Eight Reasons Our Changing World Will Turn You Into an Environmentalist, Like It or Not

From Alternet.org:

AlterNet picked eight topics -- water, global warming, food, health, energy, pollution, consumption and corporations -- that pose real dangers to the future of human life and selected a series of recent essays that illustrate these problems, along with links to organizations and further resources that address these issues.

click here for the whole thing

I haven't read all of this yet but I think it serves as a decent Earth Day oriented post.

I don't know how much the people of Alternet really know about this but they've certainly done their research in finding people who do. It's awesome how passionate they seem to be about getting the word out about environmental crises.

To toot my own horn, I'll share what's been on my mind recently. I've come to a certain conclusion that wind and solar power are the way to go as far as energy, both for lighting our homes and for powering our cars (solar). Well upon reading some of this Alternet article, I'm probably right. Biofuels not only use up essential resources for human life, they might not be as eco-friendly as some would have you believe. When burned they emit carbon dioxide, which is the same compound that humans exhale, BUT according to my biology professor at UNO (Dr. James Grady) there's already an excess of CO2 in our atmosphere. I don't believe we're going to be helping anything by switching to biofuels to run our internal combustion engines. I honestly think that electronic (battery) and solar powered cars are the only way to help the environment, BUT that's only if we also switch to solar and wind power energy generation.

So before we keep building hybrid cars, or any new cars at that, we need to generate clean energy first, so that when we charge our electric cars in the future, we're not relying on a dirty way of getting that electricity. Just manufacturing a new car, hybrid or not, is dirtier than driving that car for a year (no source, that's just what I've heard). All of the machinery that goes in to manufacturing EVERYTHING needs to be running on solar panels, in factories that are powered by solar and wind plants, NOT coal or nuclear facilities.

That's my two cents.