the logical justification for to constantly do these actions. But, the people around us hold us to a higher moral standard to act this way. So green mindedness becomes a sort of moral compass that guides our personal behavior in response to the problem which is otherwise much larger than the scope of our individual lives.
