Oceans Over Lands: It's not easy being green.....

Hmmm what’s more important, the environment or the economy….. Well they are both green, they are both important, and both apply to people. The environment is the world in which we live our lives and the economy is what motivates us to keep on living. So if they both have a significant impact on us, then which one should we consider in saving first? Without the environment we wouldn’t have an economy. The environment provides us with resources we use in our daily lives and without it we would be in a barren place and the economy wouldn’t matter. Let’s look at Africa for example. Here is a country that has little economy because the environment around them provides little. It is a place with massive desserts, little water sources, and scarce amounts of food. People work very hard and use the resources that they have on hand in order to survive. . So I think that we should work on fixing the world around us and then the economy will fix itself.

There are many people out there, however, that believe that the economy is the thing that needs fixing first. Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann calls the Environmental Protection Agency "job killing." She believes that the economy and the environment are not equals. The idea of telling people to be more environmentally friendly is a hard sale to make when the unemployment rate has become so low. Newt Gingrich points out the rises gas prices and how he would like to fix them. He claims that he could reduce gas prices to as low as $2.50 a gallon; reason being that, "the price of gasoline is becoming a genuine crisis for many American families. If it continues to go higher, it will crater the economy by August.” So here we have examples of people who are for the economy, which we won’t have if the environment falls out on us.

So how do we fix it? First, tie environmental rescue to economic recovery, by "greening the bailout," as columnist Tom Friedman of the New York Times has put it. We need to put more emphasis on helping the environment in order to help the economy. If everybody played a part, even if it is a small part, we can make a difference. I know, based from personal experience what we can do to make a difference. I work at a bank and my manager decided to place more of a green effort on our branch alone. We made sure lights were shut off when not needed, we recycled paper and cardboard boxes, and we kept the heat at a constant temperature as well as a few other things. By making these adjustments we were able to see a significant difference month after month on our budget report, helping our branch and company to save money. This helped us to see how much we have an impact on change and helped each of us to become better in our own lives.