JOURNAL #6-Too green?

FACT(S) #6:
-When you toss out one aluminum can you waste as much energy as if you’d filled the same can half-full of gasoline and poured it into the ground.
-More than 50% of a new aluminum can is made from recycled aluminum.
-The 36 billion aluminum cans landfilled last year had a scrap value of more than $600 million. -Americans throw away enough aluminum every month to rebuild our entire commercial air fleet.
-Recycling steel and tin cans saves 74% of the energy used to produce them.
-Americans use 100 million tin and steel cans every day.-Americans throw out enough iron and steel to supply all the nation’s automakers on a continuous basis.[source:http://www.oberlin.edu/recycle/facts.html]

Perhaps you're wondering what this has to do with anything, but for my blog this week, I chose to research some ideas that people have about environmental sustainability, recycling and "going green". I believe that one can only properly form an opinion about a topic after they have researched both sides and done so with an open-mind.
Saturday evening, I was at home and decided to research "Environmental Issues" and one of the first articles that popped up was one that posed the question, "Is there too much emphasis on environmental responsibility?" At first I was discouraged by the topic, but soon I realized the importance of being able to dedicate the time to hear out what others have to say.

"There’s a new sin in town.

Writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, philosophy professor Stephen A. Asma believes that eco-judgmentalism — Too long in the shower! Not enough sustainable shopping bags! — is getting out of hand.

While brushing his teeth recently, Asma recounted, his six-year-old son “scolded me for running the water too long. He severely reprimanded me, and at the end of his censure asked me, with real outrage, ‘Don’t you love the earth?’”

As Asma sees it, green guilt has reached biblical proportions. “Instead of religious sins plaguing our conscience, we now have the transgressions of leaving the water running, leaving the lights on, failing to recycle, and using plastic grocery bags instead of paper,” he says. His “New heresies” also include “failure to compost, or refusal to go organic.”

None of this is to diminish the need for environmentalism, says Asma. “But we have a tendency to become neurotic and overly anxious, especially when we are regularly told, via marketing ploys, that each one of us is responsible for the survival of the planet. That’s a heavy guilt trip.”

I found this to be particularly interesting because, we often discuss in class that there is a generational gap and that students today are being educated for the future and sadly, many of their parents are behind the curve. I just cannot understand how a six year old little boy sees the significance of our issues, and a grown man (a teacher nonetheless) is denying our environmental issues.

I am aware of the fact that everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but when you see the above picture of a beautiful sunset being polluted with waste from factories, I personally feel as though it is ignorant to deny the issues at hand.

Through this article and the responses, I have further confirmed my view points and feel even more strongly!