Know Thyself

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Some Personal Testimonials


Earth Car Free Day begins and ends not with international conferences and treaties. Nor with national legislatures and new laws. And not even with a lot more grave research and new big thick books books and reports. (Though all of these may ultimately help.)

Nope! Earth Car Free Day 2001 has to begin with you: the single solitary citizen with an over-riding concern about people, nature, and above all to what we owe our children and their future. How was it that Mrs. Bruntland and the World Commission on Environment and Development put it already half a generation ago (1987)? "Sustainable development (is that which) meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs".

So, if we have learned but one thing about all this uphill struggle during these intervening years, it is that at the end of the day, a safer and better planet and more sustainable lives are not going to come out of some magic bottle but out of the unending multitude of personal choices that each of us make in our own daily lives. Today, few of us, and certainly no one in the rich, profligate and self-satisfied countries of the North have sustainable lives and habits. We thus have to learn to be sustainable. And what better way to begin then by getting to know ourselves better. How heavy is my ecological footprint on this small planet? How heavy is yours?

The goal of the several small devices and stories that have been assembled in this section is to help us get to know a bit better the implications of our own choices and behavior. A small first step in the direction of self-education. But beware! We like the way our friends from LEAD have put it with their . . .

"WARNING: The results your answers produce may disturb you. In a few reported cases, the users' mental well-being was affected and some serious thinking was induced."

But Samuel Johnson has reminded us. . .
"Nothing is more unjust, however common, than to charge with hypocrisy him that expresses zeal for those virtues which he neglects to practice; since he may be sincerely convinced of the advantages of conquering his passions, without having yet obtained the victory -- as a man may be confident of the advantage of a voyage without having courage or industry to undertake it, and may honestly recommend to others those attempts which he neglects himself.

"The interest which the corrupt part of mankind have in hardening themselves against every motive to amendment, has disposed to them to give to these contradictions when they can be produced against the cause of virtue, that weight which they will not allow them in any other case. In moral or religious questions alone, they determine the sentiments by the actions, and charge every man with endeavoring to impose upon the world, whose writings are not confirmed by his life. They never consider that they themselves neglect or practice something every day, inconsistently with their own settled judgment, nor discover that the conduct of the advocates of virtue can little increase, or lesson, the obligations of their dictates; argument is to be invalidated only by arguments, and is in itself of the same force, whether or not it convinces him by whom it is proposed."

--Samuel Johnson, Rambler, No. 14, London, 5 May 1750

Which we read as a plea for generosity tempered only by thoughtfulness, energy and a wink .

Last updated 20 February 2001. © 1994-2001 EcoPlan , Paris.
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